Out of Place

  They got closer, and I finally relaxed for real. These weren’t sharks. They were dolphins.

  Now that the rest of me wasn’t so tight, I could feel my fingernails digging into my skin and realized that I had a death grip on the sampo. I opened my cramped fingers and tied the bag back around my waist. The cut cord seemed to have grown back to its original length. How interesting. I took off my coat and waited.

  When they finally got close enough, the slightly larger of the two otherwise identical dolphins was the first to speak.

  “Miriam Mermelstein, I presume,” he said grandly. “Allow me to present myself. I am Oliver, and this is my colleague, Stanley.

  “We’ve come to rescue you,” Stanley said, getting right to the important part.

  “I can live with that,” I answered, feeling better by the minute.

  “Your grandparents,” Oliver said, “appointed us specially to search the seas until you were found.”

  “Don’t be silly, Ollie,” the smaller one dolphin said, “she sent lots of us out to find Miriam.”

  “That’s because we were all sent specially. Don’t you know anything, Stanley? But we are the ones who found her. We are the only ones who have completed the mission. Come, Miriam Mermelstein. Let us retreat to the surface for a bit of fresh air and then I will return you to your beloved grandparents.”

  CHAPTER 14

  OUT OF RANGE

  We were swimming near the surface so that Oliver and Stanley could put their heads out of the water to breathe whenever they felt like it, or in Stanley’s case for a little high jumping. He always angled his body just before hitting the water, for maximum splash.

  “I don’t know why you persist in these childish games, Stanley,” Oliver said. “Real bubble-breathers pride themselves on a fine, smooth return at the end of a dive,” he explained to me. “All that splashing is terribly uncouth.”

  “I like it, Ollie. It’s fun. You should try it.”

  “Well, we have business to conduct. We must escort Miriam to Casalot with all haste. Your little games just slow us down.”

  “I’m sorry Ollie. Say, those are a lot of nice purple bruises,” Stanley said, deciding to change the subject. “How did you get them?

  “Now, Stanley,” Oliver chided, “you know it’s not polite to ask personal questions.”

  “No, it’s okay,” I cut in. “I got caught by a big wave and dragged out to sea.” Stanley looked me over.

  “It must have been a pretty big one,” he remarked. “You’re just covered.”

  “Well, it was raining pretty hard, and I didn’t see it coming, and...”

  “What in the seven seas were you doing on the surface during a storm?” Oliver sounded shocked. “Didn’t your parents teach you anything?”

  “They did,” I answered shamefacedly. “They told me to head for deep water at the first sign of bad weather, but I thought I still had time.”

  “Tsk, tsk, such a willful child.”

  “Oh, Ollie, don’t you remember the time that we...”

  “That was entirely different, Stanley. We were on an important mission.”

  “But we were only going to visit...”

  “Stuff and nonsense, Stanley.”

  “I think I’ll swim on the surface for a while,” I said, feeling uncomfortable. “Anybody want to come?”

  “I’ll come, Stanley answered enthusiastically. “Do you know how to play tag and tickle?”

  “I was born playing tag and tickle,” I said with equal enthusiasm, forgetting for a second that I was supposed to be miserable. My body hurt all over and my heart ached for my lost family.

  “Oh, wait a minute. There’s something I have to do first. I’ll catch up.”

  When I got to the surface, I lifted my bag out of the water and took out yet another cell phone. I could spend hours figuring out what to say, so I didn’t. I just dialed and waited for the inevitable.

  I waited some more. The inevitable wasn’t happening. In fact, nothing was happening. I checked the phone to make sure it was turned on. The screen was flashing -- “calling; calling; calling” -- but there was no ring.

  Then I noticed the little distance-symbol in the corner of the screen. I was too late. I was out of range.

  “Mom and Dad will never know what happened to me. I’m trapped in the ocean forever and I can’t even call my parents to say goodbye.”

  PART 2

  CASALOT

  CHAPTER 15

  BOBBING BREASTS

  “Well, we’re here,” Stanley announced.

  “Here? Where is here?” I was confused. All I could see was empty water all around, north, south, east, west...nothing.

  “Why, Casalot, of course,” he said politely. “It’s down there.”

  “Oh, down there.” I still wasn’t used to thinking of ‘all around’ as a direction that included up and down.

  “Oooo! It’s so pretty.” From here, the castle looked like a far-away tower of tiny twinkling lights.

  “Give us but a moment to fill our lungs,” Oliver said, “and we will then escort you directly to your grandparents.”

  The ocean floor wasn’t all that far down and the castle got bigger quickly as we swam closer. Still, it was a lot deeper than I expected.

  “My parents told me that Casalot was an ancient coral reef,” I said, “but I thought coral reefs grew near the surface.”

  “Not this one,” Stanley said. “It’s dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “Tsk, tsk, really, Stanley. Centuries ago, Miss Miriam. It died centuries ago. Some trivial change of water temperature, I believe. The Sky of that period preserved it and moved the entire reef to a more private location. It was a major feat of magic, never since duplicated.”

  “That’s because everyone fought so much about where to put it, that nobody wanted to do it again,” Stanley said.

  As we got deeper, we started to see more and more Sky heading to and from the castle. My fears were confirmed. Bobbing breasts were everywhere.

  I positioned myself between Stanley and Oliver, trying to look small, wishing I had chosen a more neutral color for my top. Like flesh. Great choice. But electric blue and orange, being my current favorite color combination was what I was wearing. Very in your face, hard to miss, blue and orange.

  On the swim over with Stanley and Oliver, I had done the light bulb over the head thing and decided to exchange my bikini top for a sports bra. The new top covered my shoulder blades and when my wings were folded up, it held them in.

  So, I could leave the top on and look weird, or I could take it off, exposing the two highly inadequate bumps on my chest and my oversized, seriously conspicuous wings. There were no good choices. Already, I was not fitting in.

  CHAPTER 16

  CASALOT

  Could it get worse? Of course it could. But first there was Casalot. So impressive, that I forgot my self-consciousness for a good ten seconds.

  As promised, the castle was made of coral, but without any of the little bumps and branches where the coral animals used to live. I guess it’s entitled to some smoothing out after the first couple of centuries. The closer I got, the more Casalot reminded me of the drip-sand castles I used to make when I was a kid -- lumpy but not bumpy.

  The ancient coral reef was surrounded by hundreds of dainty fairy lights. I had seen lights like that before, in my backyard, the night the dragonfly fairies came to celebrate me getting my wing-buds. But these were bigger, and they floated in the water, instead of in the air.

  The color of the coral, was, I don’t know, kind of a gray-white, I guess, but the neatest thing was the way the slick coral reflected the underwater lighting system. The walls glowed like polished silver. A couple of towers and some turrets and it would have been the perfect fairytale castle.

  Ten seconds was enough to take it all in. Then I was back to remembering that every Sky we passed, and there were plenty, must be staring at me. I couldn’t tell for sure, because I wasn’t up t
o looking anybody in the eye.

  We didn’t go in the main entrance, because there wasn’t any. The windows were the doors and the doors were the windows. This, I could tell from the fact that there were fish and fairies swimming in and out of all of them. I guess there must have been as many different kinds of sea-people living or at least visiting Casalot as on a living reef.

  I caught my first sight of a sea sprite disappearing into one of the window-doors in the castle wall. Little-kid-sized people with arms and legs like mine, at least like mine used to be, but with fins on their arms, their legs, all along their backs and fins for feet. They were water breathers. Mom had told me that Sky were the only air- breathing fairies in the ocean. She didn’t know about fresh-water fairies.

  Stanley and Oliver led me through an opening near the top, then through a series of big and little rooms, all lit with fairy lights that bounced out of the way when we swam too close.

  We passed any number of sea people, both fish and fairy, going the other way, or just hanging around, but I couldn’t say how many because I was trying really hard not to look, especially at the other Sky. They probably thought that red was my natural skin color.

  None of the rooms had anything like what I would call furniture. What they did have in almost every room were at least a couple of big cushions. Sometimes, they covered the whole floor two or three deep. I just hoped that there weren’t any lurking floor-doors under those comfy looking cushions.

  I figured we had gotten to wherever we were going when Stanley and Oliver stopped in front of a supersized window-door with a green and turquoise patterned curtain hanging across it.

  “Wait here, Miss Miriam,” Oliver said starting to nose the curtain aside.

  “I want to come, too, Ollie.”

  “You stay here, Stanley. Someone has to guard Miss Miriam.”

  “I don’t need to be guarded.”

  “She certainly doesn’t,” Stanley seconded.

  “Well, someone has to announce her, and that someone should be me.”

  “Poo. She doesn’t need to be announced. Come on, Miss Miriam. Let’s go.” Stanley flipped his tail and opened the curtain all the way.

  Heads turned. We were looking into a truly humongous room in what must have been the center of the old coral reef. Twenty or thirty Sky were lounging on an equally enormous pile of pillows. They looked almost insignificant sitting there surrounded by all that empty space.

  They were all looking at me. Me and my electric blue and orange bathing suit. I developed a sudden interest in the ceiling. It was filled with hundreds of fairy lights that lit up the giant room like a sunny day.

  Two of the Sky were swimming towards me. Must be Grandpa and Grandma Mermaid. I guess I’d better start thinking about them as Grandpa and Grandma Sky, so I don’t accidentally call them mermaids, but it will be hard. I grew up with stories about Grandpa and Grandma Mermaid. They were my favorite make-believe people. At least I thought they were make-believe at the time.

  Besides, these two people looked exactly like I always thought Grandma and Grandpa Mermaid would look. Old, but not very old. Nice, friendly faces. Soft, huggy arms. Black eyes for Grandpa Mermaid-Sky. Blue ones for Grandma. Grandma had red hair. I wasn’t expecting that, but I liked it. Grandpa’s hair was black and curly, just like it should be. I hoped it was really them. Already, I could feel a teeny smile starting up.

  “What happened, child?” the not-smiling back, maybe Grandpa Sky, maybe someone else, said, severely. “Why didn’t you call your parents?”

  My whole face, smile included, froze solid. I had a pretty good idea of how silly I must have looked right about then, but that only made my death-skull smile freeze harder.

  “Ahem, ahem.” Oliver cleared his throat. The two Skys turned to my friends, my only friends at the moment.

  “Forgive our manners,” maybe-Grandma Sky said. “You must be Stanley and Oliver. We got your message this morning. Word has already been sent to Rose of your success. We are extremely grateful.”

  Oliver and Stanley didn’t have much in the way of facial expressions, but there was something about how Oliver hung in the water that reminded me of my cat Tefnut when she was especially pleased with herself.

  “It has been our great pleasure to be of service, Queen Floradora,” Oliver said with a bowing nod.

  “We’re just glad to help,” Stanley said, “but we have to go, really bad.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Oliver give Stanley a little whap with his tail.

  “Well, I don’t know about you, Oliver, but I’m just about bursting.”

  “Stanley!” a clearly shocked Oliver said, under his breath, but loud enough for everyone to hear on the other side of the hall.

  “You poor things,” said Grandma Sky. “You must be starving for air. I hope you will both return tomorrow with the rest of your pod, so that we may express our thanks in a more public setting and with all of the appropriate and greatly deserved formalities.”

  There may not have been much air left in his lungs, but this time, Oliver’s chest definitely got bigger. Then, both dolphins turned and fled. I was on my own.

  CHAPTER 17

  INSEA, OUTSEA, ONSEA

  “Well, Miriam,” not-so-huggy-looking-now Grandma, said. “What do you have to say for yourself?” There was a long pause while they waited for me to answer.

  “I was kidnapped?” I finally said in the smallest voice I could manage. They didn’t buy it. They were still waiting.

  “Twice?” I squeaked out. Eyebrows went up. Grandpa Sky turned to the people on the other side of the room and said loudly,

  “We’re taking Miriam for some refreshment. Please don’t wait.”

  “I’m not really hungry,” I said even squeakier.

  “This way, please,” Grandpa Sky said sternly. I was no longer worried that I would accidentally think of them as Grandma and Grandpa Mermaid.

  They led me through another curtained doorway into an empty room. On the opposite wall was a smaller curtainless opening. I followed Grandma and Grandpa Sky through this door into a smaller room with no other way out. What it did have, was plenty of lights and plenty of pillows. With the big room between us and the main hall, we had privacy to spare.

  “Make yourself comfortable,” Grandpa Sky said, sinking down onto the pillows. “I assume this is going to be a long story.”

  It was. When I got to the part about Zazkal squashing my charm, I couldn’t keep my bottom lip from quivering. Meanwhile, Grandma Sky got so amazingly still, that it seemed as if the water had frozen solid around her. At the same time, Grandpa Sky leaned forward, squinting, acting like he couldn’t quite make out what I was saying. When I finished, he let out a big sigh and shook his head.

  “I can’t believe Zazkal did this,” he said. “It’s...It’s...It’s not Sky.” Grandpa kept slowly shaking his head from side to side, adding an occasional sigh, and muttering under his breath. Eventually, Grandma Sky, still hardly moving, spoke.

  “That rogue-Sky has gone too far this time.” She was speaking slowly and she sounded mad, that is, a lot madder than she already was. “There will have to be sanctions.” She gave Grandpa a black look that he didn’t seem to notice.

  All this was very interesting, but it wasn’t doing anything about my quiver. The deed was done. Punishing Big Fish wasn’t going to get me back to Kansas. Grandma and Grandpa Sky finally noticed that I was getting dangerously close to the hysterical sobbing stage.

  “Don’t worry, Miriam,” Grandma Sky said politely, but not with any of the sympathy I had been hoping for. “This is not hard to fix...although Zazkal wouldn’t have known that,” she said darkly. She reached down and put her hand on her tail near a little white spot I hadn’t noticed before. Then, she closed her eyes and got quiet. Kind of like Zazkal did when he took the coin out of my bag.

  Grandma Sky opened her eyes and held out her hand. She was holding an identical twin to the magic scale that Zazkal had crushed. On her tail, ther
e were now two white spots.

  “Oh, Thank you!” My words carried the force of all the unhappiness I had been feeling. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” I would have kissed her feet if she had any.

  “Be careful with this one,” Grandma Sky said. “They don’t grow back when you take them off this way.” I thought I saw a flicker of a smile, but it was probably just wishful thinking.

  Next, Grandma reached up and took a long black hairpin out of her hair.

  “You use hairpins underwater?” I asked. I thought mermaid hair was supposed to be all free and floaty, which of course hers wasn’t, which I would have seen if I had bothered to notice. Grandma and Grandpa both looked down and then at each other, clearly puzzled.

  “Under? Water?” Grandpa said. “My dear, we’re not under the water, we’re in it.”

  “How could we possibly be under the water?” Grandma asked, still holding out the hairpin. “I suppose we could dig a hole in the ground, but then the water would fill it, so we still wouldn’t be under the water.”

  They were right, but considering the present circumstances, I was left with a serious gap in my vocabulary.

  “Well, what do you call here?” I asked, grateful for at least a temporary change of subject. “Where we are now, not in the castle, but in the water?”

  “In the water is correct,” Grandpa said. “What we say is that we are insea.”

  “And on the land, where I live, what do you call that?”

  “Outsea,” Grandma answered for him. I thought about that for a minute, and then asked,

  “What about when you’re swimming on the surface. You know, with some of you in the water and some of you out of the water? Is that insea or outsea?

  “That’s onsea,” Grandma Sky answered. “Here, use this.” She handed me the hairpin. “Put a hole in that scale so you can keep it on your necklace.

  I had been too busy not looking at people to notice hairdos. But, now that I thought about it, I realized that most of the people I passed had their hair short or pulled back in some way. Sky-hair made a lot more sense than mermaid-hair. I already knew from personal experience that floaty hair gets in your mouth when you eat.

  The conversation, if that’s what you can call what we were doing, sort of petered out after that. No one said anything at all while I was putting the new scale on my necklace. No one offered to help, either, when I had trouble taking off the necklace without dropping the scale.