After Ice

What the Tide Dragged in

"Come on Shai you'll be late!" 

"Imf coiing!" I yell back at my Aunt through a mouthful of sandy toast. She gives me a disappointed stare before handing me my rainjacket and slamming the door behind me.

There's a light drizzle falling from the ever-permanent clouds overhead, and I pull my rain jacket tighter around my body as I sprint for the workstations. My boss will have a seizure if he finds out I'm late again. 

Just as I'm about to reach the metal entrance, a massive wave bursts over our island wall, drenching me to the core. I curse and tuck my wet braid under my hood, my boots making squishy noises as I run. How very timely. 

And that's when I hear it: chanting. 

Kill him! Kill him! Kill him! 

What the hell? 

I look back at the towering metal structure of the rainwater station, and then to the crowd. 

My fellow islanders glance distastefully in my direction as I shimmy my way to the front. Not that I mind anymore; the shimmying wasn't the root of their dislike. It's the two things in my skull, my unfortunate eyeballs holding the bluest of irises. Not so crazy, I know. Unfortunately, blue is water and water is the ocean, and we hate the ocean. So I'm cursed and foully pigmented and stared at disgustedly by people who I've known since I could walk. 

Three guards are shoving someone forward through the square to be held in front of the harsh words hurled from the crowd of workers. Beast! Savage! Go back to where you came from!  

It's just a boy?

He doesn't have a shirt or shoes which is practically suicide in this weather, and his ragged pants have seen fewer hole-filled days. His feet are bloody, just like his hands. I can't get a good look at his face, craning my head this way and that. I'm about to ask someone what's going on (not that they would reply) when the Mayor himself steps out from the crowd of drab and dreary islanders. 

Kill him! Kill him! Kill him! 

The guards finally get the boy's hands lashed together, and shove him to his knees in the mud facing the Mayor. 

The boy doesn't shiver. 

Not once, even as the rain keeps drizzling and the muddy water runs around his knees. Even as the wind rips at our clothes and stings our already frozen skin. Not at all. I can't take my eyes off him, and neither can the rest of us, though I get the feeling my gaze is a lot less hostile. The woman next to me even has her teeth bared. 

"Skinjob!" she hollers. And I can't believe I'm so blind I didn't see them before. 

Tattoos. Merpeople tattoos; swirls and branchings of blues up his forearms, down his back. I hear someone say a quick prayer and another spit at him savagely. 

I'm too stunned to do either.

I'm snapped out of my daze when the Mayor walks forward, staring down at the Merboy who's eyes bore into him with hatred. Granted, it is hard to look intimidating in rainboots. A guard twists the Mer's arm painfully, and he grits his teeth as the Mayor sneers. 

"Quiet, everyone!" the Mayor bellows, his combover fluttering like a lost chicken in the wind. The crowd settles down. "Seems we have ourselves... a castaway." The tattooed boy forced to look up at him curses something in another harsh language, and a guard with the rifle fires a shot into the churning clouds. 

A warning. 

"Do not fear," the Mayor continues, eyes still locked with the sea creature at his feet. "We will take care of him shortly-"

"Throw 'im out!" shouts a man. 

"Yeah!" chorus the workers. The people are angry - the Mer have killed most of our ancestors with their waves. I stick my fingers in my ears, hoping they'll quiet down. 

But they don't. 

Instead, the Mayor barks at the guards who obediently drag the thrashing boy towards our mostly vacant cell block. Sensing I'm about to be trampled unless I get the hell out, I dart back up to my work station, climbing the grated steps as adrenaline sings through my veins and rain hammers down. 

At least this time my boss should have an interesting story.

*

That night, I cannot sleep. Not from insomnia, or my Aunt's snores next to me. There's water dripping from the ceiling by my head into a bucket, and it's driving me crazy. And the whole Mer thing. As I lay in bed staring at the damp ceiling, I make up my mind. 

Snatching a hunk of sandy bread from the kitchen as my Aunt drones on, I pull on my rainjacket, flick up my hood, and sprint towards the cell block.