Challenge Submission YagaCorp & The Northern Freshwater Mermaid - A Love Story(?)

[Avesta Hitch]

𖣂𖣂𖣂𖣂𓆝 𓆟 𓆞𖣂𖣂𖣂𖣂​

One of the first things I learned when researching the land YagaCorp bought up north was that before about 1900, Shadow Lake used to be called Angry Dead Girl Lake. Or at least, that was the rough translation of the various probably-misspelled Ojibwe words on the old maps at the state historical society. Looking back on it now, I think if the well-meaning people of Whispering Pines had kept the old name I probably wouldn't be sitting in this tacky fake-log-cabin-esque hotel room, drinking rotgut whiskey and wishing I was dead.

See before this craptastic tourist trap was spread over seventy-five acres, with golf courses and water parks and valet parking and a Starbucks disguised as a trapper's cabin, there was nothing here but the lake and the pine trees. Okay, probably a few thousand squirrels and a couple herds of deer, maybe a bear or two, definitely at least one fox, and the stupid ducks that got me involved in all this.

And she was there too. She always had been, until I came along and ruined things.

It was one of my first surveying jobs. At the time I didn't bother looking into who or what YagaCorp was, all I cared about was the fat paycheck they were offering. So in the spring I went up to those woods, a good forty minutes past a cluster of gas station and churches that had the balls to call itself a town, and I began documenting everything, so they could get ready to build

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I'm not an outdoorsy guy, I never have been. Maybe it was because I never had an old man around, and Ma had to work two jobs to support us all, without a spare moment for herself let alone a whole camping trip for three kids. But we used to go to the park down the street, the one with the little creek and the retaining pond. I used to love watching the ducks there, especially the baby ones. I could spend hours watching those little guys swim, hearing those cute little peep-peep-peeps as they followed their mom around. That's why when I saw the fox corning that one little baby in the woods, I had to scare it off. No duckling tartare for Mr. Fox that morning.

We weren't far from the water's edge, and I'd seen what I assumed was the mama and about ten other babies swimming maybe twenty feet down the shore. Carefully as I could, I picked the critter up, and even though it pissed on my hand I was able to get it safely into the water. It took off towards the others without so much as a look back, ungrateful little shit, but someone else saw me that day, even though I didn't know about it.

Later, she told me she was touched by the small kindness she witnessed. It was why she saved me when my dumb ass ignored every warning the locals had given me. I took my collapsible kayak out into the middle of the lake, trying to get some shots of the shore where YagaCorp could set up a jet-ski marina for the new resort. I was just about in the middle of the lake, where the DNR reported a depth of almost 500 feet (and the locals said there were underwater caves that went even deeper) and something hit me.

To this day, she claims innocence, that it must have been a muskie or a sturgeon, but sometimes I wonder.

I do know I was drowning. Again, city boy, I never was much for swimming. I was fully clothed and wearing a heavy camera bag, and I got so turned around in the icy blackness that when I began to kick as desperate as I could I wasn't sure if I was going up or down. I felt the slick, muscular body of a large fish brushing against me, and remembered the mounted muskellunge on the wall of Dave's Last Chance Bar, and the jagged teeth he'd painted blood red as a joke.

Then well-muscled arms were around me, and the next thing I knew I was breathing air. The taste of wind and pine was all I could think of as the sun beat unsympathetically down on me, and I realized after a while I could feel the sandy lake bottom against my feet.

Then I saw her face.

She wasn't particularly ethereal-looking, which is something the stories and art and animated movies don't like to show. At first I thought with her brown skin and strong features she was one of the ladies off the nearby reservation, and that the lack of oxygen was making me hallucinate her mossy green hair and the white-rimmed eyes that were about 90% pupil. But then she pushed me onto the mucky lakeshore, and I felt the something else besides the soft, slightly sticky skin of her naked torso. Right about where her legs ought to have been was four or five feet of twisting, beige-gray fish flesh, with little nobs like the kind you see on lake sturgeon running down the side, ending in a flopping, asymmetrical tail.

In the stories, when the mermaid saves the prince, she swims away, leaving him with nothing but the sound of her voice. But she didn't speak to me at all that first time, and she did stay. At least, until panic overtook me, and I scrambled away from the water in horror and disbelief at what I was seeing. She tried to follow, her powerful arms dragging the splashing fish tail through the mud. Her eyes grew even wider somehow, but whether out of confusion or hurt I couldn't say. It probably wasn't the nicest way for me to react, given she saved my life and all.

That should have been the end of it, but it wasn't. I was broke after all, and most companies don't give rookie surveyors the kinds of opportunities YagaCorp did. It did take me almost a month, and several angry phone calls from my boss, and finally a threat of legal action over a broken contract, but with the help of a bottle of whiskey and another advance on my paycheck, I made my way back to Shadow Lake. The rented kayak was still there, placed neatly on the shore and almost spotless, and as soon as I touched it her dark head popped up out of the surface of the water, the eyes even more accusing than before. I felt the urge to run again, but the memory of my bank account an a swig from the bottle kept my feet planted on the shore.

It took us a while to work out communication. She was alone in the lake, she had been since the glacial era when she found her way through the deep places of the world to the little pocket of fresh water surrounded by a wall of trees. The first humans in the area learned to avoid her, the "angry dead girl" they thought was haunting the lake. In their defense, she did have a habit of drowning anyone who killed too many of her fish or murdered land beasts on her shore, so the fear wasn't entirely unwarranted. Similarly, when the settlers and loggers came, she would go so far as to flop up to their cabins and shanties, smashing her tail against the walls and screeching like a banshee, her bare hands occasionally tearing apart those who remained.

To this very day, she wears her nails long, and sometimes I'm afraid to fall asleep before her.

But after the rage came the loneliness. All the people had been gone for more than one hundred years, and other than the random surveyor or scientist coming to check on the health of the woods and lake, she'd barely even seen another human. She had considered exploring the tunnels beneath the lake and finding her way back to the sea, but the fish and the deer and the trees begged her to stay, to keep their lake safe, even if they couldn't provide her the company she so craved.

Eventually, there was only one thing left to try. She told me all creatures of the woods knew of the guardian, and she'd learned the method of summoning by asking a fox. On a full moon she laid out the sacrifice on the shore, surrounded by flowers and strong smelling herbs, and called the name three times. Emerging from the black wall of trees, the house on bird legs silently approached the lakeshore, and the hag poked her head out the front door.

"And what do you want?" she asked the mermaid in a language all the old things know.

The mermaid cried "I am alone and trapped here, my heart is dying. I want a partner, a friend, a love. Someone I can teach and learn from, who will make my days worth living again!"

The hag looked at her crookedly, as hags often do. "And what will you give me if I grant your wish?"

The mermaid made an offer. The hag chewed on her lip with her two remaining top teeth, hopped from one leg to the other, looked up at the moon and into the depths of the lake, then agreed.

The bird-leg house went back into the woods, and today it's settled out in The Haunted Woods Waterpark behind Building C. Kids climb a ladder between the legs and ride plastic mats down a curly slide into an over-chlorinated pool next to the jet-ski rental dock.

But before the house became the most Instagrammed water slide in the north woods, I saved a duckling from a fox, and the mermaid knew I was the one the hag had promised to her. So she saved me from drowning. She gave me back the kayak, and eventually told me the long stories she knew from the ancient world. She asked me about my family, my friends, what life was like in the big city far to the south, what television and the internet were. I brought my guitar to her a few times, and we learned to sing together. Eventually, I told her every painful thing that had ever happened to me, and she held me in her arms and sobbed diamond tears into my hair.

Seven months later, my work was coming to an end. The ground was going to break for The Whispering Pines Resort in a little over a year. I didn't know what would happen to her, I didn't want to think about it. But when I told her I had to leave, she broke down sobbing.

"You have to stay!" She wept. "Or it will have all been for nothing! We must stay together, or no one will ever come again and my heart will die!"

I didn't know what to do. I could hardly swim, even though she tried all summer to teach me. I could much less breathe water or living on raw fish, meat, and water plants, the way she did. I had friends in the city, my brother was getting married in the spring, and the rest of my paycheck was waiting for me.

"Can you come with me?" I asked. I didn't know at the time how badly the lake needed her, but that wasn't my biggest worry. My apartment didn't even have a bathtub, although it did have security cameras in the hallway that would definitely pick up a short, skinny dude trying to carry a half-woman, half-fish into his unit.

But she didn't say no. She only looked at me with those wide fish's eyes, her tail flicking back and forth and splashing in the shallows of the lakeshore. "I will have to ask," she said finally. She opened her arms in what I thought was a final embrace, and I kissed her. She tasted like the first breath of autumn in the north woods.

Several weeks later the check had cleared. I had a fully stocked fridge and a paid-off credit card, and I was getting ready to meet a dental hygienist I matched with on Tinder for a drink. My phone rang, and the caller ID was YagaCorp.

"Hello?" I answered, fearing a complication with my payment and at the same time hoping for another job opportunity. The company owned property around the world I knew, and maybe they would need survey work done elsewhere.

"We have a bonus for you!" croaked a spine-tingling voice I didn't recognize. "Are you able to accept delivery?"

"What?" Someone was knocking on the door.

"We have a bonus for you! Delivery should be imminent. Thank you again for all your work!"

Another knock.

I dropped my phone and ran to the door.

She was standing there, dressed in a ratty hoodie and jeans. Her hair was black now, her eyes brown and the same as any human's. She had no shoes, and I could see a pair of large but neat bare feet, dripping on the dingy carpet of the apartment hallways. There was a smell of pine and lake water about her that I both loved and loathed. I gathered her into my arms and kissed her soundly.

Maybe I should end the story there. That's the fairy tale happy ending. But see, my life isn't a fairy tale. Maybe magic is real, but it's the kind of magic that isn't always nice. The kind of magic they used to burn witches for.

Or drown them.

See there were still bills to pay, and she didn't even have a name, let alone papers. We had to invent a story for her, then find money to make documents that would match that story. She couldn't work, she'd only just learned speaking, and reading was wholly unknown to her. She stayed home, watching TV and flashing videos on the internet. She began to ask for things she saw, things I tried to give her, but it was more money, more hours away. She was alone again, most of the time.

I think she blamed me. After all, I never told her about the rest of the world, things like insurance and credit scores and rent payments. Maybe if I had she'd have made a different choice. But it was too late.

We had a moment of happiness when we realized she was pregnant, even though I had no idea how we would feed another mouth. We got a bigger apartment, baby clothes. I tried to take jobs closer to home so I could be there when the baby came. But I was called to Shadow Lake again, now The Whispering Pines Water & Golf Resort, the money too big for me to refuse. YagaCorp wanted to expand into the hills about four miles north of the current property, possibly creating a hunting reserve where hunters could park their fat asses in a blind and shoot deer gathering at feed piles, then take triumphant pictures with the corpses.

Since the resort was built and cell phone towers were put up, I was able to get her call when it came. She'd had the baby, yes, a girl. Beautiful little legs, but she was unfortunately born with gills. Everything was all right though, because the old woman had already come to collect the child even with the gills, and the former-mermaid was heading back to our apartment now, child-free and happy as can be.

"What do you mean the old woman?"

The price she had paid. What she had traded for me. It's always a firstborn child in the stories, isn't it? We could have others, the not-mermaid said. It was only this one she needed to trade, and our life as humans could continue.

But she wasn't human, not even if she had legs. No more than I was a mermaid, even if I had thought about remaining in that lake with her. I should have. Or I should have let her be.

Either way her heart had died, but at least there wouldn't be a

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My firstborn child would be home in the secondhand crib I bought, maybe with a dental hygienist mother on maternity leave, and we would go camping sometimes, maybe go fishing, watch ducklings in the park.

My phone is ringing now. It's her. I bought her a new iPhone last year after she cried and begged for one. I'm behind on the payments. "Baby come home, I need you," she says.

I finish the whiskey and head for the door.

𐀪𐀪​