Part of Your World

I wrote this for my English final project, and I really love it. Eventually I'll rewrite it, or at least fix the ending, because it's really rushed.


I remember in flashes. I remember the first time that I went to the surface. I was fifteen. I saw the boy. He looked a little older than me. I thought he saw me. I swam away.

I came again. It was two weeks after I had first come up. He wasn’t there. I came back every night for five years. I watched him grow. I grew, too. Our hair grew a foot each year we lived. The old ladies, the ones who were almost a grand 300, had hair that they dressed themselves with, a long silver dress that curled around their fins. That is every mermaid’s dream. Our hair is our one pride.

I remember crawling onto shore. The sand felt like broken glass, digging into my skin. The sand behind me turned red. I never reached him. He didn’t see me. He ran away. After I did. I didn’t go home that night. I couldn’t, not bleeding like that. She found me.

I remember the trail of blood in the water. I got away. No one could know I was bleeding. They would know that I had been up there, on the sand. They would know I had fallen in love with one of them. A monster.

She took me. I didn’t fight. I knew who she was. Secretly, in a place inside me I wouldn’t admit existed, I wanted this. She could give me what I wanted.

“Are you sure?” she asked me. Her smile stretched from cheekbone to cheekbone. Black magic twisted at the corners of her thin lips, tearing them even farther across her face. Her skin was gray and tight, her hands a mess of gnarled bone.

Then there was the pain. First she cut my tongue. “Payment,” she hissed. Then I felt myself catch fire, spreading through my fin, burning it apart into two parts, searing my gills shut. The fire spread into my lungs. I couldn’t breathe here anymore.

I remember my first breath of pure air. I gasped for it, clutching at it, shoving it down my throat, past my tongue-less mouth. I could not lick the salt from my lips anymore.

It was worth it when I saw him. He was on the sand, digging his feet in. I stepped onto the sand. I fell down. It still felt like broken glass. My feet were soft, like my hands. They were pierced, bleeding. He saw the blood, followed the trail to me. He jumped up.

“Who are you?” he asked, and I knew then that he didn’t remember the night he had almost drowned. I remembered that night. His ship had crashed against the rocks. He wasn’t saved by xedshis crew. They couldn’t find him. He was lost in the water. I was watching. I saw him. I saved him.

He took me to his castle. They cleaned me there, washed the salt from my lips. They scraped my skin raw with their brushes. My feet bled on the tile. A man carried me upstairs.

The ladies wrapped my feet in the softest cloth, trying to cushion it against e floor. My feet , though still stabbed, no longer bled.

I remember the days we spent together. He was being kind. I fell even more in love with him. He was perfect, even more perfect than I had thought before. Each day he smiled more. Each day it was easier to ignore the knives in my feet.

I remember when he held my hand. He pulled me in front of him, and looked down at me. The sun was setting behind me, casting shadows across his face. He opened his mouth, as if wanting to say something, but no words came out. Instead, he leaned down, and he kissed me. I would have walked a thousand miles on bleeding feet to have that moment last forever.

I thought that he loved me. When she came, that other girl, I was proved wrong. She was beautiful, in way that I could never be out of the sea. And she could speak. She could sing. She made my throat ache. I could hum a tune, but I couldn’t sing like her.

He started spending more time with her. He had seemed to have forgotten me. But I had not forgotten him. I did little things for him, things that would mean something only between him and me. It was my last-ditch effort to try and have him choose me.

On their wedding day, my sisters came to me. Their arms bled as they crawled upon the shore. Their hair was short.

“Take it,” they said, and tossed me the dagger the sea witch had made from their hair. “Take it and kill him with it, and then you can come and live with us again.”

I didn’t want to go back to being a mermaid, swimming for two hundred and eighty more years, only to turn into the sea. I didn’t want to be without a soul. But to get a soul, I’d have win the love of a human, and I’d already lost that. I would have to die tomorrow, not having lived out my three hundred years, and not having gained a soul. That seemed worse. I took the knife.

I remember their wedding night. I waited until they had both fallen asleep. I trailed blood on the floor, walking on the cold stone to their bed. I watched them, their chests moving together, breathing as one. I saw the joy that even sleep couldn’t wipe away from her face, joy that had almost been mine. I looked at his face. I raised the knife. In that moment, he shifted in his sleep, and murmured her name. His voice was so soft, and so sweet. I couldn’t kill him. I realized in that moment that I hadn’t stayed for a soul, but to make him happy. In the end, that was all that mattered to me.

I dropped the knife. The prince woke up, and he saw me. I turned and ran.

I ran to the sea, blood trailing behind me. I ran the wrong way, towards the rocks with little pools of water in them, water trapped from the high tides. I tried climbing through them, but it hurt too much. I collapsed in one of the pools, and I let myself cry.

I heard footsteps climbing over the rocks as the sun started to rise. I turned on my back, looking up, and the prince was there. His face was worried as he looked at the blood that the water had not soaked off of me yet.

The sun rose higher. I felt myself relax, as if I were falling asleep. I fought to stay awake. I didn’t want to die. It scared me. His hand cupped my face as he leaned close and whispered to me. He lifted my hand to his face.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t save you,” he said.

I knew he was talking about the blood. He knew I was dying. I squeezed his hand, letting him know that I forgave him. I loved him too much not to. And finally, I let go.

“Come with us,” I heard. I opened my eyes. The air around me had taken the form of girls, most of them a little older than me. Confused, I looked around. I was in the air. Down below, I could see my body as the prince placed it gently in the ocean.

“You saved his life in return for yours,” one of them said. “And for that, you have been given a soul. You’re one of us now. You are a daughter of air.”

I remember in flashes. There’s no reason to remember any other way. There’s no use dwelling on the past now. There is only joy, when I dance unseen with the children of the prince, when I watch over the love the prince and his princess share for each other. And sometimes, I swear he knows I’m there. He steps in the ocean with his princess, and together they look up and smile, and I can tell they are remembering in flashes, too.