Read Elijah’s Mermaid for Free Online

something so thrilling had entered my mind, I called down to my brother excitedly, ‘Stop splashing, Elijah . . . what do you think? Perhaps water-babies don’t
really
exist, but we
could
try and catch a mermaid . . . that is if they don’t only live in the sea?’
    Elijah, whose feet were now becalmed, was half-smiling, half-frowning at such a suggestion until he replied with great certainty, ‘Last year, when Freddie visited, he said this stream runs into a river, and that river runs all the way to the sea. So, a mermaid
could
swim as far as here . . . if she wasn’t too big . . . if she wanted to.’
    ‘She might,’ I agreed through a moment of tentative creeping doubt, ‘
if
she swam too far . . . if she lost her way. Shall we take these fish to Papa? Shall we see what Papa says?’
    As it turned out I was right not to fret. Ellen Page never mentioned the state of my dress. And Papa, well, the gift of our fish inspired him to write a new fairy tale, though when that was published up in a book he had to make it longer, and the ending became much happier. But this is the story he told that day –
    There was once a lovely mermaid child who left her papa in his palace of shells in the depths of the darkest ocean. He had pleaded and begged for her to stay, for she was the most precious thing he possessed. But she had such a yearning in her heart to see the airy light of the sun and to feel its warmth upon her face. So, one day, when her father was sleeping fast, the mermaid swam to the top of the waves and played with dolphins and gossiped with gulls, and rode on the foamy backs of white horses – until they all dissolved away, being so very far from home and by then having come to the mouth of a river
.
    There, the mermaid glimpsed a dragonfly, a creature she’d never seen before, and she found herself longing to stroke its wings, which were coloured a vivid turquoise hue, like the blue of the sky and the green of sea, like an oily, lustrous, precious jewel – a jewel she might give to her papa
.
    Wherever that insect hovered next, the little mermaid followed it. She battled the river’s downstream flow, heading past ships and bustling towns, then into the quieter countryside where each day the banks grew narrower, where each day the water grew shallower, until there wasbarely enough of it left to cover the mermaid’s silver tail, which by then had begun to scorch away, for the hot summer sun was beating down, the stream dried to a ditch of gluey mud. She wept salty tears ’til she had no more, and those tears left a crusting trail on her cheeks, as if slugs and snails had been crawling there. Her breaths grew faint and her heart grew slow, and with its last beat she gazed up at the sky, where she saw the dragonfly again, and this time it hovered so very close that the tips of her fingers could touch its wings around which the air seemed to sparkle and whirl, a strange iridescence of glistening light, as blue as the sky and as green as the sea – in which she would never swim again
.
    Papa’s stories could be somewhat cautionary. The moral of that one was not hard to see. Better to be safe and stay at home, however beguiling the world might seem. But all through that summer
our
world was the stream, to which we returned most every day to dip our toes in liquid green and to stare at the ribbons of wavering light that shone on the water’s surface – where there might be the glint of a mermaid’s tail. And that hollow in the rocky bank, where Elijah had hidden himself from me, we imagined a sort of grotto where a mermaid might happily make her home, well away from other prying eyes, or the hard cruel glare of the midday sun. We decorated our stony den with old shards of china and bird-pecked snails – and when Uncle Freddie had seen it, a week later he sent us a basket, and that basket full of straw and shells, all smelling fresh, of salt and the sea, and attached to the handle a note which read:
Something