Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep (2015) by Paula Guran

Author:Paula Guran [Guran, Paula]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: anthology, fantasy, novelette, Short Stories, short story
ISBN: 9781607014607
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2015-04-17T21:00:00+00:00

The Mermaid of the Concrete Ocean

Caitlín R. Kiernan

The building’s elevator is busted, and so I’ve had to drag my ass up twelve flights of stairs. Her apartment is smaller and more tawdry than I expected, but I’m not entirely sure I could say what I thought I’d find at the top of all those stairs. I don’t know this part of Manhattan very well, this ugly wedge of buildings one block over from South Street and Roosevelt Drive and the ferry terminal. She keeps reminding me that if I look out the window (there’s only one), I can see the Brooklyn Bridge. It seems a great source of pride, that she has a view of the bridge and the East River. The apartment is too hot, filled with soggy heat pouring off the radiators, and there are so many unpleasant odors competing for my attention that I’d be hard pressed to assign any one of them priority over the rest. Mildew. Dust. Stale cigarette smoke. Better I say the apartment smells shut away, and leave it at that. The place is crammed wall to wall with threadbare, dust-skimmed antiques, the tattered refuse of Victorian and Edwardian bygones. I have trouble imagining how she navigates the clutter in her wheelchair, which is something of an antique itself. I compliment the Tiffany lamps, all of which appear not to be reproductions, and are in considerably better shape than most of the other furnishings. She smiles, revealing dentures stained by nicotine and neglect. At least, I assume they’re dentures. She switches on one of the table lamps, its shade a circlet of stained-glass dragonflies, and tells me it was a Christmas gift from a playwright. He’s dead now, she says. She tells me his name, but it’s no one I’ve ever heard of, and I admit this to her. Her yellow-brown smile doesn’t waver.

“Nobody remembers him. He was very avant-garde,” she says. “No one understood what he was trying to say. But obscurity was precious to him. It pained him terribly, that so few ever understood that about his work.”

I nod, once or twice or three times, I don’t know, and it hardly matters. Her thin fingers glide across the lampshade, leaving furrows in the accumulated dust, and now I can see that the dragonflies have wings the color of amber, and their abdomens and thoraces are a deep cobalt blue. They all have eyes like poisonous crimson berries. She asks me to please have a seat and apologizes for not having offered one sooner. She motions to an armchair near the lamp, and also to a chaise lounge a few feet farther away. Both are upholstered with the same faded floral brocade. I choose the armchair and am hardly surprised to discover that all the springs are shot. I sink several inches into the chair, and my knees jut upwards, towards the water-stained plaster ceiling.

“Will you mind if I tape our conversation?” I ask, opening my briefcase, and she stares at me for a moment, as though she hasn’t quite understood the question.

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