Apologies if there's a "link the story you idiot, don't paste it here" rule. I did not see one.
I was not born. I was found.
Well, okay yes of course I was born; everyone is born. But I do not know when, nor do I know where, and I certainly have no idea how. All of that is a mystery. I do however know exactly when I was found, and I know exactly where I was found, and I certainly know how I was found, because my father loves to tell the story whenever he can.
I was found on July 5th, 1986, in Waipi’o Valley, on the Big Island of Hawai’i. It was around 10AM, and the sun had just started to find its way over the Kaluahine waterfalls that overlook the Valley’s beach. My father, a park ranger of the Valley and of nearby Pu’u O Umi Natural Area Reserve, had caught wind that some tourists had chosen the beach for their Fourth of July celebration the previous night. While the Valley itself is not an off-limits area, the news still warranted investigation, because where tourists go, trash follows in their wake, and the ancient Hawai’ian kings who lived there did not need cigarette butts and plastic red cups littering their ancient home.
Despite being a park ranger, my dad has always had a strange tendency to fail to notice potential danger when it approaches him. That is probably why, when he saw me stranded on the black sands next to an empty bag of Doritos, without thinking he simply picked me up. I suppose I should be grateful that he did, rather than leave me there and pretend he never saw a small baby abandoned on the beach, or even perhaps throw me into the ocean and wrestle with a conflicted conscience for the rest of his life.
I should be especially grateful he then decided to take me back to his home. He is fuzzy with the details when he tells me this part of the story, namely as to just what it was that made him decide to take me in as his daughter, but knowing him, I probably just did something cute when he picked me up, like babble in unintelligible babyspeak, or flap my tail all adorably.
…Wait.
Did I mention that I’m a mermaid?
…
Shoot. No I didn’t.
…Yeah, I probably should have said that from the start.
…
Can we start this over? …Yes?
Okay.
(ahem)
My name is Kainoa Bryer, and I am a mermaid.
Now, I know what many of you are thinking, because I have gotten this response more times than the Hawaiian language has native speakers. Your mind just invoked an image of something human above the waist, probably Caucasian-skinned, with a beautiful face crowned by flowing locks of hair, and below the waist, with no natural transition to speak of, the scaly tail of some kind of fish. In truth, there is really not a single word in that sentence that can be used to describe me.
First of all, I am not a fish. I am not even part fish. Call me a fish, and you will be surprised at just how high I can get that tail up off the ground and just how hard I can smack you across the face with it. And if I am to be technical here, I am not part human either. That one generally takes people a little longer to figure out, so I’ll give you until the end of this book to mull it over.
The scientists also agreed that, much like the chimpanzee is humanity’s closest genetic relative, mine is the dolphin. It took me a long time to finally give in and admit they and their fancy-shmancy gene-sequencing technologies are right, because let me tell you – dolphins are assholes. But it does make sense. Our tails are almost entirely similar, and I have the same gray skin tone as they do, though where their underside is merely a lighter grey, mine is the color of pale human skin, which many, many people over the course of my life have taken to mean I must be sick. One stark contrast however (and this is why some people still do not believe I am a mammal) is that I do have a pair of gills, located just below each breast.
On that hot and sunny morning when my father picked me up off the beach and took me home with him however, I was young enough that the gray of my skin was isolated to just a small circle on my back, easily hidden. Apparently I was a very small thing, small enough to fit in just one of his large, hairy arms. Though my real birthday is still unknown to me, I could not have been more than three months old at the time.
Anyway, when I did whatever cute thing it was that I did, my father knew right away that, as he puts it, ‘there was something special about me’ (as if finding the only documented mermaid in existence is not special enough). At that moment, he went straight back to his Land Rover and made a beeline for home, forgetting all about the tourists’ garbage. The Waipi’o Valley, by its nature of being an extremely steep valley, has very few roads leading in and out. Those that do are very treacherous to navigate, even for those who have driven them countless times before. Even with one hell of an all-wheel drive vehicle, the drive back up the steep incline of the Valley takes at the very least thirty minutes, so the time was almost noon when my father finally returned home, fearfully hiding a tiny mermaid in his arms.
“Ku’uipo?” he said once he was inside, seeing if my mother was home. The most-spoken language in Hawai’i is of course English, but in my parents’ house it is only spoken if someone does not know Hawaiian. For the purposes of this book however, I will translate everything into English, save for instances where I think something has to be kept in its original language.
A quick, fearful search through our small house proved my mother was nowhere to be seen. Back then she was working as a cook in a restaurant in nearby Honoka’a, the only town with a paved road leading to the Valley. It was not uncommon for her to (without saying a word to the rest us) run off to the store to pick up ingredients for a new recipe she wanted to try. What ingredient it was this time she has since forgotten. Considering what this day became for her, I don’t blame her.
My dad took that moment of solitude and quiet to sit down with me in his arms and well… just look at me for a bit, at the thing he just picked up and took home with him. I do not know what it was he looking for – maybe a seam where the fake tail ended, or something to see who I actually belonged to, or perhaps just something to prove to himself he was not hallucinating. Maybe he was not looking for anything at all; maybe he just wanted to look.
When I started to cry he brought me back down into his arms. “No! Don’t cry! What is it? What do you need?” he said, trying desperately to quiet me down by cradling me in his arms and rocking me back and forth.
“Oh! Water!” my father cried out, sure he’d solved the mystery of the wailing mermaid baby. “That’s it! You don’t like being out of the water, do you?” Hurriedly he dashed to the bathroom and began to fill up the tub, one arm holding me and the other testing the temperature. “Shush, shush. It’ll be okay, little guy.” When the tub was full enough for a grown adult to take a bath in, he gently lowered me in, and prayed the decision was not a terrible one.
Unfortunately, it kind of was, though not for the reason he had thought. When I started to thrash about and violently cough up water, he immediately snatched me out of the tub and tried to wipe the spit from around my mouth with the nearest thing he could grab, a roll of toilet paper. “What’s wrong? Is it too hot? Too cold?” As soon as I could I immediately began crying again. “No, no, no! Shhh! Please don’t cry!” He stuck a hand into the water. “I don’t get it. It’s the same temperature as the ocean…”
Then it hit him, and from that point onward, we each learned, in our separate ways, that I cannot breathe freshwater. “Of course! It needs to be saltwater, doesn’t it?”
First things first, though – he had to stop the crying. The Waipi’o Valley Lookout where we lived was in a very rural area, so houses were generously spaced apart from one another, but a baby’s cry has the power to travel unnatural distances. Since my parents had no kids then, if anyone heard it would draw immediate suspicion.
“Shh, shh. C’mon, little guy. Don’t cry now. Hey, you need a name don’t you?” He chuckled to himself. “I’a?” ‘I’a’ means ‘fish’ in Hawaiian. Remember what I said about fish? Yeah. I gave my dad a hard punch in the shoulder when he finally decided to add that part to the story.
My disgust for the name then must have been as great as it has been for all the following years of my life, as that only made me cry harder. “Okay, okay! No! I won’t call you that. I promise. Okay?” No luck. In a panic, he ran, screaming baby in hand, to the kitchen, grabbed the sea salt and a handful of measuring spoons from the cupboard, then threw open the refrigerator, spotted a nearly empty two-liter of Sprite, and grabbed that too. He did not need the soda, only the container, but if there is one thing one learns after living with my mother, it is to never waste food. To do so means certain death. Gulping down the last of the soda, he hurried back to the bathroom.
After draining the bathtub of its unbreathable water and the two-liter of its also unbreathable yet rather tasty soda, my dad got to work. He closed and locked the door, set me down on the fluffy moon-shaped bathmat, and began to fill the container up with warm water. Being a park ranger does have numerous benefits, one of them being knowledge of exactly what percentage of seawater is salt. Three and a half percent, to be precise. For every two liters of tap water, in went two tablespoons of salt. When he thinks back now on it, he has absolutely no idea how many times he filled that container up, poured in the salt, shook it up, and then dumped into the bathtub. He also has no idea when I stopped crying, but that when that tub was once again full, I was once again quiet as a mouse.
Saying another silent prayer to himself and to whatever gods of the sea may have been listening, he picked me up and placed me back into the tub, keeping both hands on me this time should I almost-drown again.
No such caution was needed. The salinity did the trick, and I was in my mode, happily floating under the surface of the water.
The main points I'm looking for input are this:
Is the premise (a mermaid or something like one growing up and living in our modern world) interesting?
Is the setting believable? (I'm not from Hawai'i - if anyone here is, that'd be a big help)
Does the transition from exposition to chronological story work well enough or is it too sudden?
Other than that, if there is anything else that sticks out as particularly good or particularly troublesome, let me know. This idea is still drifting around in open water (pun) without a specific direction to go in.
Submitted March 18, 2015 at 08:29AM by cyborgmermaid http://ift.tt/18F4m80 shutupandwrite
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