Song of the Last Mermaid

When the last mermaid’s heart jolted to a stop, the monitors sang a siren song, calling harried doctors whose long white coats rippled like sea sails over breezy waters.

They dragged machines into the room on squeaky carts. The machines didn’t work so well in water, so they used nets to drag her sagging body from the tank like a fresh catch. Wires and suction cups were hastily arranged around the heart area, tubes shoved down the throat. The machines pulsed and hummed, then she coughed, briny water bubbling at her lips.

The last mermaid was pulled back from death. That was the easy part.

The hard part was that mermaid cells wouldn’t thrive in test tubes. Mermaid embryos withered. Still, they had various cells, studies, and determination to pull the species back from the brink. Hope remained so as long as one mermaid still swam through the world’s waters.

The last mermaid was too precious to be allowed to swim freely in her tank. What if they couldn’t pull her out fast enough the next time her heart stopped? Doctors designed a special bed, the upper half pillowy, the lower half a shallow tank. They changed the pillowy section when it got too wet and smelled of mildew. Various machines beeped rhythms from the room’s corners, all of them blinking and alert.

Twice a day, a therapist named Anya came to help exercise the tail that wasn’t allowed to swim anymore. The mermaid’s white hair draped limply on the pillow like dried seaweed while Anya lifted and lowered the fishy half.

The mermaid liked to tell Anya about her "spring maiden" days, when she performed in a tank in the middle of a bar, surrounded by walls painted to look like sunlight under the ocean’s surface. Back before people knew she was the last. She’d croon and ripple her tail and pretend to remove her seashells, though she never actually did. During breaks, she’d meet co-workers at the tank’s surface to smoke cigarettes and bitch about the folks banging against the glass, waiting for the shells to drop.

The mermaid smiled, remembering, when a white-coat scientist came in with a long needle. "This won’t hurt much," he recited like an auto-recording. The needle slipped into a spot where soft skin transformed into bluish scales.

The last mermaid gasped and stopped breathing. Anya pressed against a corner while the doctors with their machines jerked the last mermaid back from death once more. Therapy was canceled for that day.

When the mermaid seemed more stable, Anya returned to the beeping room. She bent the tail like folding tissue paper, slow and careful.

The last mermaid rasped, "Do you have a cigarette?"

Anya shook her head, horrified. To damage those lungs when they were trying to save the species!

The last mermaid laughed-coughed. "Here’s a secret: mermaids can’t die outside the ocean. Whenever my body gives up, I get pulled back. The ocean decides my tides of life."

But the machines were keeping the mermaid alive. Right?

"You humans have such hope. It’s sweet. Now, cigarette?"

After the machines brought the last mermaid back to life for the ninth time, Anya lit a cigarette in the mermaid’s mouth.

The mermaid coughed, and saltwater from her lips dampened the smoke. "I hate being the last. I can’t live, I can’t die. I’m tired, yet I want to swim again."

Anya nodded as she gently stroked the tail. Her heart beat a rhythm different than the blinking machines, frustration and grief and pity pounding hard enough to clog up her throat.

The last mermaid formally requested to be returned to the ocean, but the doctors said no. If she returned to the salty depths, they’d lose their chance to figure out how to make more mermaids. They needed more time to study the reproductive organs. Scientists had brought pandas and rhinos back; they could do the same for mermaids. Yes, she was part human, but she was also the last of her kind; she owed it to her species to let them continue to study her. The courts and lawyers prepared their arguments, the case looking to stretch over months and years like a horizon.

Anya planned as well. Late at night, she silenced the alerts so no sounds bleeped when she lifted the last mermaid, far lighter than expected, the tail sloshing puddles on the linoleum. There was a strange quiet to the hallways. The last mermaid whispered that she’d been singing siren songs of sleep earlier.

They shouldn’t have made it out that easy, it seemed, but Anya slipped the last mermaid into the backseat and they drove off with only the soft puttering of the car’s engine to announce their escape.

They shared a cigarette as Ayna steered to the beach roads. It was Anya’s first. She coughed, and the last mermaid laughed. The sound tinkled like windchimes.

At the beach, the sand sagged between Anya’s toes, and the ocean slapped against her thighs as she lowered the last mermaid into the water.

The mermaid waved to her therapist, the moon shining on white hair, like a moment frozen in a storybook illustration. Mermaids had waved to sailors for as long as humans had explored the seas in their quest for knowledge. Yet there was so much they didn’t know, Anya thought.

Anya didn’t want to say goodbye, but she waved back as the ocean sprayed her face and salty wet dripped down her cheeks. The bluish tail faded beneath the waves.

No one saw the last mermaid die, so hope remained. People claimed they heard enchanting music rising from the ocean. Scientists sent machines deep underwater, scraping video cameras through dark underwater trenches. They found nothing.

Anya didn’t do physical therapy anymore, but she liked to visit the beach. The salt sometimes gave off a breeze like cigarette smoke, and she swore she heard singing in the waves. Sometimes she sang back.