The Mermaid Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

he carried her to the bedroom.
    â€œOh, you didn’t have to. The couch is fine.”
    â€œYeah, but you won’t be with me.”
    â€œYou’re too good to me,” she said. At some point she’d started saying those words like she meant them, like she needed him to believe them.
    â€œLikewise.”
    She threw a leg over his. He fell asleep telling himself the story of how they’d met, trying to find the words, but failing. The girl she was in the mermaid tank, how her hands and lips had sparkled, how the fish tail seemed real, the minutes he’d counted waiting for her to breathe. Her hair had spun around her, like the water had wind in it. He’d held his breath waiting for the strands to part, to show a glimpse of her face. The mermaid tail caught light and water as though it were made from both. It was sewn, surely, but fit her so perfectly it might as well have been part of her. Someone had made it, someone who knew her skin well enough to form it again from cloth and thread. It moved with her so well he could build a fish’s spine beneath it, a lithe frame fashioned by fragments of imagination. Her hair had parted just then to show her small mouth. Then her eyes. A soft yellow, like dried flowers. She saw him. The thought was as unexpected as she was. She’s real. He counted breaths with her. He’d pressed his hand to the tank. A large man had tried to pull him away, but he stayed, waiting for her to breathe, for her hand to meet his on the other side of the glass. He was waiting, still.
    In the middle of the night, he woke to find her watching him. “Is your head any better?”
    â€œPerfect,” she said.
    â€œGood.”
    â€œI just need to remember to breathe more.”
    â€œThat’s like telling yourself to remember to blink. You do what you can, that’s it.”
    The nights she’d been in the tank she’d breathed only five times an hour. She told him that the pressure, the water, and the lights had made the headaches start.
    He settled back to sleep. She whispered into his ear, “You’re a good, solid man, Danny. Love you.”
    When he left for work he heard her in the bedroom, laying cards on the floor, the soft tap of paper and the whispering. At the press, in the middle of the day, when his knees started barking, he tried to take apart what he’d heard her say. She’d been asking for her mother. There were cards she read for other people, she’d read for Frank, for Leah, for him every now and again. She’d used silly laminated tarot cards she’d picked up at a bookstore. It felt like a party trick, a really good party trick. The deck she used in mornings, at night, when she was asking for her mother, was the deck she kept in a box in her top drawer. They were old, worn, and smelled like Simon had said his book did, like basement, cookies, and vinegar, and like somewhere he wasn’t allowed to be.
    *   *   *
    He didn’t feel the press go through his glove, not even the pressure of it. A quarter-instant of heat, blinding heat. Friction, pressure, then the punch. Leather, oil, and metal met skin, muscle, and bone. He must have screamed. His knees buckled, the left turning sideways. The pain sluiced through his hand, wrist, arm, whole body, flashing cold, cold, cold.
    Tools dropped. Someone came running. The steel strips began to curl, pile up, and mash into the press line. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Tim Banderlee smack the emergency stop on the feed. His world blinked electrified purple.
    Someone tried to pull his hand free, but he was attached to the punch. It had gone through his finger, but not severed it. He was stuck to the machine, nailed there. Flesh gummed in the works. When Tim tried to pull, the animal wail Daniel made frightened him. “Jesus Christ.”
    Banderlee called for the floor manager. They overrode the machine and dismantled the punch until they