Untitled chapter
Mermaid Magic
1
Why are you staring at me?
Oh, you’re wondering why I have a pink tail, don’t you?
Well, that’s because I’m a mermaid. I’m twenty years old and I live in the Pacific Ocean. As you can see, I also have long blond hair and brown eyes. There are many cities for merpeople in the ocean. Actually, in all of the oceans.
But humans knew so little about oceans that they hadn’t discovered our culture yet. Merpeople knew even less about humans, since it was difficult for us to explore their world too. But we were working on it.
Merpeople had magic. We could cast spells by thinking about what we want to do and waving our hands.
One day, I was swimming with a humpback whale. We were swinging our tails in the same way. Fish and sharks swung their tails from side to side. Whales, dolphins and merpeople swung up and down. My mother, Chantal, helped me realize that when I was seven. My parents got divorced when I was five. I lived with my mother and I spent more time with her, so we were closer, but I was friends with both of my parents.
Lately, something has been wrong with my parents. They’ve been acting like jerks for the past few weeks. My mother kept trying to pick fights with me and I always ended up swimming away from her. The last time I saw my father he also tried to pick a fight with me. I’ve been avoiding him until I could figure out what was going on.
My best friend, Matthew, came swimming in my direction. I was happy to see him. I gently stroked the whale’s side and stopped swimming with it. It swam away and Matthew approached me.
“Hey, Aida,” Matthew greeted me.
“Hey.”
“Are whales your favorite animals?”
“I don’t know if I have a favorite animal.”
“Mine are stingray.”
“Great.”
“I was swimming with one just now.”
“This is the third whale I found today.”
He laughed.
He knows how much I loved animals. He loved them too.
We swam back toward the city. We got sidetracked several times because we saw a lot of animals. Sometimes we swam with the animals, sometimes we just looked at them.
“How’s your Mom?” Matthew asked me.
“The same,” I said, gloomily.
“She’s still picking fights with you?”
“Yes. I’m fed up with the way everyone has been behaving.”
“Me too.”
“Every five seconds a fight breaks out. Merpeople are a lot less tolerant than they used to be.”
“Not just that. They’re evil. Sometimes they intentionally seek out other merpeople to hurt.”
“Yes, I’ve had to defend myself with magic several times.”
“Same here.”
“I’ve tried to put myself in Mom’s position every time she picked a fight with me,” I added. “But I still don’t understand where she’s coming from. What do you think is causing this?”
“I think it’s a spell.”
“Come again?”
“I spoke to a distant cousin yesterday and he wasn’t evil either.”
“How many merpeople are evil?”
“I think almost everyone in the city.”
“How do you know?”
“I talked to a lot of merpeople over the last two weeks and they were all like that, except my cousin.”
“I haven’t talked to that many merpeople lately.”
“I think someone cast a spell on everyone in the city. Why else would merpeople change like that?”
