I curled myself up, panting. Perhaps if I made myself smaller the pain would also
shrink. But it didn’t.
“What’s wrong with you?” Hannah asked, warily, as if this was a practical joke.
“You stupid little bitch.” I spat the words onto the grass. “Just get away. Or I’ll...
I’ll...” I howled.
When I looked again, Hannah had gone. I couldn’t care. Pain trumped everything.
My hand brushed my leg, where the burning was worst. I felt something hard and
cold. Gradually, I managed to turn my head and peer down. That’s when I saw the
scales. They’d broken out all down my legs. Shimmery green scales that rippled when
I moved. I scratched one of them, picking until I felt blood. Then my lower body
began to convulse. I was being ripped open. Ragged screams tore from my throat.
They must have taken my last trace of energy, because I blacked out with them still
ringing in my ears.
“Lydia?”
I opened my eyes. My shade had been carried away, so I lay right in the glare of the
hot, bright sun.
“Lydia.”
“What?”
“You need to be in the water,” Hannah said.
I tried to speak again, but I was parched. Like a dried up snake skin, crackling into
dust. But at least the pain had stopped.
“Come on.”
Hannah stooped and jammed her hands under my armpits. I shifted away. Or tried
to. Something was wrong with my legs. I looked down and saw the tail. Startled, I
tried to get away from it, but the tail moved with me. That’s when I realised. It was
my tail and it reached all the way up to my belly button.
“We need to get you in the river.”
I gaped at her. Wasn’t she fazed that I was now a mermaid?
She tried to drag me towards the water. Her mouth puffed air on my face. Sweat
glued her hair. But it wasn’t working.
“You’re too heavy,” she said.
“I’m not fat. It’s all tail.”
Somehow, between us, I made it to the bank. The grass was cooler there. Moisture
soaked into my pores. I imagined those pores like grasping mouths sucking at the
water, desperate for every last particle. Hannah shoved me, rather abruptly, and I
rolled into the water.
The river greeted me with a hard smack.
“What’s it like?” Hannah asked. She was sitting cross-legged on the grass, making
a daisy chain. There was something picturesque about her, like a child in a Victorian
painting. I, on the other hand, looked like an entirely different kind of painting.
“Can you talk underwater?”
“No.” I turned the page of my book, not because I was reading but because maybe