The Broken Mermaid

The Broken Mermaid

by Lesley Allen Corea

The bright flash of a dragonfly’s wings gleamed in the sun as it whirred past Sally’s left ear and settled onto the statue in front of her. Gentle gurgles of water tumbled from the fountain.

“That’s odd,” Sally muttered and brushed her wispy brown hair from her eyes. She had not seen a fountain in this park before. The keys on her purse strap chimed out of time as she stopped short to consider the mermaid.

The stone mermaid holding the vase from which the water poured was old and weathered. Missing an elbow and cracked through its midsection, a black pipe held the statue upright. Hints of green moss grew in the dark crevices and lines that spelled out the statue’s frozen features, the sunning dragonfly a living barrette on the stone flow of the mermaid’s hair.

Sally would rather have rested by the fountain than headed to work at the restaurant. She jiggled her purse up with a hop and slid the purse strap further up her shoulder. She dragged off to work.

During her shift that evening, Sally pondered the broken mermaid statue and the fountain, oddly enchanting for all its disrepair.

Sally left work with the best tips she had made since The Big Loss. The bartender chirped a friendly word to her about it having been a good day. She tipped the bartender and gathered her belongings to go home. She smiled for a change.

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At home, the foreclosure notice sat unchanged on her kitchen table.

Sally’s late sister Margaret dourly glared from a photograph on the mantle.

“I know, Margaret. You were right about my gambling and I was right about your smoking and look where being right got us.” Sally groaned and threw up her hands.

The punch of The Big Loss and impending foreclosure were lessened by the balm of an unusually good day. She hummed. Sally drifted off to her first full night of sleep since The Big Loss.

She dreamed of the fountain with the broken mermaid. The fountain’s water traipsed musically. Sally heard the broken mermaid statue whisper, “Little black notebook,” in a soft, feminine voice. Her dream guided her down the stairs of her house toward the basement.

She dreamed the mermaid’s face against blue sky projected over the vision of her basement. Through cobwebs and around ancient brick columns, Sally traveled onward into the dark cellar. She was unafraid.

“Little black notebook,” the broken mermaid whispered again as the statue revealed her elegant stone face to Sally. Around a corner on a brick ledge in the basement was a wooden box. The box floated up and began to open itself in front of Sally’s eyes. Just as Sally was about to see what was inside the box, she jerked awake.

“Nineteen thousand two hundred and six dollars due in two weeks and I’ve barely enough to pay my electric bill. Oh dear.” Sally spoke aloud in a flat voice and finished her morning coffee. She felt numb.

She slung her purse over her shoulder and slid the purse strap up with a hop. Sally headed out the door. She looked forward to seeing the fountain with the broken mermaid statue again on her way to work.

Sitting on the bench next to the fountain, the water steadily tumbled. Birds sang. Sally smiled up at the broken mermaid.

At the restaurant later that day, images of the broken mermaid and impressions from her dream intruded upon her workday thoughts. I wonder what it means, Sally mused. She recalled the statue’s slow whisper from her dream, little black notebook.

So obsessed was Sally with visions of the broken mermaid that it was a wonder anyone got their correct order. She glided happily through her waitressing shift.

That night, Sally’s dream was a repeat of the prior night with the addition of an old bank on Main Street. A warm, calm enveloped her. She saw the same wooden box on the brick ledge in the basement and heard the identical whisper from the broken mermaid statue, “Little black notebook.”

On her next day off, Sally parked up her courage and ventured into the basement for the first time. Miraculously free of her lifelong fear of spiders, cobwebs, and all things dark, she explored.

She retraced the path to the brick ledge she had seen in her dream and reached around the column. Her hand felt a wooden box.

Eager to see the box, Sally fumbled and dropped it. She wedged her body between the cobweb-covered column and a wall. Cool, stale air from deep in the darkness chilled her fingers and face. Sally raked at the void searching for the treen box. She could not reach it.

Disheartened by her misstep, her old fears sprang upon her.

She shrieked. Sally’s voice bounced in the pitch black. She fought her way through nets of sticky dust to the safety of the downstairs hallway and latched the door behind her. She sat on the floor and cried, head in hands.

“I’m losing my mind,” she declared to her sister Margaret’s photo on the mantle as she wiped remnants of spiderwebs out of her fine hair. Margaret’s photo stared blankly.

During the week that followed, Sally walked out of her way to avoid the fountain with the broken mermaid statue. She served customers with a smile at the restaurant, but it was still a terrible week for tips. A few customers stiffed her altogether.

One more week, she thought looking at the foreclosure notice on her kitchen table. Sally considered gambling one more time to try for a big win. A steady stream of salty tears poured down her face and into her mouth as she ate stale pizza for dinner.

Sally sat paralyzed on her couch in front of the television. She dozed off and dreamed vividly of the fountain, the broken mermaid statue, and her basement. This time, she saw a plank of wood in a corner of the cellar. Her fantasy demonstrated retrieval of the fallen box.

That morning, a groggy Sally made her way to the basement. “It’s the last week. I may as well look one more time,” she mumbled. Crazy dream…

She flailed past the creepy web entanglements and located the wooden board she saw in her dream. As in the vision, Sally used the piece of wood to extricate the wooden box from the hole.

Clutching the box, Sally scooted back to her kitchen table. Extrusive threads decorated her hair. The timber box was tied closed with a faded piece of pink, sateen ribbon.

Sally sawed the knot open with a dull kitchen knife. Inside was a little black notebook.

She carefully moved the slightly frayed, black elastic closure and opened the little black notebook. A gray ribbon bookmark held the middle page. Sally read cryptic numbers neatly written in black ink.

A long, skinny key was taped onto the lined, white paper below the number. The yellowed tape crumbled easily away from the page.

Sally glanced up at Margaret’s photo on the mantle. So what? Sally imagined that Margaret scolded her. The specter of Margaret took a long, ugly drag from her unfiltered cigarette. You look like a nutcase celebrating over that junk.

“It is not junk,” Sally indignantly answered the air with a raised a finger. “These books are for important things. Special things.” She knew the book was important. For the moment, why it was important was yet a mystery.

She traced her fingers over the rounded corners of the small, black notebook.

Sally had not felt this confident since The Big Loss.

The pocket inside the cover of the little black notebook held a weathered piece of thick paper with a crude drawing of a mermaid. A scrawled message read:

Time is naught, sorrows weave,

Provision comes from dreams believ’d.

Sally rode rough seas of intense dreams that night. She awoke periodically to disturbing developments--her pillow shoved to the floor, her hand clutched a coaster from her nightstand, and somehow, she had managed to put one shoe on her wrong foot.

Once, she emerged from sleep completely turned around with her head at the foot of the bed.

Repeatedly, Sally dreamed that she walked to the bank on Main Street and presented the number in the little black notebook to the teller. Each time, the same faceless teller in a wrinkle-free burgundy pantsuit brought her a long, thin, metal box.

Sally hastily brushed her teeth and dressed in the dim morning light. She situated the little black notebook in her purse and slid the purse strap up her shoulder with a hop.

Sally placed a kiss with her finger onto the frame of her deceased sister Margaret’s photo. She bounded out to the bank on Main Street that she had seen in her dream.

The glass door closed silently behind Sally as she entered the bank. Her pulse thumped in her ears. Sally presented the little black notebook to the teller at the counter.

The teller led Sally to a room and returned with a long, skinny, metal box, then retreated and left her in privacy. Sally drew out the old, skinny key with shaky hands and nested it perfectly into the safety deposit box’s lock.

She stifled a yelp as the long top lifted from the body of the box. The container was full of neatly bundled hundred-dollar bills. Sally rubbed her eyes in disbelief and counted the money several times. Each time, the total was exactly twenty thousand dollars!

Ecstatic, Sally danced around the box and covered her mouth with both hands. She hastily loaded her purse with the bricks of paper money.

As she closed the top of the safety deposit box, something rattled inside the container. Sally opened the lid again. A tiny mermaid figurine holding a vase lay in the bottom of the box. Sally picked it up slowly and turned it over to examine all sides of it. The figure of the mermaid had the faint beginnings of a crack through its midsection.

Sweaty and nervous, Sally shimmied off her undershirt and with it covered the cash in her handbag. She placed the mermaid figurine and little black notebook on top. Sliding her purse strap over her shoulder with a hop, Sally marched off to pay the debt on her house.

That afternoon, Sally watched the rainbow from her suncatcher wobble slowly across the dusty living room. She placed the tiny mermaid figurine next to Margaret’s picture on the mantle and flopped down onto the worn couch.

She nodded to her departed sister’s picture and envisioned a nod of approval from Margaret in return.

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The next day, a puzzled Sally could not find the fountain with the broken mermaid statue on her walk to work. A plot of overgrown grass peppered with a few scraggly dandelions stood where the mermaid fountain had been.

“Excuse me, where is the fountain in this park?” she asked a man who walked briskly by with his dog.

The man shrugged his shoulders and answered, “Haven’t seen one,” as he passed.

Sally dropped her head and the hair on her arms stood up.

She retrieved the little black notebook from her purse and ran her fingers over the squareness of its spine. Sally wrote, My Big Win, on the first page of the little black notebook and graced it with a smiley face. She paused, then added, My New Life, numbered lines one through ten and returned the notebook to her handbag.

Sally slid her purse strap up and over her shoulder with a hop and hiked onward toward her job.

Infused with hope, she saw her workaday routine from a new perspective.

A pink and green jeweled dragonfly alighted on a long blade of grass where the fountain previously stood and seesawed in the fresh spring breeze.