Mermaids

The sun was dunking its head back down, leaving splashes of orange in the sky. I was six, and blowing bubbles in the water. I would dip my own head in, open my eyes briefly to watch the sunlight stream into the chlorine and reflect colors of all kind. Slowly, I breathed out, watching the air spheres bounce to the surface. Then, a firm hand grabbed my arm, pulling me back to air, so I can stand on my own two feet. My mother's wild curls hid her worried eyes; all I could see was the frown.
"It seemed like you were drowning there, Mindy," she told me.
I shook my head slowly, staring at the sky again. "Find your earring, Mommy?" I asked, folding my arms behind my back.
"No," she said with a sigh. Her gold earrings that my father gave her on their tenth anniversary, which was last week. She forgot she was wearing them when she went swimming. She was looking for them for a half an hour.
"Check our chairs," Nattie said. His real name was Nathaniel, but that took ages for me to pronounce, so I always just said 'Nattie'. His family was taking a trip to the pool with our family, and he was my best friend. His hair was slicked back from the water, and he played with the string on his Superman swim trunks, not making eye contact with my mother. She shrugged, and trudged back to the plastic chairs where our stuff was thrown about casually. The concrete was rough on my wrinkling feet, and I brushed it against my palm, feeling the hard surface.
"Wanna play mermaids?" Nattie asked me. His opal eyes searched mine, waiting for my concentration to break from the bottom of the pool. My mouth broke into a toothy grin, and I straightened myself taller.
"Sure." I pumped my tiny arms out to deeper waters, where the water lapped up to my blue lips. Nattie was half an inch taller than her, and never fails to mention it. "So, what now?" I asked, watching my hair spiral out when it floated in the water, which reminded me of seaweed.
"Stick your feet and legs together, and you can't move it, see?" he demonstrated this, pursing his lips and planting them firmly stuck to each other, chin held high. I followed his movements, giggling at the silliness of the practice. "Then you just swim."
"Mermaids just swim around? That's boring," I said, with my pudgy hands on my hips in defiance.
"They collect treasure underwater, and lure in pirates with their song," Nattie said. "So lets find treasure and sing."
We decided on joining in on the search to find my mother's lost earring, while flapping our now uni-legs, dunking our heads underwater, eyes wide open, hoping the colors that shone through the water would illuminate the gold flash somehow. After a while, we gave up hope, sitting on the concrete edge of the pool, the soak leaving out bodies. We sang public domain songs, which Nattie claimed "the mermaids owned first" and pretended to comb our hair with our fingers. Nattie's short hair made it hard to comb, but I insisted that the rest of his long beautiful locks were simply invisible. After a while of our nonsense, Nattie's dad wandered over, asking what we were doing.
"We're being mermaids," Nattie said proudly, breaking from song.
His father paused, lifting his sunglasses a centimeter, and I could see his cold grey eyes that calculated us. "Men can't be mermaids."  He then walked away.
I never had liked that man anyways, he seemed to hate children. "He's a liar," I informed Nattie, who's shoulders had slumped into depression.
"He always says that, though. That I can't take a ballet class because men can't, that I can't read fairy tale books because men don't, and I wanna, though," he said, blinking back tears. "I wanna."
I was about to tell him something about what rubbish that whole bit was, when I saw a twinkle of gold in the water, right where I was blowing bubbles earlier. "There's her earring!" I shrieked, pointing. Nattie instantly dived in, keeping his legs locked, and retrieved the earring with swift motion. He surfaced with a smile plastered on his face, holding his treasure in triumph.
"I'm the best mermaid there ever was!" he shouted, much to his father's dismay. I toddled to the edge, giving him a high five.
"And no one else can say differently."

Author's Note

This was really nothing, me just experimenting with descriptions. I'll have more stories that aren't just challenges to me later.

Reviews

[roarke]

It was a good little story. Kind of like a mild J.D. Salinger short story. One thing, I strangely first got the impression they were at a beach not a pool... my fault, but was it a private or public pool? What were the sights and sounds around them as contrast to the very intimate portrait you've painted between the two children? Could there be a second contrast in the discourse between Mindy's mother and Nattie's father? Just ideas, don't discard this story, it's a great beginning.