Sophie adjusts her phone between her ear and shoulder, then grabs the lighter from the counter. “It’s not working.” Her other hand turns the knob on the stove. Click, click, click. Her attention gravitates to the massive stone on her ring finger. In the year since it became a permanent fixture on her hand, she’d only lost weight. Why was it so tight now?

“I’m sure your fiancé could have fixed it, if you let him come.”

“Penny, please. I don’t want to talk about him.”

“You're getting married to this man in two months. How can you say that?”

“You don't understand.” Sophie grimaces and squeezes the lighter trigger. The stove burner doesn’t ignite. “He doesn't see me at all. He doesn't hear me. I have to repeat myself a million times before he even acknowledges my feelings. And this morning...Penny, I can't do it.”

“Can’t do what? The wedding? Sophie, you’re almost—”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” Sophie slams the lighter on the counter. “This fucking stove.”

“Some vacation you’re having.”

Sophie leans against the counter and surveys what was meant to be a pre–wedding getaway. The cabin is nothing like the photos in the listing, all dated furniture and dim lighting. The ocean beyond the French doors is the only amenity seemingly as advertised. “I’m gonna go. There has to be a manual or something.”

“Don’t have too much fun.”

A brief search of the rental reveals a worn white binder beneath the sink with the crudely written title: Instruction Manuals. Inside, Sophie finds only one page, torn at the edges and yellowed with age. Scrawled in the penmanship of a child:

How to Become a Mermaid

1. Find something shiny in a tidepool

2. Give a peace of treashure to a sea creatcher

3. Go into the ocean. MUST BE AT NIGHT! Keep swimming intil your tail apears

4. You are now a mermaid!!

Sophie is surprised by her own amusement. It’s far from a solution to the dysfunctional stove. It’s something she might’ve written herself, when she and Penny were kids. She runs a thumb over the waxy, blue letters.

Outside, the low sun splits the sky into magenta, lavender, and deep marine. She walks along the water, frothy swells playful against her toes. Her shoes and phone she’d left at the cabin, but the paper is folded against her palm. Perhaps it's silly and unimportant, but in the midst of the wedding, the vacation, and that damn stove, nothing sounds more appealing than being a mermaid. 

The tidepools are tucked into a crop of barnacle-encrusted rocks. Sharp edges meet the soft soles of her feet. She remembers how to tread so they don’t cut.

Beneath the glassy surfaces of the tide pools are soft anemones, starfish, crabs contained within spiral shells. Nothing that shines. So she looks on, at sun-bleached rocks, flourishes of frilled orange, barnacle tongues, ridges on the shell of a mussel. Green shore crabs the color of sea foam scuttle from shelter to shelter. The vibrant ecosystem blurs into a mosaic of dusk–drenched color.

There—a ribbon of silver.

It started when she turned thirty. She’d scour her scalp for that dreaded glint, that strand that caught the light differently. She’d fish it from her brown locks with tweezers, only to find two more sprouting the next week. They were the color of her lost time, her wasting value. She was well into her thirties now, and the silver was too aggressive to be subdued. It declared her failures and her desperation.

But it was the shiny thing she saw in the tide pool, that streak at her temple. And if it could turn her into a mermaid, could it be so horrible?

A purple shore crab shuffles out of the pool and pauses before her. It’s massive for its kind, nearly the width of her palm. It wears a carapace of deep, iridescent plum, and only one claw at its front. She’s not sure if it's the fading light that’s convinced her of its pointed observation.

With her thumb and forefinger, she plucks them from their spot. The crab swings their lone claw in slow, agitated circles. Bubbles spew from their mouth. 

Her smile falls. She knows the feeling all too well: angry, flailing, and utterly trapped.

“Oh…I’m sorry.” She sets them down. The tears that follow are quiet and unexpected, and the first to touch her lips tastes of brine. She slides the ring from her left hand. “Do mermaids get married?” The band is gold, inset with a square cut diamond. She’d always preferred silver, and she’d always loved opal. Still, she’d squealed and clapped her hands and jumped up and down when he proposed with it. She was almost forty, after all, and any ring at that age was her dream ring.

When she was young, she never dreamed of a ring at all.

She extends it to the crab, vaguely aware of the absurdity of the action but too entangled in it to care. “Do you like it?”

The crab clasps the band and retreats to the tidepool, as if that were their very purpose for emerging in the first place.

Sophie is left in the company of the hollow wind and the ever–growing waves behind her. She knows how fast the tide can reclaim its shore. The moon is out now, a low, narrow crescent. In the distance, the light she left on at the cabin is a yellow hazard, a warning to stay clear. She’s certain now that she’d rather be a mermaid than deal with that gas stove—or anything that came after.

The tides rolling in are loud, enthusiastic. She’s unsure of the last time she swam, but she knows she’ll fare much better without being bound to a rock.

She walks to the edge of the sea, the small swells cold and textured around her ankles. Foam clings to her skin like scales. She can’t feel her toes, buried in the sand. 

She goes into the ocean and swims.