by Oninye-Che Burge
The Pool Master scrapes the side of the silver rocks that meet the yellow sand beach. Beer bottles and garbage bags collect at the base of the boulders, coalescing in colorful messy piles. Caroline thinks they look like sea glass, shining and reflecting the East Coast sun.
The hand-held net catches against the Thing. Poking it back then pulling it forward. The fishing net swallows it down and she lifts the Thing up. It’s a thick and pulpy sack about the size of a basketball and all sorts of sallow shades of green. The sun thrums oppressive and unrelenting as Caroline pulls the Pool Master toward her. Her arms tighten and threaten to buckle. Even worse, her sweaty palms threaten to lose the handle. She continues carefully.
Nasty sludge and mystery weeds come up with the Thing when she hefts the pole upward. The beach is closed on Tuesday evenings, but on Tuesday mornings it’s supposed to be open. It’s Tuesday morning, and the beach is closed. It’s a holiday. This makes Caroline sad.
She’d read somewhere that beaches need people as part of their ecosystem, need them to stomp and run about to pulverize rocks into sand. Without people, there’d be no sand, and who’s ever heard about a beach without sand?
A visitor said they’d found something dead and bloated near the beach, and so here she is, the brave Pirate Captain, here to rescue the landlubbers and their beloved coast.
Caroline treks back up to the boardwalk. Now that the Thing she caught in her net is out of the water, the beach could open. It’s the highlight of Caroline’s Summer, watching the beach open. The popping of the bright sun-umbrellas, exploding open like pimples. The children and their families coming down from the amusement park, dragging their excitement and sweat behind them. Happy memories being made. Caroline likes happy memories.
It’s an ideal summer job. By the water (perfect for a pirate), close to home (perfect for a pirate who still lives with her parents), and enough to finance all a pirate’s needs. When the Solar Park merch doesn’t sell (and it usually doesn’t), she gets to keep the extras. She has eight t-shirts, each in different colors that all say It’s Always Bright Here! It’s a perfect system for when she doesn’t want to do laundry. And she gets discounts on the park rides, but only the ones low to the ground. The higher ones that scrape the clouds tip sideways on days when the wind is too strong or when they get depressed because they’ve gone unridden for too long. When that happens, Caroline likes to run them. Amusement park rides, she’s learned, need to get taken out for walks just like dogs or ferrets. They get sad and fat when you don’t exercise them, bloating and rusting under their own weight.
Caroline loves working at the park. She loves it more than anyone else probably. The only downside is that it’s hot. Hot all the time. Sweat pools in places she didn’t know it could. It drips from her armpits down her sides to her waist, down her back, soaks at her groin or from behind her ear then up onto her upper lip, damp and savory.
She slings the pole over her shoulder, hauling it as it drools sea water onto the tigerwood of the boardwalk.
Her boss’s awning is green. Her cap for work is green. The Thing she fished from the water is green. She leaves it outside next to the red bike rack.
“Did you get it?” Her boss says. Her boss, who she doesn’t recognize as her boss because a pirate answers to no one. There are no laws at sea.
“Yeah. It was all gooped up by the Death Rocks.”
Her boss rubs his temples, his oily blond hair dangling from his (green) cap. She thinks his name is Adam because it’s on his name tag, but it’s smudged so it looks more like Advvvmm. That’s funnier. She should call him that instead. “You’re not calling them ‘Death Rocks’ in front of the park-goers, are you?”
Caroline tilts her head, considering. Then shrugs. People died there a bunch of years ago so she calls them the Death Rocks.
She used to be a park-goer herself. When she was younger, and the boardwalk was still populated by pastel ice cream shops and airplane-book bookstores. The best carnival games were still open, and the Sea Slayer wasn’t too rusted over to move. Caroline had been angry when they shut it down. It had been her first summer on the job, and she had been fresh from college, staring up in her green shirt and capris as they pulled a bright orange tarp over the whole ride. Out the window of the gift shop (where her boss is working because they’re severely understaffed), she can see the tarp now, looming over Solar Park and casting the boardwalk in the shadow of a giant orange monster.
While by the window, her eye hitches on the name tag section of the gift shop. A familiar name is at the forefront of the dolphin-shaped tags under “E”. She rips her gaze away before she can get angry.
“Hey,” Caroline says. “Did you know it’s my birthday soon?”
Advvvmm sighs. “No, I did not know that, Caroline. Look, I’m lowering your hours.”
“Yup.” Caroline’s mind drifts to thoughts of conquering the beach later. Taking the withered greying floaties from storage and lining them up along the sand. Forbidding anyone from crossing the threshold without paying tribute.
“So, no more coming in on Saturdays, yeah?”
“Mhm.”
“And you’re good with that?”
“Yeah,” She rushes. “I’m gonna go inspect my booty. That’s—”
“Pirate for treasure.” A familiar forehead vein makes an appearance. His hand drops beneath his pointed nose, flexing and unflexing. “I know. Look, make sure not to talk to the guests too much today, alright?”
Caroline nods and salutes dutifully as she exits the shop.
She heads to the bike rack, moves the Thing to the storeroom. It’s heavy and squishes under her touch, toppling with a loud Plop! When she sets it down next to a box of key chains. Something about it reminds her of a pearl. A fleshy, mucusy, pearl.
Before she can inspect it further, a coworker calls her over to help heave the metal gates open. He’s new so he can’t do it by themselves. Caroline helps. It’s what a good captain does after all.
–
When the beach opens, she greets the park-goers as they leak in. She wishes they would flood in like they did when she was younger. Back then, even Tuesdays found Solar Park swarmed with people, crawling all over one other in a messy heap of limbs, towels, water-guns, popsicles, and water coolers.
Nowadays, the beach’s patrons are teenagers with nowhere better to be and families too poor to afford the more popular amusement park farther inland.
The state of the rides probably doesn’t help. Their upkeep is so bad that they shake with the effort of moving, jerking like they’re having seizures. They have a nasty habit of shutting down at any given point, which led to a lawsuit incident a year ago when a woman was trapped at the top of the slingshot for four hours.
Once, when she was six, Caroline got lost on the beach. Her parents had been lax about her safety at best, neglectful at worst, which usually wouldn’t matter if not for the panic that had erupted on the beach. People rushing, pushing and yelling about gunshots. It wasn’t until a woman in a sequins skirt stopped to ask if she was okay that Caroline unfurled herself from her hiding spot beneath the docks. In a panic, Caroline had gripped the woman’s skirt and refused to let go. The material cut into her fingers from her iron grip and sequins flew off in chunks. As the woman guided her back to the beach, Caroline apologized tearfully, desperately sorry for ruining everything, but the woman shook her head. “Those are my scales,” she’d said. “Everyone knows that a mermaid’s scales always grow back.”
Caroline nods to parents and suggests rides. She gives directions and holds maps to point out that the difference between The Sticky Wriggler and The Tickle Monster is that one is lime green and the other is just pistachio. Some of them think she’s playing a character. The kids like to play along, but couples and groups usually give her a wide berth. That’s okay. Solar Park is a place for Dreamers, even Dreamers who have put their imaginations to rest and need them woken back up.
The two o’clock sun beats down intensely, turning the red and green of boardwalk light bulbs into bright, angry blurs. Sweat has caked itself in layers on every surface of her body and, even then, she can feel sunburn threatening to flare up on her skin. Caroline is eager for her lunch break. Eager to inspect the treasure she’s pillaged. She sighs and tunes out the chatter, letting the time pass by focusing on the dinging bells that mean someone just won Soda Pop Toss.
Before her break can come, a group of girls in multicolored bikinis stalk down the boardwalk. They look to be about her age, their hips jutting side to side, icy cold drinks in hand with the cubes bobbing and dissolving behind plastic and condensation.
They look like anemones, swaying aimlessly against the current, but Caroline’s eyes widen when she recognizes a familiar face among them.
For a second, she thinks it might be a mirage. That the tv-dinner diet and lack of citrus might finally be taking a toll on her health.
“Ella? Eleanor?” Caroline might melt on her feet. She might jump out and hug the girl. She might jump out and choke the girl.
Eleanor is sucking on a lemon, and her eyes go wide as they meet Caroline’s. She has brown skin tinted like sugar and short braids that curl at the ends. She has braids now? That’s new. Caroline is always torn about new.
“Oh, hey.” Eleanor answers, familiarity and an excited smile gracing her face. As she does, she dips her head forward and spits the lemon back into her cup, a line of saliva following the lemon’s descent. Her new friends stop ahead, slowly staggering past Caroline like she is a landmark to notice later. Like she’s fixed to the park and could be pointed out on the ride home.
“I haven’t seen you, in like — in, like, ever. Forever. Ha.” Caroline says. Consecutively, she becomes aware of her shirt bunching around her pits, her hooked posture, and the sand caked in the gap between her socks and her sandals.
“Right? It’s been an eternity. You’re still going to Lake U, or am I getting it mixed up?” Eleanor tucks a braid behind her ear as she leans her head back. She wears a blue bikini and frameless purple sunglasses that look plastic and chewy, like they belong to a Polly Pocket. Her left foot is angled away from Caroline, toward the other end of the boardwalk. Eleanor is left-handed. Caroline remembers. She wonders if Eleanor remembers Caroline’s middle name, how funny she used to find it.
Caroline stares, eyes wide and glassy. The air is slow, thick with sand and sweat. Heavy and too open all at once. She feels like a fly under a desk lamp, exposed and flightless.
“No, I — I dropped out a while— look,” Her tongue flops numbly in her mouth, useless. She needs to know, but the words come out half-fused together like conjoined twins. “Are you— I’m still — Do you still play mermaids?”
Eleanor blinks. She looks back behind her to the girls occupied by their own conversation. Then she turns back to Caroline, hair swooping behind her. She says something but whatever it is gets lost on its way to Caroline’s ears. Caroline speaks faster.
“Do you? ‘Cause I still, I’m still —” She’s still a Pirate Captain. Still clinging to the blue plastic of her ship’s wheel on the playground while Eleanor sings her siren song below.
Eleanor’s shoulders go up. She’s responding. Smiling. Placating. Lip gloss melts down her chin underneath her mouth.
Her foot is still angled away.
Eleanor turns around, her group moving toward the Tickle Monster. The opposite way of the Whirler, if that’s where they were headed. Caroline would’ve redirected them if they’d asked but now, she’s feeling vindictive.
What Eleanor said, whatever she said, wasn’t a real answer.
Eleanor runs toward her friends, smiling, waving like the two of them had just had a conversation. Like they’d just caught up on old times.
Caroline watches Eleanor go. Tears and heat cause her vision to ripple, her face to burn up. Her breath quickens and her ears ring until all she can hear is the Ding! of some asshole winning the Soda Pop Toss over and over and over again.
The excitement she felt for her treasure shrivels. The excitement she felt for anything at all withers away.
The next few days drag, time sloughing by like slushy down the side of a paper cup.
Caroline doesn’t remember when her paycheck gets halved, but it does. She doesn’t remember when her parents start getting on her ass about moving out, but they do. At twenty-two, they say, they had already bought houses, gotten married, had a kid. At twenty-two, she’s already conquered all seven of the seas, so really, which is a more impressive feat at the end of the day?
On Thursday Caroline sits on the lifeguard chair, numbly watching the sky instead of the children in the ocean. Seagulls hover in lazy circles above, stalking beneath the clouds, occasionally swooping down to terrorize what few visitors the beach has. She read somewhere that seagulls are scavengers, more opportunistic and violent than vultures are, but they get a better rep because they’re more annoying than scary. Caroline disagrees. She’s terrified of seagulls, though she’d never admit it. What kind of pirate is afraid of a bird?
Once, she watched a horde of them crowd the beach so early that the sun hadn’t yet broken past the purple seal of the horizon. They feasted selfishly and indiscriminately, tearing flesh and meat from whatever was at the center of their spoils. All she could do was imagine herself in there, helplessly throwing her weight around as they pecked out her eyes, prodding and competing for the juiciest parts like her liver or kidneys.
Caroline all but forgets about her treasure until Saturday when she’s taking a smoke break outside the gift shop, and her nose scrunches up. Something smells like dead fish.
“Caroline!” Advvvmm calls from afar. He’s shooing people off the beach for the day.
“Yeah?”
“It smells like something died in the storeroom, so I need you to deal with that, okay?”
It’s then that Caroline remembers her abandoned treasure and curses herself for forgetting. She’s been off her game as a captain since running into that awful girl. “Consider it handled, Pirate’s honor!”
The smell hits her before anything else. She finds her treasure in the back, by the key chains where she left it. Caroline slips it from the netting and into her hand, sniffing it, then reeling back. The odor was definitely coming from it. The scent is salty and pungent, like a mix of mold, brine, and something older.
Looking at it in her palm, she begins to feel nostalgic. If it were solid, instead of fleshy and soft, it could’ve been a giant egg. She and Eleanor could’ve pretended it was a fishy child waiting to hatch that they could raise on both land and sea.
She remembers that back then, Eleanor had told her something about shark eggs.
Mermaid purses, they were sometimes called. She’d said that sharks were the only species of fish that didn’t regularly lay eggs, only doing so on special nights like full moons and Christmas. They were so rare that mermaids found them to be fashionable status symbols, using the purses’ magic to grant wishes. This, according to Eleanor, meant that when you found a shark egg, it was so novel that the egg owed its finder a gift.
“What does it owe you?” Caroline had asked, rapt with interest.
Eleanor’s answer was quiet, a secret just for the two of them. “If you feed it,” She’d whispered, “It owes you a wish.”
They could’ve done that if Eleanor wasn’t such a fucking bitch. Just thinking of the girl is enough to piss Caroline off, make her grind her teeth and bite her lip. They could’ve made a wish for a thousand wishes and kept wishing until their tongues cramped and fell from their mouths.
It’s then that she notices a sudden wetness streaming down her arm. Unconsciously, she’d started to squeeze the treasure, breaking the layer of mucus and causing gunk to ooze down to her elbow. She prods at it, examining closer.
There’s a soft thrumming light at the center of the sack. It hums a slow, quiet noise that grows into a piercing drone so intense that the room starts to spin. Caroline’s world swirls and distorts like gasoline in water. The sound peaks to a keening pitch until it feels like her brain has been temporarily split in two. Her mind chokes on the knowledge as it forces itself between the gap.
The door to the storeroom is blown wide. Caroline stumbles backward, nearly dropping the purse, the Egg, but she scrambles forward to catch it before she does.
“Caroline, it still smells like — are you talking to yourself in here?”
She had been so focused on the Egg that she hadn’t noticed the footsteps until the storeroom door creaked open.
“What are you doing fumbling on the ground.”
“I’m—” she coughs.
Advvvmm’s nose is pinched from the reeking smell. His expression goes from annoyance to something mildly concerned. “Is everything alright? You hurt or what?”
Caroline struggles to her feet, everything still off kilter. And yet everything is set right. Her treasure map has just illuminated the path to her promised riches. She knows exactly what to do now.
With a steady hand, she reaches for the Pool Master leaned up against the wall.
“I’m fine, I just — I need to do this. For the wish. I’m really and truly sorry. Really and truly.”
“What?” He looks worried. He won’t have to worry much longer.
Caroline swings the fishing net in a clean arc, knocking the Pool Master directly into Advvvmm’s head. Its frame collides with his skull making a dull Crack! and when his skull caves in, she feels the initial recoil reverberate all the way to her shoulders.
“Sorry,” She mutters. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but I need this wish.”
She picks the egg up and soaks it in his blood, trembling with excitement as she does.
Caroline floats herself home, high on adrenaline and feverish excitement. It’s so late that the lights are off in the house. Which is good. Which works. There had been so much more blood than she could’ve ever imagined. So much to mop. She fumbles with the keys, praying that her parents are asleep and praying that they kept her yearbook from high school when back then she herself couldn’t be bothered to manage its location.
She strips the bookshelf, peeling down every photograph and encyclopedia until she finally finds the book. She flips through the pages so ravenously she gives herself two papercuts, sticking her index finger in her mouth to catch the blood.
She finds the number, in the back under the Stay In Touch! section. She checks and double checks to make sure it’s the right one. Then texts it.
The Egg needs one more thing for her wish to come true. She knows this because it told her, just like it told her how hungry it was and how lonely it gets at the bottom of the sea with nobody else around because shark moms are very hands off with parenting and mermaids are vapid, selfish owners.
The next morning, she leaves for work so early that she doesn’t encounter her parents, leaving only faint bloody handprints marking her return and exit.
Both the beach and the theme park are closed on Sunday mornings, the environment eerie and hollow without its inhabitants.
“Hey, hi!” Eleanor waves excitedly, causing her gold bracelets to jingle. She’s waiting by the low gate that separates the boardwalk from the beach. Caroline jogs up to her.
Eleanor is wearing the same blue bathing suit as the day before. She flushes in the face of Caroline’s blatant staring, adjusting the string of her bikini bottom.
“I’m only back in town for the last couple weeks of summer,” She says nervously. “Didn’t think to bring more than one bathing suit.”
“Right.”
“I didn’t realize this place was closed,” Eleanor offers, attempting to smooth the awkward vibe of the conversation. “Lots of benefits to working here, huh.”
“Yeah.” Caroline breathes, heavy and desperate. She can feel impatience rippling through her in bursts, making her fingers twitch and her shoulders tense. She hadn’t realized it, but she’d been waiting for this day for so long. Now that it’s here, she’s beside herself with the anticipation.
“I could be wrong but isn’t it your birthday soon?” Eleanor points at the black plastic bag held at Caroline’s side. “Is that what’s in the bag, is it a cake?”
“Hm? Oh, yeah. Actually, I think it might be today.”
“Might?” Eleanor giggles. It’s kind of cute. “What do you mean might? Dude, it’s your birthday.”
Caroline shrugs and exhales a hearty laugh. She’s so excited she can barely bring herself to be nervous. “Do you remember when we came here for our 8th grade trip? Wasn’t that awesome?”
“I mean, I’m sure it was. I was sick that day though.”
“Oh.” Caroline blanks for a moment before speaking again. “That explains it. I was looking for you the whole day.”
“Really? I don’t know why you thought to do that.” Eleanor twists the bracelets on her wrist. It’s gold and sharp, the same as her eyes when the light hits them. “We only hung out, like, once. That one time when we—”
“When we played mermaids.” Caroline takes Eleanor’s hands tight in her own. “So, you do remember.”
Eleanor licks her lips, suddenly uneasy. “Caroline, what is this about, actually? I just wanted to catch up and see if you still—” She blushed and paused, eyes darting away and back. “If, I dunno, maybe you’d be interested in lunch or something before I head back to Cali, but you keep—”
Today the beach is hazy, the atmosphere thickened by an invisible fog. Above them, the gulls gather and let out their cries. The 99-degree weather makes everything heavy and gauzy, like it’s happening in a dream. Caroline could reach out and her hand would pass right through Eleanor like she wasn’t even there.
“It was a Tuesday, and we were in 5th grade, and my parents were late to pick me up again, and I was so sick of being the last kid to get picked up. The teachers felt bad, so they let me play out on the playground where you were waiting. You came up to me, wood chips in one hand, fist in the other, with a bright orange Barbie: Mermaidia shirt on and said we were gonna play mermaids. I asked you your name and you said it was Eleanor, but you hated it because it was too long, so I should call you Ella like Cinderella, and that it was also your mermaid name. You let me play Pirate Captain so long as I pretended to get enchanted by your song so I would look at you and reach out to you through the bars. You stayed on the woodchips and climbed up the slide to get me, but you were too loud, so I always knew when you were coming and to run away.
“We never saw each other again after that because I was too scared to talk to you again but, Ella, that time I spent with you felt like lifetimes to me. I hated you when you didn’t seek me out because—because I hummed your siren’s song when I was at my lowest. I clung to your mermaid spells when I was even lower. I found what you told me about, the shark’s egg. I found it the same day I ran into you, the same day you just so happened to be visiting home. Do you know what that is, Ella? It’s fate. It’s fate and magic all coming together to make our wish come true.”
Ella looks horrified. “Is this why you texted me? Is that why—Caroline, why is there no one else out here?”
“You don’t get it, Ella, we could be the Dreamers.” Caroline’s words are thick with delirium. She feels giddy, saying all her secrets aloud. “Forget bullshit like bills and politics. All growing up makes anyone do is lose themselves. They abandon what makes them happy, they forget it, but we didn’t.” She gestures desperately between the two of them. She has to make Ella understand. “We’re different!”
“Caroline, please, you’re scaring me. We played once. One time.”
“We can do it again.” There’s a breathlessness to Caroline’s voice as she grabs Ella’s arm. “We can play—”
Ella rips from Caroline’s grip and shoves her back, breaking into a run and speeding down the boardwalk. She ditches her pink platform flip-flops immediately, but the added mobility doesn’t stop Caroline from booking it after her.
Caroline follows behind, stumbling into a dead sprint, tears threatening to spill from her eyes. She didn’t want to have to do it this way. She really didn’t.
Evidently, it had been a fatal mistake for Ella to take off her flip-flops. Her foot gets clipped on a nail sticking out from the wood, causing her to trip and tumble forward.
For a moment, time slows, and all Caroline can hear is the padding of her own feet against the boardwalk, the ringing in her ears. Her breath heaves and she slows to a walk as Ella drags herself forward from the ground, attempting to put any amount of distance between them. Blood oozes from her foot and smears against the tigerwood.
When she catches Eleanor, they’ve run all the way to the Death Rocks at the boardwalk’s end. Caroline straddles her and slams the other girl’s head into the boardwalk, emptying the egg from the bag with her free hand. Her mermaid is crying, but that doesn’t matter. Pirates don’t ask; they pillage. As a kid, Caroline used to dream of spending whole days at the beach, and now she does. She wouldn’t be a pirate if she didn’t go after her wants unabashedly. This is the same. It’s all the same.
Ella looks like she’s drowning as she chokes the egg down. Gasping and gagging, floundering for air. She’s sobbing now as the slurry and mucus clog up her mouth but slowly and surely make their way down. It takes a bit of effort and Caroline really has to shove at it to get past the other girl’s teeth but eventually Ella’s throat is bobbing thickly as it wavers between the options of retching the egg back up or swallowing, with the latter winning out in the end.
The transformation is slow and definitely not pretty looking. Caroline flinches a little as Ella’s legs seem to fuse into a gruesome new shape, her spine poking up and out, breaking her skin to form blue fins trailing down her back.
Gills sprout from Ella’s neck. She groans as she coughs up bile and salt water. The skin on her legs sheds off, peeling in chunks and revealing scales underneath.
Caroline drops next to her mermaid and reaches a hand out.
“I knew it,” Caroline mutters, reverent. She gently passes her fingers over newly emerged scales. “They always grow back.”
About the Author:
Oninye-Che Burge (any pronouns) is a junior year college student and writer who focuses on themes of isolation, monstrousness, and radical hope. They are currently in the midst of their biggest project yet while working on getting their few short stories published in between. Oninye lives in Brooklyn New York, is current pursuing their writing bachelors at Ithaca College, and their favorite apples are Honey Crisps.