Len Kuntz

Mermaid

You swim with the other orange fish, flapping, splashing in a manmade koi pond outside the Bank of America building just after noon on a hot Friday.  I say, “Honey, how did you get here?”

You giggle and gurgle, such a slippery young thing.

“Come on,” I say, “what’re you doing?”

Around me people come and go in a hurry.  Darrell saunters over, gives me a head tilt and asks if everything’s okay, his Security badge glinting furious from sun glare.

I hear your rippled laughter, high pitched and juvenile, lovely.  It’s been so long, since that day on the boat, when you were angry.  You said you didn’t need swimming lessons.  Mermaids are water-born.  And when I said I’d teach you soon as the cruise was over, after we got back to the states, you threw a rare tantrum.  I heard your mother’s voice say, “Just let her blow it off.”  And though we were over by then, me and my ex-wife, I took her advice this once and didn’t chase after my little girl.

“So what’s up, partner?” Darrell asks, his thick thumbs hooked through belt loops.

He doesn’t see you because you’ve gone under, deep below the surface the way you must have after jumping overboard, hiding behind some slime-slickened boulder, blending in with the willowy seaweed or swimming to the far ends of the water the way mermaids do when they’re curious and bold.

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Len Kuntz lives on a lake in rural Washington states.  His writing appears widely in print and online at such places as Juked, Elimae, Mud Luscious and also at lenkuntz.blogspot.com