January's Mermaid

A Story by jake

A boy finds a mermaid in a frozen pond.

In the middle of winter when everything was white and blue, ice and snow, except for a few thin, grey ghosts of smoke that rose from the chimneys of small houses, there was a forest. It was the type of forest where children occasionally, but not often, went missing. In the forest there was a pond. It was frozen just like everything else. The pond was rarely visited by anyone when it wasn’t frozen and this winter it belonged solely to a mermaid and a little boy. The pond wasn’t far from the boy’s home so he visited the pond and the mermaid frequently. He would take his skates there after school and dance in circles around the frozen creature. He liked to think that when the pond melted that he could swim with her and she could teach him how to breathe under water. Though he knew that she wasn’t there last summer or last winter and she will probably be gone by the time the world comes back to life. She will swim deep and far and go to another pond, in another forest, and make new friends to dance the cold winters away with.
    He could tell that she was magic. It was very obvious to him, and it always bothered him when people told him magic didn’t exist. There was magic in her grey eyes that were only partly opened. There was magic in how her hair flowed in every direction, but never moved, and it was magic how her skin changed color with the time of day and the mood of the pond. There was magic there. A person didn’t have to look hard for it.
     He thinks she’s lost. He thinks that maybe at one point in time she swam in the oceans, but he doesn’t know. Maybe she’s not lost and just decided that lakes, ponds, and watering holes were more inviting than the empty, black depth of the sea. In the ocean there are only other fish to keep her company, but here there are fish, birds, deer, and all sorts of other creatures to talk to and share stories with. The kind of stories only animals that live in the woods still remember, and in return she tells them about the lost, vacant worlds below the mirrored surface of the sea.
     The boy only skates in circles around the mermaid. Once he was careless and skated over the place where she floated in the blue glass, his skates scarred the window where he looked down on her. He thought that her face would be obscured to him forever, but a freezing rain fell and polished the silvery pond. Now he only dances in circles around her.
     As the months drew on, the ice grew thinner and the boy couldn’t visit the mermaid, at least not yet. That would have to wait till the summer months, but as soon as the pond started melting and formed a black watery eye in the middle the mermaid was gone. The boy never saw the mermaid again, but for that one winter, the pond was theirs.
     Late in the following summer the police found the body of a missing girl in the pond, but it was not the mermaid. The boy was swimming at the pond the day they found the body and he saw as they took it out of the water, but he knew it wasn’t the mermaid. The body was colorless and there was no magic.