Chapter Two

Melissa had a water sprite in her bathroom.

 

At least, that’s what she had deduced from an hours worth of trying to communicate with the woman in a strange mixture of English, her native language, the baby mimicking language and not a little bit of charades. A water sprite.

 

Upon arriving at the apartment, Melissa’s guest, who still had no name as far as she was concerned, had demanded water. When Melissa had given her a glass of tap water she’d dumped it on her head, at which point Melissa figured out that the woman wanted a bath. While drawing the bath, and trying not to notice that the woman was suddenly naked and walking around her apartment, the woman had started trying to explain. What was clear to Melissa, especially after she’d taken a good look at the sort of clothes the woman had been wearing, discards from the Salvation Army, was the woman currently splashing around in her bathtub was certainly homeless and possibly insane.

 

What was less clear was what to do with such a person.

 

Melissa wasn’t a particularly religious person, she’d always felt like an outsider in most places of worship, but the story of the Good Samaritan had always been something that resonated with her. Offering the woman a meal was probably in order, and a bed for at

least one night, clothes, too.

 

Her mother’s voice screeched into her brain that it had been stupid to allow the woman into her apartment in the first place, let alone allowing guilt to give the woman even more handouts. She shook her head and was now determined more than ever to help the woman. That was what her mother did to her.

 

There was a box full of old clothes from when Melissa was a little lighter, pre-Ben days when she went running in the mornings and did yoga, that she had always meant to get rid of but could never bring herself to give up. Today, though, seemed like the perfect day to get rid of jeans that were just never going to fit her again. The woman was a little shorter than herself and was so thin as to be waif-like.

 

Her build along with the blue-green hair and blue eyes, not to mention the slightly tipsy feeling she got every time she looked, really looked, at the woman, made the story of being a water sprite seem a little more plausible. If, of course, such things were possible. Melissa wished they were but romantic notions never got you anywhere in this life.

 

She pulled the box down and rooted through it. Finally, she found a pair of white khaki pants and a gauzy pink shirt that she thought the woman would look great in. She needed new shoes, too. The shoes she had been wearing were men’s dress shoes with a hole in the sole. She found a pair of white flip-flops and hoped that the woman had the same sized feet she had.

 

She was in the kitchen making tuna casserole, she hadn’t made tuna casserole in ages and the idea sprang at her when she found the can in the back of the cupboard, when the woman came in. Fully dressed now in better clothes, clean, and still dripping wet from the bath, she looked better, and more ethereal. She smiled at Melissa and indicated the casserole dish.

 

“I’m making tuna casserole,” Melissa said. The woman tilted her head to the side. “Tuna. Fish.” Melissa was getting tired of the charades but made a fish motion with her hands. The woman’s eyes lit up and she clapped her hands together.

 

“Tuh-nah.”

 

“Tuna.”

 

It was done a few minutes later and Melissa watched as the woman took her first bites of the fish. Her eyes lit up again as she tasted it and said some word in her strange language.

 

“Iichy?” Melissa said. The woman made a gesture as if to say close enough. It was strange, though, she’d only known the strange woman for a few hours and already their pidgin language was more understandable. Still, Melissa, who had taken a handful of psychology classes, wondered what precisely was the nature of the woman’s disorder.

As soon as the woman was done with her food she launched into it again. Whatever it was, it was very important. Her eyes were open wide and her cool hands, still cool though the bath had been warm and the apartment didn’t have the air conditioner on, were on Melissa’s arm. She was more calm than she had been earlier, the bath had been a calming influence, then, but whatever was wrong was very important. Melissa tried to follow the woman’s words but they made no sense.

 

“Something about,” she said, “a horn?”

 

The woman nodded vigorously. She placed her hands to her mouth and made a sound exactly like blowing through a conch shell. She seemed to think that Melissa understood now but Melissa only shook her head and frowned.

 

“I don’t own a horn,” she said.

 

The woman shook her head. She motioned to Melissa, then to herself, then off towards the gulf and then made the horn sound again.

 

“The horn isn’t here, it’s somewhere else?”

 

The woman nodded.

 

“Sahmwhere. Undahr wahta,” she said.

 

“Under the water? In the Gulf of Mexico?”

 

The woman didn’t know the Gulf of Mexico so Melissa grabbed her laptop and looked up Google images and pointed them to the woman. It was clear that the woman had never seen a computer before, or her psychosis was so far gone that she didn’t recognize it. She touched the images with such a longing that it was painful. It was like, exactly like, showing images of a person’s loved ones after some horrible catastrophe has wrenched them away, possibly forever. Then, of course, Melissa thought, this woman was a water sprite.

 

“Gulf ah Mezxico?” the woman said. She pointed at the images. Melissa nodded. She

looked at them again and said a word. “Home.”

Reviews

[OT]

what a strange woman! definitely a sprite of some sort if not a water one! your writing style is great you really bring us in and give information quite subtly without having to completely narrate it which is a great skill!!

you describe this mad woman wonderfully, almost like teaching a young child! makes me even more speculative about what the story is, I have a few suspicions, some sort of dodgy slave trade or something perhaps, hmm, thought provoking indeed!! A few misplaced commas, and few places where a comma is needed, but it reads so well, and is written brilliantly!