PROMPT : HAZY
I feel so hazy. Like everything’s in muted shades of blue, white and grey. Everything smells—salty. I feel parched.
The ground is rough everywhere that my feet touch and this so not the way I thought I was spending my sixteenth birthday!
There was supposed to be a cake, a party—and friends! Not puking my guts out in the back of my dad’s rattletrap pick-up truck, while my aunt sympathetically patted my back and held a bucket under my mouth.
“How is she?” Dad asks, the truck has lurched into a safe spot on the coarse beach and he’s come to check on us.
“You’d better carry her,” my aunt says. “She’s pretty bad. You’re sure she was born at night? And not a few hours earlier?”
“Night!” Dad grumbles. “If it’s earlier, her mother didn’t say anything about it.”
The mention of my mother is confusing and interesting in equal measure, because, one, Dad never talks about her and two, no one in the family ever talks about her.
But then Dad’s picked me up and is walking towards the beach. I’m starting to see more exact shapes now and less blurry blobs. The scent of salt is much stronger here, but somehow, it doesn’t smell as disagreeable as before.
“Get her to the water!” My aunt’s shout, startles me, because she’s much closer to my ears than I expected.
But then new hands are taking me—strange hands—and I have no time to protest or speak, because my first mouthful of air, sends me gasping and jerking against invisible blades tearing at me everywhere.
And then there’s water.
I can barely process that someone has dropped me into the very thing I needed the most—water. Lots of it.
Then it registers that I should probably surface in order to breathe and that’s when I discover the tail—black and red, with fancy flecks on the fins.
And it clicks.
I’m a mermaid.
Great.
(c) S. Harricharan