Eventually Syrena fell asleep, but Sophie couldn’t. She tried hunkering into the mud like a cat or a mermaid, but the sand felt itchy, and she was too aware of every little fish that swam by her face. After lying there in the dark for what felt like hours, she decided to explore.
How many days had she spent at the bottom of the sea, practically traversing the whole Atlantic Ocean—and had Sophie even done any exploring? Could she even say she’d seen the deep sea? Or had she just rushed through it at the urging of a tyrannical mermaid?
Following the steady blue glow of her talisman, Sophie set out cautiously, part walking, part human-style swimming. As she paddled around, she came upon a cluster of coral dotted with slumbering sea snails. Her stomach growled at the sight of them and she nearly burst out laughing. Sea snails? Maybe she truly was becoming part mermaid. Sophie swished over to the rocks and plucked a spiral snail shell from its shallow crack. Before she could even consider the creature inside, she held the shell to her mouth, slurped, and swallowed. The snail left a slime of flavor upon her tongue, and it made her curious. She pulled another from the crack and slurped it from its home. Cruel, a voice rang in Sophie’s head. It was cruel to pick the innocent snails from their resting place and end their peaceful lives so suddenly in her belly. It was cruel, like the sunfish eating the mermaids, like Syrena eating the shark. The entire ocean was cruel, and all of the earth, and Sophie was a part of it, made to consume life the way sharks were, the way the snails themselves feasted on fish killed and abandoned by other fish.
Sophie grew dizzy with the thought. She lifted the edge of her T-shirt—once boldly striped, now faded as pale as a fish bone from her time in the salty sea. She dabbed her mouth with the hem. The food chain, or rather chains, the millions of strands of life consuming life upon the planet, was suddenly something Sophie understood, more deeply than she ever had in a classroom. She held an empty periwinkle shell, covered with something fuzzy and nutritious, up to the baby octopus still residing on her head. He grabbed it with his tentacles and went to work scraping it clean.
Sophie moved deeper into the reef, running her hands over the ruffled lids of giant clams furred with pink algae. She was mesmerized by the pulsing, colorful mantle peeking out from the shell’s wide curves. Even more mesmerizing was a giant oyster nestled among them, flatter and wider than the clams, its ridged shell sprawling in all directions. Sophie had never heard of giant oysters, but what did that matter? She hadn’t heard of mermaid-eating sunfish, either. As she moved closer to the oyster, its shell began to lift open in greeting. The shiny sea plants and elegant sea fans fluttered with the giant oyster’s movement, and gazing at it with apprehension and wonder, Sophie could see the gleam of something dazzling on the oyster’s fleshy lip. A pearl! As the oyster cranked its shell ever wider, the pearl caught the scant light available at such depths—the blue of Sophie’s talisman, the luminescence of a passing worm, the sparkles of phosphorescence among the algae—and glowed, majestic and ghostly.
Griet! Sophie thought again of Syrena’s sister, not that the creature had really left her mind. In fact, wasn’t she somehow seeking Griet in her solo outing? With the mysterious mermaid haunting her mind, didn’t she set out to find something—some proof of her left behind in this, her undersea queendom? And here it was, a giant ball of beauty in the plush body of the huge oyster. It was for this thing that Syrena’s sister had been named; such a creature had to be dazzling. What must it be like to have a sister lovely as a pearl?
For lovely as a pearl Sophie’s sister was not. Dumb as a plant, more like, stuck inside her grandmother’s trailer, the toxic greenery binding her like roots clutching soil. Sophie shook the thought from her mind. The memory of that glimpse of her sister was truly haunting—spooky. All alone in the dark, she’d much rather imagine Syrena’s sister, the beautiful Griet.
Sophie swam toward the pearl. She could gather it in her arms and carry it back to Syrena and perhaps it would comfort her. Not that the mermaid needed comfort, exactly—she seemed beyond it. But maybe in the giant pearl Syrena would see an unusual beauty, and understand for a moment the way her stories had captured Sophie’s heart.
As Sophie approached its lip, it was as if the oyster inhaled, took a deep and terrible breath, pulling Sophie into its shell, sliding her across the smooth surface of the giant pearl. Sophie tried to swim against the strong current, but she was pulled completely inside the giant oyster almost immediately. And then the shell slammed shut.