Lovesick Little Page 2

  The king sighed; there were many things about human kind that were backward and made no sense to him. “They have discovered inexpensive ways of manufacturing it, and often it is more profitable to make more of it than it is to reuse what’s already made. What the humans fail to understand is that every piece of plastic that has ever been made is still on the planet, and has nowhere else to go.”

  After hearing such a disappointing report, no one felt much like reveling anymore and the birthday girl allowed her sisters to carry her to her bed to spend the rest of her birthday in solitude. Once the hall had cleared out, the youngest swam over to her father and took a seat at the foot of his throne. He wore a troubled look while he pondered the state of the planet, but brightened up at the sight of his most darling child. “I wish I could give you a world free from wastefulness” he said tenderly.

  The following year, it was the second sister’s turn to venture up. To adorn her with embellishments fit for royalty, her grandmother clamped eight exceptionally shiny, perfect oysters onto her beautiful emerald tail.

  She broke the surface just as the sun was preparing to set, while the sky looked like a pastel smattering of pink and violet. She swam into shallower waters, found a big, algae-covered rock and, once situated comfortably, untied an old antique letter-opener from the strands of her hair. Mermaids, since they never have any pockets and so seldom carry handbags or rucksacks, love to tie their favorite tools, instruments and treasures into their long tresses so they’re always handy. She swore she could hear the big sun sizzle as it dipped behind the horizon, and took the letter opener to her tail to pop an oyster off. It hurt and it took a few of her shiny green scales with it, but still she jimmied it open at its hinge and scraped it from its shell.

  The princess puckered her lips and slurped back the wonderfully gelatinous mollusc inside. This oyster tasted like a juicy, ripe strawberry to her, and even though these particular ones were the finest, roundest oysters in the world, she popped the next one right off and shucked it, same as the last. Casually flicking off the perfect pearl contained in each, she ate all the oysters that were clamped to her tail while white swans bowed and danced off in the distance as if putting on a sunset ballet.

  Suddenly, the distressed quacking of a flock of ducks interrupted the evening’s peace. When she swam over to them, she noticed that all their wings were coated in an oily, black sheen and they were struggling to free themselves from it. All around, there were dead fish floating upside-down inside nasty swirls of black goo, surrounded by tangled bits of dead plant life. She tried to gently brush their wings clean with her hands, but all she could seem to do was spread the greasy stuff around and it made her hands as black as them. The giant blob was thick, dark as caviar and seemed to be slowly torturing everything in its path.

  She followed the trails of surface residue for miles, watching it become thicker the deeper she ventured. Soon, she reached the source of the whole mess: it was a well in the ocean floor that pumped out black ooze like a bullet hole oozes blood from a racing heart. The mouth it poured from was large and wide, and there was nothing she could do to stop it from hemorrhaging. As she held herself back, watching it gush out and fill the blue space, she noticed a tiny yellow seahorse feebly swimming from it. She cupped her hands around him and saw the splotches that dappled his gills and snout. Not wanting to stay while the mean clouds billowed, she clutched the seahorse and high-tailed it back home.

  When she returned, everyone was still up singing and dancing but as soon as they saw her frightened face and the black smudges across her, they knew something was amiss.

  “Father, there is a leak, and it gushes blackness from the floor beneath us!” she said. “The darkness reaches and spreads, swallowing everything. You must stop it before it spreads across all the oceans!” Failing to display the kind of shock and fury his daughter was expecting, the mighty king just sighed, hung his head low and said, “You’ve paid a visit to an oil well.”

  She said she wasn’t sure, but went on to describe the hole she found that pumped out the thick black veil. Then she opened her hands and showed him the tiny oil-covered seahorse that hadn’t made it back alive. “Have you known about all of this, Father?” she asked, “Just like you knew about the gyres?”

  The king had known about the oil spills of the world, and about the humans who would stop at nothing to drill for more. As king, he had chosen to carry such worrisome burdens alone. “The humans have made their modern society very dependent on this oil, and they have taken to drilling for it in every sea, even though drilling seabed has proven disastrous time and again. They suck it from the ground like vampires, then burn through millions of gallons a day. The price they can trade it at knows no conceivable limit, and yet they never seem to stop needing more.”

  The five elder sisters took the little seahorse out to the gardens to bury him inside a little clamshell. The youngest stayed inside with her father while he sat deep in thought on his throne. “I wish I could give you a world free from carelessness,” he said.

  The next year it was the third sister’s turn. In order to make her tail luxuriously shiny, her grandmother drew a bath filled with the finest sea slugs and snails so that their hungry suction might polish her red scales to spotless perfection. This sister was the most daring of all, and she decided her day would be most fun if she spent it frolicking at the surface with a family of bottlenose dolphins, the baby of which was her most cherished pet at court. While they all played, chased and dove around under the warm coastal sun, they were sublimely unaware of the peril about to befall them.

  While the elders of the family fed along the shallow bay, the mermaid and the pup allowed the current to carry them out a bit. She lay on her back while her friend floated alongside her, drifting along without a care in the world.

  Suddenly, a loud tapping noise filled the waters, assailing their ears with its harsh clamor and destroying the peace they’d been enjoying. It was so loud that she could barely think, and she wondered what on earth could be so audibly offensive. The dolphins instinctively darted away from the noise and soon found themselves corralled into a cove while a row of boats dragging long nets rapidly closed in on them.

  The mermaid ducked under and bravely swam toward the boats to investigate. She soon discovered that the noise echoing through the bay was the result of men clanging hammers and metal sticks off long lead pipes that dipped several feet into the water off the sides of their vessels. They sounded like a thousand deafening gongs being banged upon all at once, reverberating and multiplying to discombobulate the sonar of the dolphins.

  By the time the noise ended, the cove had been sealed off with a wall of heavy netting spanning from the surface to the sandy bottom. The dolphin family was trapped in there, along with a bunch of others who had been dragged in by the nets. Once all the nets were secured, the boats pulled out of the bay and left.

  The hour of chaos and panic was followed by several hours of quiet evening. Once the sky was darker and it appeared safe to do so, the mermaid and the pup swam in to make sure everyone was okay.

  All of the family members were accounted for and no one seemed to have been hurt too badly, so eventually they all calmed down and began to search the perimeter of the netting for a hole or the possibility of a way out. By nightfall, they had found one frayed spot in the netting and began scouring for something sharp with which to widen the hole. The mermaid tried to grind a few sharp stones and a broken glass bottle against the net but it was very strong and nothing worked. She wanted to swim back to the palace to get her father but was afraid of what could happen if she left her friends trapped there so she stayed with them, keeping everyone calm throughout the night.

  They awoke in the morning to the sound of a motorboat loudly approaching the bay from down the coast. Soon, a whole fleet of small tin boats were pulling in, and swarms of humans began gathering along the beach. Within minutes, they were wading into the shallow waters to handle the dolphins, sizing up an
d scrutinizing fins, tails, and beaks, and laying claim to the ones that best fit a certain criteria.

  One burly-looking woman in a black wetsuit called some men over and they forcefully loaded a little gray one onto a large gurney while the rest of her family cried and wailed. But for all their weeping, no sympathy was inspired, and the humans simply ratcheted the straps around her smooth, rubbery body and lifted her onto the back of a truck. When she struggled to break free, they bound her even tighter until she was unable to move at all. The same happened all around, and everywhere there were confused dolphins who could find no escape from the clutches of the upright monsters who continued to pick from them until less than half remained in the water.

  After the last desirable dolphin had been bid upon and loaded up, the only people waiting around were the ones inside the boats. The mermaid tried to get the pup to swim to safety with her, but the baby would not abandon her family. When the people on the shore were out of sight and the big trucks had cleared out, an unimaginable massacre began.

  A man steadying himself inside a little boat delivered the first blow with a long, sharp spear. He drove straight into the smooth, grey flesh of the dolphin nearest him like he had done it a hundred times before. The dolphin cried out in agony and terror as he ripped the wound open wider with his violent withdrawal, then brought his spear down again, this time harder, faster. The men stabbed those dolphins repeatedly until their blood spilled from a multitude of wounds. They continued their killing until the crystalblue cove was awash in crimson blood.

  As the last of their friends bled to their deaths in agonizing convulsions, the fishermen pulled them up onto their boats using large metal gaffs that they hooked into their sides. Once all the bodies had been collected, the only cries that could still be heard across the cove were from the pup that had refused to flee while the rest of her family was being butchered and stolen.

  She was easy prey, in fact the very definition. Most of the boats were already filled, stacked high with dolphin bodies but there was one who still had room, and he wasted no time moving in for the kill. For a brief moment he admired her smooth, unblemished skin and contemplated how much more she might be worth alive. After just a moment’s consideration, he decided it would be easier to just kill her. The mermaid swam beneath her friend and begged her to dive low and out of sight but she wouldn’t budge an inch, too distraught to even think of escaping. With no other options, the mermaid bravely swam up, grabbed the side of tin boat and rocked it hard enough that the little man lost his balance and fell into the water.

  While he was under and struggling to go up for air, she grabbed him by the shirt and dragged him lower, down to the floor. His eyes widened fearfully at the sight of her, but she felt wild with rage and didn’t let him go. She grabbed the spear out of his hands and, in hard retribution for all her friends killed that day, she aimed it at his heart and drove it straight through him.

  Blood spilled from the man just the way it did from all the dolphins killed that day but she felt no pity for him. Spellbound by the hurt and anger she felt and tasting all the metallic blood between her teeth, she jiggled the spear and watched him bleed out into the water. After watching the last bit of life escape him, she grabbed her friend, so weak with grief, and swam her back down to the palace.

  When they arrived, everyone knew right away that something terrible had happened. The princess’s hair and skin were stained red with blood.

  “You’ve been to the coves of slaughter,” said the king in a sad, knowing voice. He was aware of the terrible things that go on in that corner of the sea but, just as with everything else, was morally unable to interfere. It pained him to sit idly while human destruction extended deeper into his world but his hands were tied; to interfere would be to interact, and to do that would be to breach the cardinal rule of his kingdom, which is to let nature find its own order and balance. “Were they all taken?” he asked, his eyes low. In the sea, there is nothing sadder than to hear of dolphins being killed, for they are the most well-intentioned and pure creatures of all. The devastated princess nodded. Yes, they had all been taken.

  The king explained to his daughters the great profit-driven enterprise of stealing dolphins and submitting them to lives of captivity. Then he explained the fishery industry and how people willing to pay the high price for whale meat are often sold dolphin meat that’s been knowingly mislabeled. Sadly, the great king knew all too well that if humans could find a way to profit from something, they’d bleed it ‘til it’s dry, even if they had to kill over and over.

  “I wish I could give you a world free from violence,” he said mournfully.

  For the fourth sister’s birthday, the old queen covered her body in a wrap of seaweed and minerals to nourish her beautiful skin so that it would glow milky and bright on the day of her first surfacing. Rubies adorned the scales of her lavender-colored tail, and a tiara of sapphires glittered against the platinum and gold of her hair. This princess was very ladylike and not quite as adventurous as her sisters, and instead of getting in close to see the people in the towns and cities, she wished to stay far out at sea to observe the upper world from a safer distance.

  She could see for miles in every direction, and the clouds in the bright blue sky passed over her head the way giant whales did when she’d lie on her back and stare up from the ocean floor. She closed her eyes and basked, just leisurely wading, enjoying the new and thrilling experience of sun and air. She was so relaxed that she didn’t even notice a boat slowly passing behind her.

  After a while of sunning, her face began to feel hot so she ducked under to cool her skin, opening her eyes to see a shark about twenty feet below her struggling against a fishing line that was tearing up his gills. She swam over and tried to pull the hook free but its sharp barb was stuck deep and every time she wiggled it, he bled profusely from the cut. She looked around her and saw several other sharks and fish caught on lines, fighting and swimming hard against them or submitting and floating lifelessly behind them. Just as she began to wonder how so many sharks and fish got fooled and caught by the same line, she noticed something small and shiny as it came flying at her face and just as she went to turn away, it stabbed into the corner of her eye and hooked itself into her socket, yanking her forward and lodging its sharp barb into her skull from the inside.

  It was the most painful thing she’d ever experienced and she screamed in agony as her eyes clouded over in red. As it pulled her quickly through the water by her head, she realized there was only one way to free herself, and that would be to out-swim the drag of the line and use the slack to unhook it with her fingers.

  She was fearful of losing an eye, but grateful for the benefits of having fingers and thumbs once she was able to carefully remove the hook from her head without noticeably severing any nerves. In disbelief of what had just happened to her, she covered the eye with her palm and began to back away from the long lines. When she looked up at the horrible boat to curse it, a huge shark carcass plummeted straight down at her from above and as it collided with her, its rows of sharp teeth sliced into the tender flesh of her shoulder.

  After it hit her, the shark tumbled away into the depths and she understood that it hadn’t meant to hit her. As it drifted downward, she could see that it had no fins, and in fact was bleeding from where its fins once were. Another lifeless shark body came plummeting down from above and she saw that its fins had been cut from its body, too. With her eye gushing blood and her shoulder raked and raw, she decided it was far too dangerous at the surface and swam away as fast as she could until she was back at the palace and safe again at last.

  When the princess returned, everyone was still waiting up for her and when she entered the grand hall, her sisters gasped in horror and swam to her aid, for the poor girl looked a fright. “What’s happened to you, child?” asked her grandmother, getting up from her throne to inspect the fresh and painful-looking wounds.

  “I surfaced in the open water. There were so many sh
arks . . . a hook meant for one of them tore into my eye and dragged me behind a boat. The humans are monsters; they kill them for their fins and toss the rest overboard. I wish to never visit the surface again.”

  The king nodded, in agreement that it was far safer at the bottom where the humans couldn’t find them. “You’ve witnessed shark finning in the 21st century,” he said.

  “Father, it was barbaric,” she whimpered. “What uses have they for so many fins?”

  The king explained to his daughters that there were people in the world who believed consuming shark fins guaranteed lifelong health, based on the notion that sharks aren’t usually known to get sick. He described the massive industry that sprung up from the concept, and how sharks are now systematically murdered around the world, simply for the price of their fins.

  “I wish I could give you a world free from greed,” he said to all his sad girls, while his youngest healed the cuts and scrapes of the year’s sorrowful birthday girl.

  The fifth sister celebrated her birthday in the winter, so in preparation for her first journey to the top, her grandmother ordered for thousands of white crystals from deep-sea caves to be mined and ground into a sparkling powder. Then, as is customary for any princesses born while the snows cover the land above, her grandmother had her golden yellow tail, her fair skin, and her long hair covered with it so she’d shine like a diamond on her special day and camouflage easily in the snowy, icy waters.

  When she broke the surface, she found the ground above to be topped in a blanket of white, exactly like her grandmother had promised. All the boats in the harbor were lifted out until spring and in the bay, people glided around the frozen water swiftly in shoes that had metal blades stuck to the bottom of them. From the cold water she watched, exhilarated. She decided to venture north up the coast to see just how cold and icy it could get.

  When she finally popped her head out of the water, she found herself surrounded by broken sheets of ice that covered the surface like jagged white tiles. Excited to climb out of the water for the very first time, she spotted a smaller iceberg and scaled its side, pulling her slippery tail up so she could sit. Snowflakes gently fell from the sky and she glistened with them under the diffused sunlight of the winter afternoon. She felt she had found a cold paradise.