In the Hands of Water: The Melusine in her Senescence (A Portrait of an Urban Siren)
by Shannon Joyce Prince

There are other men and women like me who live above storefront restaurants where the people fry their fragrant memories of far away homelands into profit, telling the history of their dishes if you smile at them, placing the coins of one nation into hands whose jewelry marks them as being heirs to another, folk who remember in one language and plan in a second. They live on a street named after an activist with a storefront church on the corner, the preacher more an oracle than a theologian, enjoining all the people on their fold-out chairs to shout the fact of their redemption, and the congregation is small but the denomination powerful, at least among those for whom sating, healing, and pleasing the body is never a series of whimsical spontaneities but a delicate monetary balance.

Else they are like me and live in a small parrot-colored house with a porch and at least one beautiful ancient tree behind, in a neighborhood where the young men are universally considered menaces no matter how doe-vulnerable their eyes are. A place where verbs undergo metamorphosis before they are spoken and nouns are passed through alchemical ritual prior to inflection, which is to say, others scorn the beauty in our rarefied grammars, not that this silences us—though it does circumscribe the worlds through which we can move. A place where lack is a presence, where nothing is an entity, where poverty isn’t a possible era to be prepared for but a certain reality to be reckoned with (familiar if not benign), and in these places the struggle is communal, the delights subversive, the oppression hereditary. A place where the fight means that growing old makes you not only an elder to be cared for, but an ancestor to be revered. Here, though there is no lack of the divinely eccentric, the trouble and joy that has fallen into each of the old lives is remarkably harmonious, community meaning others’ splendors and aches are familiar and comprehensible. The past allows disparate seniors to lay claim to each other, leaving us often interchangeable in the eyes of the young. In such lairs, children seem to become grown early like blossoms forced open in winter, people fear for the youths vulnerable as a robin hatched too soon, attempting to soar while studded with merely the roots of feathers. And yet, yet they manage the blue, they accomplish the sky, and though this is cause for rejoicing, it is not a matter of surprise.

What I mean to say is that I live among people for whom the difficult is assimilated into living and yet the living continues on and on.

*

My name is Nephrolepis, which is what people give me. As well as the three Nephrolepis in my kitchen, my porch is full of them. Nephrolepis flutter star-like at the rafters, balance alert on the rails, and settle on the floor. I think, subconsciously, people give them to me in such profusion to ensure my viability. They must think I need Nephrolepis to remain whole or sane, or perhaps visible. That without the plants I would vanish, and their fear has become my own. I imagine that if my Nephrolepis died or were stolen, my flesh would turn cloud-gray and cloud-ephemeral; cirrus-style I would be whisked away into nothing.

Through their gifts of Nephrolepis, my neighbors construct me, elide me with the grotto-like clutter of water ferns at the front of my house, assure me an identity. I am not sure if they do this for me or for them, yet it continues. Holidays having become unnecessary now that people have gotten into the rhythm of it, some even give me Nephrolepis without any particular thought of me as the recipient, in the same way that some people drop coins into the collection plate. They learn to associate the pointy leaves with the exotic name, see the plant and I come to mind. They bring Nephrolepis not in an attempt to earn a smile —nor refreshment, nor friendship—but because it has become appropriate to do so. Because they have decided that my home is where Nephrolepis belong.

I have never told anyone how wildly uncorrelated my name is with the plants I am given. The first time I was given one was by my husband, forty-one years ago, and I didn’t even realize he was alluding to me. So many folks have spent so many years generously assigning me this identity that, not from politeness but because I have long since partly morphed into the individual they believed me to be, I have never divulged the secret self. Now I walk with both identities. I am the old woman of brown skin ripe with plum tones and wild hair as gray as oak bark and a porch full of tropical ferns. But none of that has anything to do with the actual truth of my name.

Nephrolepis for my parents conjured river waves splitting to reveal a forbidden aqueous kingdom. It meant water that churned sierra green, immiscible with a sea god’s turquoise. Connoting the blue and emerald marbled light in a shark’s eye, the cyan thunder that drums over islands, my parents thought Nephrolepis a mermaid’s name. Nephrolepis ferns can only be where there is a body of water, and water was the only part of the plant’s name my parents associated with me. I cannot really explain, easily or briefly, to anyone why my parents leaned into the mythic when naming me, so I let them believe what they like about botany.

The floral explanation does not protect me.

Mermaid love is like jatropha fruit—something has gone wrong in the crafting of the beauty. I am too devout to call it a failure of God; perhaps it is the way the sun acts to mute the promise of green nectar, it might be a matter of how the lunar gold of the moon enflames the sea. Something gets lost in the desire of these beings to enjoin. Mermaids can never align, though they might long to. The storytellers and poets of the world have reached a consensus: the siren’s song is a eulogy. Mermaids are perpetually desirous, the ever-weeping starved folk of the sea. My song is not different, my heart no less viscerally wounded. I love as tragically as an ocean crone.

I had heard the stories, yet until my womanhood began, I did not believe. My femininity, my life, commenced with this home before it was mine, a house a blur of vermillion, citric orange, and spoonbill- pink. People who didn’t know its story might have thought that it was an odd house for a man to live in, but I thought it looked like a flower, a man’s domain yet a woman’s invitation. I remember the first day I saw the house, solemn silver thunderclouds crouched all around it, illuminating its bloom. Ebon, my husband-to-be, called out to me and his voice drew me together. A second before his words were born I was nothing more than the green in the leaves of the trees that arced over our street, the laughing light of bicycle wheels from passing boys, the bowl of a blue poppy jostled about by the wind. I had no consciousness of myself as a self; I was only a spirit, a gaze, an ear for the mockingbirds, an eye for the amber cat lurking through the streets. And those senses and forces became joined together by his call, “Hello, there. What are you doing out in this rain?”

I had not noticed any rain. I had not before inhabited the body upon which rain could fall, but when he mentioned the rain I saw the silver pieces of the sky falling liquid down and saw myself among them as he must see me, my wine-brown skin colored as if my mere presence on earth were a flushing exertion, the hundred black plaits blowing wet about my shoulders. And I couldn’t answer him, just like later I wouldn’t be able to explain my name. I never could speak on myself; I just smiled at him and he looked perhaps like he understood what it was like to feel barely bound to earth, only tentatively real.

Ebon was a tall slender man, all smooth slopes like a carving, dark enough for his name not to belie him. Thirty-one years my senior at fifty-three, I didn’t think of him as a number. I thought how it felt when we were being knit together by threads of windblown rain, as if God were walking figure eights about us. It was an Eden moment, and his house kindled like a bright ibis in the storm. He held out his hand and I followed him with the same trust that you follow a gentle hermit through the woods. He was no stranger to me – all of us in this neighborhood were netted together like the webbed roots of a peach tree. I’d seen his face turn honey and sea green with the light from Paul’s cloak in the stained glass window at church, seen him bent over his flowers every April – everybody who lived within that mass of streets in the heart of the city knew who were the folk who sent their lovers’ teeth flying from their mouths and who fed strays – kids, cats, prostitutes, and though drug dealers, gangsters, and vandals assured there was no lack of danger, none of it was covert. We all knew each other, and I knew I’d be safe walking into Ebon’s house, though I didn’t know one day it’d be my own.

“You got a taste for anything? I have some spaghetti on the stove.”

“Mmm, did you put basil in it or sage?”

“Sage, always, with a bit of mint.”

“It’s good to have something warm when it rains.”

“Something warm and James Baldwin.”

“Else Etheridge…”

“What you think of our alderman?”

“He’s not half trying, not half trying for any of those children in the schools…”

“And the preacher?”

“Good, old to be so young…”

We talked as softly as rain falls from a roof, sometimes skimming what was deeper within us, and what we grazed was attractive to us, drew us closer, revealed our cards were a match, a win, like God remembered in some game to turn both of us face up and was smiling. I kept coming back, talking over the arcane and the common, talking about the living and the ghosts, and I fell in love with him when our talk looped upwards to Heaven and caught his first wife, her name an Urdu word for Gardenia.

“Her hands started hurting her, kinking up on her by surprise, and she went to the doctor figuring she’d get some medicine for arthritis (interlude for photos of a beauty with a bindi sparkling preternaturally on her forehead). But the doctor said it wasn’t arthritis, it was Lou Gehrig’s disease and there was no treatment and no cure (a moment to pretend not to weep and another to pretend not to see). One morning she’d wake up and couldn’t walk (I don’t see that tear), a little later she couldn’t breathe on her own (or that one either). Only about a year and she was gone.”

“How normal after that abnormalcy? How human after that disruption of life’s pattern, like a maple tree going red in the spring?” My words broke, perhaps mirroring the pieces of his heart. They broke into colorful glass pieces on the floor and crushed together along with his despoiled love.

“We had always wondered why we couldn’t have a child – her ovaries, perfect; my seeds, lovely; her blood, trustworthy; my entrances, tender—but in between loss of feeding herself and incontinence, she struck upon the secret to our curse. It was her name. Gardenia, the night-blooming flower. She couldn’t bear fruit on this earth. Gardenia, the night-blooming flower, was ready, generously anticipatory in her readiness, pondering the sepia, mahogany, and clay-colored dust she would give her body to, imagining the calla lilies and bright grass that might one day spring from her form. She imagined heavenly light, lunar, and she clutched to her name, posthumous fruition. I bathed her, I combed her hair, set lilac glass bangles about her wrists as if for a sacrament, and I draped the wagtail-yellow sari over her ever-disappearing form like a magician trying to keep his secrets. Angels were stealing her from me bit by bit until she was less and less, and finally God did his work. My eyes were closed with dreams as tightly as Adam’s, yet inverting that moment He took her from me.”

Ebon never stopped loving Gardenia, and I never thought it was necessary. After all, I loved Gardenia, and I loved Ebon for loving Gardenia, and it was by his love for her that I knew he’d be a good husband to me. I was twenty-two and he was fifty-three and once I moved into the house it seemed an appropriate hue, as if a man who’d live in a home that color would do anything to make a woman happy.

*

Mermaids have no speech; they have song, but the lyrics contain no discourse or rhetoric, are merely blind expressions of or invitations to desire. Mermaids are narrated, they are not heard. Does the audience or do the sea folk insist on this silence? Are we not ready for the words that would come, millennia of inherited hunger among the reflections of stars in the sea? Like we turn away from the urgency of homeless men’s eyes, look down before veterans’ glances? Perhaps it is the mermaids themselves who do not wish to crack open the misery they have locked away inside themselves. Or the inevitably finite joy.

It is that way with me and my ten years of wonderland.

I don’t speak and folks don’t ask about my happiness, because I cannot stand the horror of its ending. I say horror, and not surprise, because the longer I loved him the keener my vague sense of the consequences of mermaidhood became. Loving him was like playing under a red sun, and though preoccupied with the game, slightly aware that the light is imperiled, about to tip over the side of the earth and evade immortality. Loving him became longing for him became slightly wistful. I loved him like we love not during autumn season with sure beauty, bright inseparable from winter doom, but Christmas-season love tempered by the melancholy Easter, knowing as you twirl the lights up that the tree is dying.

When Ebon had his heart attack at age sixty-three, I couldn’t stand to think of selecting a black suit or farewell Biblical poetry or coaxing the appropriate panegyrics from the minister. So I didn’t. I thought of his ashes becoming soil and being decanted by sunlight. I thought of deer coming, a stag heavy with boughs of antlers, or a doe followed by a reticent fawn. I imagined them bending towards grass my husband had borne by being mortal, grass rising like spiky bits of bottle glass from the earth. It may seem macabre that I fixated on his death so deeply and skirted around the pleasure of our lives together, but I could bear the sadness that surrounded me, I couldn’t stand to think of the happiness I had lost. Siren song haunting and penetrating, artful grief, lovely keening; my misery has a lexicon, my bliss rends me silent.

And just as I was imagining the red brown crown of a doe, her head bending towards vivid grass swaying under rain, something began in me. An unfolding, an interruption, a contradiction, a harbinger, a collision, an elision, and dimly I recognized before a trip to the bathroom, before comparing my blood to my calendar, before the royal confirmation of my doctor, gently I knew.

My first thought was, Ebon will be happy to have a child in the house. My second thought was, Gardenia will be happy to have a child in the house. But then the veracity of it struck me in a way that was terrible yet contenting. The baby was completely mine. My thought as I phrased it, however, was I am completely this baby’s. I couldn’t tell who was giving life to whom, who was the other’s spring.

*

Espantebrujera… to scare the witch, statues raised on Catelano rooftops to scourge evil, but this is the inner city, row houses and chain link fences, and she has only me to espantebrujera, hush, baby, hush, Mama won’t let nothing get you – I gave her Sapphire as her name to tell the world, and her secret name is Sapphire of the Beautiful Sky, Sapphire of the Forest Green. Everybody knows about the azure stones, dark as blueberries, powerful with lore, but I have seen them also, rare, teal crystalline green, and I named her for both worlds alluded to by the jewel, sea-colored space and ancient wood, but at school you just tell ’em Sapphire, baby, keep your secret self safe, you just tell ’em Sapphire, baby, that’s all they need to know. My wish for her is a life without prose, grand lyrical flights for all her days, seeing the wizard in every crone, looking only at the world through her secret Sapphire eyes.

I got me a smart one, she read everything she could get her hands on, knew all about Charles Wright and Gaudi and she had folklore brains too; she knew 8 times 8 is 64 but also that stone soup is nothing but love… you a mess, you know that? you Mama’s little mess, what do you look like old enough to be in a bra and still licking the batter out the mixing bowl? Look at you in that beautiful prom dress, you’re the prettiest girl in the world, you really are, I am so proud, you got that high school degree, I am so proud, Sapphire, baby, I am so proud.

*

I was delighted with Sapphire when she became a woman, that round number twenty was what I considered her womanhood year, watching her shine full in bloom after two decades, teaching sculpture to glorious underestimated kids at the local community center, her long hair twisted under geles, Duke Ellington intimating wondrous things throughout the classroom. I was proud of her in the arenas she inhabited, seeing her beside me with her diligent pink highlighter at church, her apartment with its replicated-Sowo masks and organic vegetables. Her style was something that hadn’t existed in Ebon’s time or Gardenia’s; she surprised me to be so contemporary, to understand how the Harlem Renaissance rose again with coral dawn light filtering into hip hop beats, African garb and hood textiles mingled on the form as if the ancestors were walking amusedly through the city streets, gentile poverty no longer the realm of the aristocracy but now a new method of revolution, loyalty and politics aesthetic, expressed in the projects, in the playgrounds, on the street corners, hands dirty and wrists full of foreign bracelets.

Sapphire was a beautiful jewel, my African violet, a young adored pharaoh – her students worshipped her, her peers made a curriculum from her library card, and she had a few boys she liked to laugh with but nobody she loved. Until Nicholas.

I can see why Sapphire loved Nicholas. He looks like the Akan gold carvings she so adores and his hair is a bouquet of black dreadlocks tied together behind his head that reach his waist. He was here in the inner city with us, but I knew by his smile he wasn’t one of us – it was the smile of an explorer who swam over a coral reef of dazzling fish. But his smile wasn’t merely one of appreciation – though beautiful, it was the smile of one who sees a difference between himself and the second world he has entered, and cannot let this difference simply be. He half-consciously subsumes it under a hierarchy. The being finds himself superior when he reflects on himself and decides only his gaze is privileged, only he can truthfully see himself and the objects of his vision, that those he saw had neither the scope to gaze upon themselves nor comprehend him. Perhaps it is the privilege of his mobility that allows this condescension, his ability to either leave or remain, to visit our world while we cannot join his.

It was in this way that Nicholas looked at me, at the students whom he had deigned to teach for two years after getting his graduate degree from an acclaimed university. It was not how he saw Sapphire. Sapphire was one of his folk to him, a recognition and not a discovery, nevermind her poverty, nevermind her lack of advanced schooling, something in her beauty, her wisdom, redeemed what she lacked. And what I didn’t like was that he saw himself as rescuing her, taking her from a world which she was too ignorant to know she was too knowledgeable to belong to. And what surprised me was that she was wooed by this derision.

She loved the way he dazzled her with a rare Hyacinth Macaw on Valentine’s Day. Even loved the way he terrified her with a trip to Ghana’s slave castle. He’d come around the house, always polite to me, smiling consolingly as if he’d beaten me at tennis.

I remember the day after I flew back from the wedding. Nicholas had married my daughter in a church dedicated to the saint he was appropriately named for, and I had looked desperately to the other patrons on the walls for a miracle. I was in a beautiful shantung dress Nicholas’s mother had offered me, certain nothing I had would be appropriate. The wedding had been in New York, where Nicholas lived, where he fled with his treasure, my Sapphire. Done with the proletariats, he allowed Sapphire to select for them a gorgeous brownstone in gentrified Harlem. He would begin his career as a publisher, and Sapphire would work at an antique art gallery run by a St. Nevis expatriate.

I stood shivering among my Nephrolepis. Something had felt wrong with the high cold air of the plane coming home, the gold autumn air of the city, the solicitous ventilated air of my home. I didn’t trust any oxygen that hadn’t been immediately manufactured by my ferns. I felt like a fish drowning above water, my life irrevocably changed.

I’d always wanted Sapphire to be loved, but to be loved in the world we shared between us. I thought I would delight in one day giving Sapphire away, I just never expected that she would be asked to do the same of me. Because that, in New York, was really what Nicholas had demanded of Sapphire. Not loyalty through sickness nor devotion through poverty, not heartfelt obedience or dusk deep trust, but renunciation of me and all that I represented.

In the time after the wedding plans, the money locked in my bank account and pinned under my mattress was comparable to the stores of an industrious child, and I didn’t know when I’d have enough to see Sapphire again. Cleaning office buildings didn’t get you much traveling fare, and already I was desperate for her. But when I phoned she gave me no more than a score of minutes before defecting to research an art piece or go to dinner with Nicholas. I could imagine the restaurants where they ate, places with indecipherable abstract art on the walls, the kind whose incomprehensibility would render me aesthetically illiterate. Sitar, Fulani drum, or complex jazz played live and gently in the background. Upscale soul food, gourmet Italian peasant, people like Nicholas couldn’t stand food without oxymorons. I supposed they’d come home to their candle-filled house and cuddle under an antebellum blanket, kiss under the indifferent gazes of John Biggers sketches.

“I wish I could be there, baby, for Christmas. I really do. But it’s just that salary they pay me’s not enough for a ticket.”

“I understand, Mama. We’ll be thinking of you.”

And I’d call around noon on Christmas, “Mama, we were just about to serve this delightful yam fou fou Nicholas’s dad made. I’ll call you back, okay?” Okay if she were to, but she doesn’t. And she doesn’t come home to me.

And she didn’t call me to explain the lack of grandchildren. I asked her in jest, in passing, when she revealed to me how she allowed her mother-in-law to lie alongside her and comfort her after a tumor-induced hysterectomy. She let me hear from a neighbor about being “one to watch” in an art world magazine. I stared at the picture, at what she had morphed into, a girl with a warm small child’s smile and dreadlocks tipped in cowrie shells and wooden beads. Avian in a rich green silk gown, her arms were thrown around Nicholas in a way that connoted camaraderie as much as romance. I could see why she was one to watch, why she had enraptured the realm she had entered, why they would forgive her her lack of breeding, college, and childhood wealth. And surrounded by guests at a party wearing enough pearls to empty an ocean and a pillaged tribe’s worth of foreign gold, I could see why the praise that came from people who knew the difference between Akyem and Ashanti art, how various French political reigns had affected chair styles, and if Japanese or Indian incense was more soothing, was to be worth more to her than someone who didn’t know her way around the hierarchies and loved her without qualification anyway.

*

When Sapphire did come to visit me, I was stunned. The doorbell rang –

“I’ll be there,” I called out. I set down my book and drifted over to the door and when I opened it there she was, elegant, seven years older, already unhappy with me. She looked at me, my long uncombed gray hair, my faded housedress, the holey socks on my feet, but she didn’t look surprised or sad, merely irritated. She looked at me and audibly sighed, as if confirming what she had always known to be true of me, but it wasn’t true, she wasn’t remembering me right. She didn’t leave me because I was this haggard creature; this raggedy apparition was what I had become in her absence. Nobody to look nice for, nobody to love – I had fallen apart. The house was showing earlier azures, sunflower, plum, and seafoam green through the failing scarlet, and my Nephrolepis were tending towards copper and gray.

“Baby,” I said. I reached for her and she jolted back as if shocked, then bent towards me. “Come in, baby,” I breathed full of love and awe. My house was not a mess, which just meant God was being benevolent, because I let it go, usually, in my heartache and didn’t clean it until moved to exceptional agitation when I needed something to soothe me. The relative order of my house, however, did not mean that I had something in the kitchen to offer her. “Sit down, Baby. All I got is some lemonade, some cookies.”

She looked at me as if I hadn’t done my homework.

“That’s fine,” she said, as if only to calm me.

“How have you been, baby? I know you’ve been busy.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I have.”

“You like working in that art gallery?”

“Yes, Mama.”

“And you and Nicholas are happy?”

“Yes, Mama, yes.” She was annoyed with my small talk, but she had closed me out for so long, I was only looking for a way back.

“Baby, you should have told me you were coming. I would have had something good cooked for you. Oh my! Remind me to call work tomorrow to tell those people I won’t be coming in.”

“Mama, you don’t have to.”

I froze, raw and sad.

“I’m only staying here tonight.”

“Just tonight, baby, with that big suitcase?”

“Yes, I…” She looked around the shabby house, at the empty refrigerator, at me, dismantled before her. “I can’t stay.”

We walked to the door, and when I tried to hug her again, she wouldn’t even yield towards me. “Baby, please.”

She reached forward and combed her fingernails through my hair like I used to do her before church, and it wasn’t unkind or condemning, it was just like she wanted to get me ready and adorned for her absence.

Three years have passed since then, and I am resigned to my Nephrolepis, their devoted guardian. I water the leaves, I taste the soil for minerals, I buy plant vitamins and plant meds. They are all I have – they and my legend. Daddy, Mama, you made me a mermaid. Is this what you meant for me? To love and sing sweetly that love’s demise? To be imprisoned within the barriers of poverty and class, as surely as if I lacked the limbs to go forward into the horizon? For every attempt towards my beloved to ache as though I trod on knives?

I am what I am, I give my love to my plants, I consult the dead about the possibility. Ebon, Gardenia, can you hear me? If you are spirits are you connoisseurs of the intangible? What has this heartache done to my soul?

I am, of course, retired, two years before my sixty-fifth birthday, but I was becoming incapable and incoherent, too much the stereotype some businessmen think poor black people are. When they recognized their myth in me, I knew it was time to leave.

What I am is someone who never existed until blown together by love, someone who previously was a mere figment, like a jinn, and dependent upon love like woven threads to remain whole. Without it, I was going back to being a breeze, a light, a sense, a presence, a haunting, a wonder, a waiting.

And now that I have fallen victim to the connotations of the secret of my name, I wonder if the misunderstandings of its popular assumption can save me. I am nymph to the Nephrolepis. If we could go back, if my name were different, would my life be? If I had not named my daughter for a jewel the color of two worlds would she have been able to leave one for a second? Something tells me the names of things are arbitrary – how would a different title have protected me from suffering? Would it have healed Ebon’s worn-out heart? But names seem awfully portentous in the Bible.

It is arguments like this that I spend hours on, forgetting to eat or change clothes. I am waiting for something to succumb in me as it did in Ebon and Gardenia. That is all. I wonder if a mass in my breast would return Sapphire to me. Perhaps a stroke or a broken hip.

I wonder what people think of me sitting up on this porch floor among my plants like a gecko or bee. I think of what the neighborhood children say, at what point my eccentricities will convert into rumors of witchhood. I guess at what their parents conclude – do I look old enough to be addled by Alzheimer’s? But my peers, surely they must know why I am on the decline; they have seen their children dispatched into the universities and stately homes, never mind prisons and crack houses, never to return.

And they, too, are in danger of disappearance. All our lives we have been on the proximity of desperation, who knew we would ever hover on the brink of style? Better off folks come now, in pairs and families, like pilgrims, watchful and wary. They claim this is better for schools, for business, perhaps for those of us who can hold on. The family across the street from me is black, which makes it less of an affront, but they are gentile like no one around here is. I hear the woman is a teacher, I don’t know what the man is, and they got a six-year-old girl. I see the woman staring at me among my Nephrolepis, a cautionary tale. Something in my frayed garb and worn house paint makes it impossible for her to extinguish the disapproval in her eyes, even when her mouth smiles beneath them. I stare back at her, too weary to be ashamed, until my gaze invades her irises, assualts her body. Whatever I am to her, decrepit, destitute, I can intimidate her, though that is not my goal; I just wish to make my regard equal to hers.

I know what she fears: not me, but how I became this, and what her daughter will be. Just like I know what she wishes, for me and mine to die or be driven out so that we are no longer a menace. She will raise her little girl but that doesn’t mean my spectre, the sight of me on this ancient porch won’t have an influence as well.

The woman across the street and I meet all the time, we smile and murmur but never speak. Under the pseudo-lunar light of grocery store aisles, above the broken sidewalk, across the street waiting for the mailman, we stare and suppose, create allegories of each others lives, silence being fertile for creativity. We think we know everything about each other. I am here because of a predictable plethora of social, historical, financial, and political reasons that college has taught her to analyze; she is here because of an interplay of willed and destined realities that proximity to power as a service worker has taught me to recognize. We have decided that it is not necessary to speak to be intimate, but locked in communal space diametrically across the avenue, we have bewitched each other. I am old, poor, and (she hopes) this neighborhood’s past, though I look to remain its majority for awhile. She is young, educated, and part of urban destiny – its promise.

Her gaze unravels me, it seconds all of Sapphire’s suspicions, I know it will send me to Ebon and Gardenia. I feel myself dismantling under her disparagement. Ebon, all your alchemy is wearing off. There are entire hours missing from my life – I find myself drifting into a window’s view in yellow light and being surprised to return to consciousness under sable sky. Not only can I not remember the light changing but also the dreams my mind shifted through in reverie. Geophagy and narcolepsy, I eat anything, a smooth pebble, saccharine grass or dirt, I sleep anywhere, at bath perilously, or it would be if I weren’t a mermaid; alas, I always wake on earth.

I stumble like a buccaneer drunk on stolen love to my porch, from the Hell of my first name I struggle to enter the myth of the second. This takes all my energy and I lie down in the pearlescent light that creaks between the crimps of Nephrolepis leaves. I wonder if I’ll have company. The dark Ebon, the lovely Gardenia. Would they lie next to me like kids at summer solstice lacking all faith that blissful heat will end or that they will ever age, lie beside me and claim me for the next world?

I awaken, not like when light sneaks beyond your dream-blinded eyes and the symbols of your reveries mix with the truths of the morning, not under the gaze of the sun but that of a child. I awaken and she is watching me silently, a comb in one hand, a brush in the other. I wonder what I must look like. To my former employers I was a faceless drudge; to my neighbors, a sister worn ragged; to my new neighbors, perhaps a ne’er-do-well; to Sapphire, a downfall, but to her – she looks at me so serenely I cannot gauge. It is the little girl from across the street, it is morning, and my habitually disheveled form is further distressed by sleep.

“Can I play in your hair?” she asks softly. I am disoriented. I guess I expected a rebuke.

“Can I, please?” she adds, thinking my quiet is a way of scolding her.

I nod, sitting up now and solemn. She comes behind me and grabs my shoulder firmly and tenderly and begins pulling at the tangles straight from the root. “What’s your name?” she asks me.

Nephrolepis. If I lied would it make any difference to the morning, to her, to fate?

“Nephrolepis,” I tell her.

“What’s a Nephrolepis?” she asks me.

“It depends,” I say, my scalp alternately burned by the fine teeth of the comb and soothed by her baby-soft hands. “Grows like a plant, weeps like a woman. Sometimes it wilts; sometimes it’s green and sun-warmed. Sometimes it’s something terribly lonely, incomprehensible even to the community, alone and singing heartbrokenly.”

“Which one are you?” she asks me.

I cannot bear this child. I cannot bear her gentle, assaulting, earnest questions. I cannot bear what she makes me say and think.

“I don’t know,” I shrug, inadvertently loosening the comb from her grip. “How come you came to do my hair?”

“ ’Cause I asked my mama why it was always like that, and she said you didn’t have a mama to comb it.”

“No,” I agree, relieved, given all that the woman could have said. “I’m old. You hungry?” I add.

“Yes.”

In the kitchen I realize yet again that I am not really stocked. “I got ice cream,” I say. She glows.

“We can have ice cream in the morning?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Don’t tell your mother.” She smiles as I pull down two ceramic bowls. Sugar at dawn, such witch-like seduction. Alluringly wild silver hair and the promise of forbidden pleasure, a young child and a house worn rainbow by its years, it is almost allegorical.

“Do your mama know where you are?” If I were younger and not addled, this would be the first thing I’d have asked.

She looks at me from under her hooked eyelashes. “I told her I was gonna play on the street.”

I look to the different hoops of kids playing jumping and clapping games along the street under the communal eye of the neighborhood adults. “I better tell her you with me. But finish your ice cream first.”

When I take her back to her mother, whom I learn is called Hera, she looks at me both gratefully and disapprovingly, reminding me I still haven’t changed from my never ironed house dress that does double- duty as nightie.

“I thought she was gonna be out on the street,” she says as means of apology. “I hope she didn’t bother you.”

Surprised me, woke me, I think. But she didn’t bother me. “I like her company,” I say.

“I didn’t finish her hair yet,” says the child. I’m scared to ask her name – is it superstition if life experience validates your fear?

Hera looks at me. “It needs doing,” I point out.

“Alright,” her mama says. “But do it over here.”

It is a testament both to my irresponsibility and her discipline that spring comfort has changed to summer punishment before the knots in my silver locks are gone. And while I attribute qualities, I might as well add Hera, who, at her husband’s prompting has allowed acceptance to overshadow her (admittedly well-founded) suspicions about me. I, too, am better, now that I have a child watching. My house is clean, my pantry full, my body groomed.

I am surprised by the pictures she draws me. I weep. I love her, and I’m not sure I want to. I cannot navigate my emotions towards her, nor comprehend fully how she integrates with my past experiences of love, yet she is always present, in my hair, in my kitchen, on my floor coloring and singing. Her name, dare I utter it, is Samularia: “sweet one forever.” It has a fatalistic beauty, and I hope it doesn’t prove to be ironic or tragic. Love post-apocalypse, love after Ebon’s helpless Heavenly ascent and Sapphire’s absconding is unpredictable. I approach love with sorrowful memories. Samularia, recently born, has no such wariness. She loves me as impulsively as I am reticent, and still we manage.

They ask me if I have grandchildren at the library, because I get so many picture books. I like to read to Sammy. She’s astonished by every plot line. She doesn’t know of course the dragon is mortal, the villain necessarily fallible. I don’t want to taint our love with lore. I steer clear of merfolk tales; it’s a terrifying thing for me to utter Happily Ever After. Once upon a time is potent and irascible enough.

*

“We read a fairy tale at school today.”

“Yes, little one. Which one?”

“The Little Mermaid.”

“I see.”

“Have you read The Little Mermaid?

“Yes.”

“Nephrolepis, do you think it has a happy ending or a sad ending?”

“I don’t know, baby.”

“Maybe it doesn’t have an ending.”

“Maybe, Samularia.”

“What do you think it was like when the mermaid became foam on the waves?”

This I do know. This aqueous state I have lived. "When the mermaid became foam, she was neither conscious nor unconscious, she observed herself as if in a dream. She couldn’t tell if she were being born to a new state or if she was withering, if foam was cleansing or toxic, but then, even to presume she was in metamorphosis was unfounded; she thought perhaps she was in stasis. I don’t think a thousand years passed for her as slowly as they would have for the prince had his life lasted so long. Nor do I think they began and ended in the Heavenly twinkling of an eye. Perhaps they were like those distended seconds when we watch an autumn leaf float down from a tree, seemingly slower yet more ephemeral because it knows we are aware.

“When the mermaid became foam, I imagine it hurt—not like before, not like walking on sabers, but like stepping into a bathtub where the water’s too hot; more like swimming through the sun than floating through water. But I imagine the way she came about her soul after those thousand years was by a pair of genderless, ageless hands sweeping her together over the blue—gently, tirelessly, rhythmically until she was whole.”

She thinks on that for awhile, solemn and lovely. Then she grins at me satisfied. “Nephrolepis, can I comb your hair?”

© 2007 prickofthespindle.com