The Driftwood Mermaid - part 1

    Tommy’s mother hated the sunrise... the soul-killing, eye-stabbing light of day. She turned over in her too-small bed and pulled the curtains shut. She had no patience with the light... she was an alcoholic.
    Every day she rose as late as possible and bought a quart of Gin, as soon as possible. Then she would drag her fat old middle-aged arse down to the beach, and would hide the bottle in her little beach-basket.
    Tommy went to school in the morning. He knew what his Mom did all day, and he made his own breakfast. Tommy is ten years old. He is in the fifth grade. Some of the other kids know about Tommy’s mom, and sometimes they kid him in cruel fashion. He doesn’t feel too hurt when this happens; sometimes when a pain is that big, you may feel nothing at all.
    Tommy’s mom dug her lounge-chair into the hot New Jersey sand, and settled her unlovely body into it. She has a cup that fits in her purse, and from this she always drank, and always Gin, or nearly always. By late afternoon she was soused beyond reason, her hair mussed by the ocean wind, eyes fearful to behold. In this state she would spend the hot afternoons, neither reading, nor ever nearing the cool water, nor heeding nor mindful of passing hot-dog humanity. Her world was aloof from the one surrounding her. In God-knows what sordid space, she dwelt within.
    Tommy wished to be an Engineer. Not a train driver, silly... a Mechanical Engineer. He studied hard, and anxiously waited for High School, when he could start applying at the fine American colleges. MIT... Rensselaer... Cal Tech... names he had read about in the library. He would need a scholarship, because there would be no money. His mother would obviously not be of much help. His father... not much to say there. Gone, gone, forever gone, a long time ago. Called his mom a dirty whore and walked out on both of them. No reason to... she never did anything. He was a sorry asshole, and Tommy wished he could miss him, but he didn’t have it in him.
    Tommy saw a strange thing last night. He had walked down to the beach after making a sandwich for himself (mom was sleeping it off). He walked along in the sand, kicking anything that was in his path. He had felt angry all day. A young punk had mocked him again, saying something about his mom, and Tommy didn’t slug him because he was a gigantic sixth grader. So he felt ashamed, sad, and mad all at once.
    Tommy liked his mom. She wasn’t really like a mother; it’s a wonder they didn’t starve. The house was paid off, or they’d have been on the streets by now. She wasn’t very friendly anymore, either, yet she had been different once. Before his father left, that is. She used to be very funny, and even now sometimes she’d smile at him, in a way that said: “I love you, under all this crap.” Tommy knew she did, he felt it. But she was a lousy mom, no denying that!
    He looked up at the bright clear stars, and watched the waves crash in in curving lines along the beach. Tommy liked to walk right at the edge of the incoming surf, to watch the complex curving patterns. Water and sand. And he liked to look at the little lights he saw sometimes in the breaking wave faces. He called them “surf lights”. They were like little fairies in the water, maybe some trick of the moonlight. A glittering sparkle, little points of light that flickered briefly in the wave, then vanished as the wave crested. They weren’t always there, but they were there tonight.
    Tommy thought of them as little pixies, friends for him to play with. He was a lonely kid, and he knew it. He only spoke to his mom in the morning, briefly if at all. And her tone was rarely pleasant these days. He wasn’t very good at making friends at school, either. He was afraid to let anyone in close, because of his family situation, or lack thereof. And so, Tommy studied hard, and lived in fantasy as much as possible. And when he thought he saw something move in the water, he wasn’t really surprised at first. He saw lots of things in the “fantasy mode”, and tonight he was in it. But when it grew larger, and reappeared twice more, Tommy did a double-take and realized it was something real.
    It was a mermaid. She came almost to the water’s edge, and supporting herself somehow in the shallows, she stared at Tommy. The crashing waves kept him from getting closer than about twenty feet, but he edged right up to the surf, not feeling afraid. She had long black hair, and a lovely, child-like, exotic looking face. He felt her eyes were green, although he couldn’t see that. She moved very gracefully, even half out-of-water, and Tommy stood quietly, seeing the most wondrous thing in all his young life. Then, within his mind, he heard her speak, although her mouth did not open, and her lips did not move. Yet he could see her smiling as she spoke:

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Penrose (W.S.Rose)