I can’t stop staring at the mustache hairs that are longer than the others and hang down over your lip, catching the head of the beer. Annoyed, I throw a napkin at you when you wipe your mouth with the back of your hand.
At the bottom of my pint glass, only white foam remains. Damn.
When I was younger, I heard mermaids turn into foam when they die. On the rocky shores of Bodega Bay, I loved to watch the white bubbles roll over my feet when I stood at the crashing waves: generations of mermaids chronicled in salty ink. This beer could be a mermaid, too. Salt, skin, and scales fermented into an IPA. I felt sad that even the most beautiful, mystical things still die. I mention this to you, and you only grunt.
“Not everything means something. Some things are just as they are.”
“How do you know?” I’m not sure if it is anger or resentment in my voice, they started sounding the same a while ago.
The server offers me another beer, but I feel your leg shaking under the table. I decline.
“Together or separate?” the server asks.
“Separate,” we say, recited so many times we find comfort in the only answer we share.
I repeat the phrase, wrapping my tongue around the words and feeling only the sharp edges of the letters. Once upon a time you and I were easy but now, like a spice we forgot at the store or an empty promise that no one reminded us to fulfill, we just shrug, “oh well”.
When we first met, you used to pay for me, swipe the bill from the table before I had a chance. I told you to stop; I wanted to cover my half.
“Pretty girls don’t pay,” you said.
That was the only time you called me pretty. I liked how it came out of your mouth mumbled and from the corner, like if I didn’t hear you, you wouldn’t repeat it.
I finish my beer and think of fishermen, who, given the chance, would pluck the mermaids from the seas. “Too pretty to be out there alone,” they say as the mermaids struggled on the ship deck. I would lie on the splintered wood, push her wet hair back, and tell her I understand. Oh, Mermaid, how did her rescue become a kidnapping?
I don’t want to be the mermaid you pluck from the waves. I want to be the siren, calling to you from afar. You still keep yourself tied to the mast; you’ve been warned: don’t give your captaincy up for a siren.
Now I’m drunk, and my birthday is coming to an end. I am neither the siren or the mermaid. I am the brackish bubbles that hug your ship when you pass through the grotto.
I can still see dried bits of foam on your mustache, and I remember even the most beautiful, mystical things still die.
Linzy Garcia is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Nevada, Reno in Fiction. In both short and long forms, she explores women’s pleasure, shame, and experience. A border child of Nevada and California, Linzy now lives with her succulent, Jasper, in Reno, NV.