Mermaid
written by: Carol Stigger
Mae wondered when she had stopped skipping up and down the winding staircase to her second story bedroom. Now 80, she clutched the railing and stared at her clawed fingers recalling the scratch of elbow length, lace gloves. Light from a full moon shone through the round window framed in gilded pine. Once a stained-glass mermaid with yellow hair covering her breasts lived there.
The glass pane replacing the mermaid was streaked, yet the moon was so full she did not need electric lights. Good thing as the power had failed again. Or maybe the electric company was tired of her pleas and simply shut it off. “Off the grid,” youngsters called it. Living off the grid. She had seen a few programs on YouTube when she could still hear the television.
She heaved herself up another carpeted step. Now she was eye level with the painting of the girl she once was. The turquoise velvet gown floated gently in places beyond the pinch of the cruel corset. Those lace gloves bobbed lightly against sweaty palms while dancing or strolling the grounds through dangerous shadows. “Yes,” she had nodded. “We should sit a bit after that dance. I didn’t know you could Tango.” He sat too close. She did not object. He pulled a lock of hair from her chignon curling it over one breast, like the mermaid. She did not object. Kicked off her sling-back slippers that pinched with every stylish step.
He kissed her. She did not object. He pulled the rest of her hair from its pins so how could she shy away from his few light moves that left her as bare-breasted as the mermaid. On that shadowy padded bench, she was unfettered, uncaring, and floating on yesterday’s hushed warnings dissolving beneath her.
Without a word, he left her there. As he disappeared down the wooden stairs to the sea, she heard him whistling a tune more fit for a saloon than the hissing ocean. “I am ruined,” she said, bemused as she got herself together and pinned up her hair. “I still have my gloves on,” she thought.
She returned to the ballroom and danced a lindy hop, a waltz, a two-step, accepted compliments about her portrait on its easel. The ball. Her debut. The unveiling of her portrait. The man never returned. As the season waned, she swelled, her heart giving an extra beat each time she passed her portrait on the stairway, each time the moon illuminated the mermaid.
Mae steadied herself and leaned closer to her portrait. Her parents had hidden it in the attic. As for the mermaid, she’d thrown a silver candlestick through it after the child was born and spirited away “to a good home.” And she, a ruined woman – for the word got out in their gossipy circle – became an old maid. Eventually, her good works atoned for her sins. After her parents died in a fiery crash, she was, somehow, respected and then pitied as the mansion aged along with her but stood firm on the bluff.
She tried to take another step but clutched her chest, gasped for air staring at her portrait instead of screaming. After all, the ocean eventually gives up its dead.
Days later they found her, on the stairway with stringy dyed blonde hair dipping over a cotton robe embroidered with seashells.
The policeman thought, just for a moment, that her hair was seaweed and that the dirty beige carpet, so gritty to the touch, was sand.
- Mermaid - October 19, 2024
- Becoming Kitty - January 23, 2022
