Another dream underwater.

 

I’ve signed off on rights to a mermaid adventure film, mother tells me, somehow certain that I am the mermaid. Later I will ask about the slippery tail and an art director looks at me with scorn. It’s about more than a mermaid. It’s a metaphor. Oh.

Still, strangely, all this time in water and tape has captured something secret, and on the flight home my silver suitcase is shuffled and scanned. For discrepancies.  I picture them with their fingers all over the watery footage. They must have found it, that dark thing, and scraped it with a scalpel from the sticky lace of my memory. All around it are hints that something is missing, and yet…what?

The escalator also goes down.

The escalator also goes down, mother sees this and we dash down pushing past sleek-haired women in blazers, past serious faces and rolling suitcases. Commotion.

Ladies and gentlemen. We are all floated out to sea, in the most brilliant piece of silver; luggage is scattered and rearranged. Beside us a group of Asian businessmen gather crates of soy sauce looking somehow simultaneously calm and peeved. On another floor, footsteps echo on slick floors and a huge man stuffed into a gray suit becomes enraged, stuffy and enraged. Where is why is, etc, these are the things that vex and bite at him, gray and bureaucratic, he strikes me, grabs my arm. I look at a big glowing clock and take note that at 5:03pm, I was struck. He snarls and denies it. Look. We are out to sea.

Kelsey wanders in, and he put his hands on her, his big mouth making ugly remarks. There is one other woman in the room. I look at the big glowing clock, making notes. His protests are like malevolent elephantine wails.

On the deck, or whatever, red and blue backpacks… We see them coming.

Kkkk. underwater oxygen sounds, kkkk.

Hold still

mermaid

what if

your cell phone goes off

underwater.

The breathless faces, all greenish blue, looking.

The voice comes through, narration overlapping the cloudy waves sounding crisp, clean and serious; And in the darkest waters, I climbed up, and squinted, eyes fogged up in murky waters, and I hurled those secrets into the green streak that could be a river channel. Later we will scrape the ocean floor with metallic contraptions, and pull the truth up to the light.