Star-Crossed by Sarah Herrington

“It’s a city that chews people up and spits them out.” She was sitting next to him on the banks of New Jersey, listening to him talk. He was smoking a hand-rolled, flicking the ashes into the rocks fringing the Hudson like a stubbly mustache. She watched his mouth move with smoke and words. She followed his eyes. There stood the Manhattan skyline, a set of killer chompers, the Chrysler and Empire a pair of fangs, the box-buildings of the projects, molars that would grind and pulverize.

“Yeah, well, you don’t know my block,” she said. Her block had the only tree in a five-block radius. She imagined its gnarled tawny trunk to be like her backbone, tough after all these years of holding her up and pushing her forward, a bit twisted from the weight of the world. The tree was crowned with a halo of petal green leaves, soft fringe. She loved that tree, it was a misfit, like her. It was probably the only reason she stayed in Manhattan.

“I think it looks more like a row of books,” she squinted into the sunlight the Hudson was splashing in her eyes. “Like the way disorganized libraries lean on each other.”

She leaned on his shoulder and it was bonier than she’d remembered. He smelled of sandpaper and vanilla ice cream. “Tell me more about your block,” he said.

She told him about the pale blue stucco box church that looked like it belonged in the dusty desert of the South West. She told how she’d spend hours with the tree and the church, writing of places with no tree and no church. The gilded cross crucified the strip of sky between 4th and 5th, sending shadows onto her notebook as she filled them with stories. She told how she had begun to lace white Christmas lights in the heart-branches of her tree one night so it wouldn’t feel so out of place in this lit-up City. She had to lean far out her fire escape to get to the tippy-tops.

Soon his lit-up-cigarette was the brightest light on the shore. The night had begun to throw its dark blanket over the City sky, obliterating any chance of stars to wish on. The teeth-buildings lit up into a beaming grin, the tip of the Empire suddenly turning blood red because it was almost Valentine’s Day.

“Look at that Vampire City,” he said. “Luring people in and then sucking their blood right out. “ He took one last drag before throwing his light into the water. She watched it float down current, against the reflection of Manhattan, a city streaming in silver lines like tear-stains on a dark cheek.

She turned to look at his face in the half-dark. There was always something half-dark and beautiful about his face, even in the daytime, like there was a whole side of him she was waiting to be revealed. She’d known him for so long, but there was a part of him that was deeper than she’d ever gotten to, even though she knew how to swim to the bottom of dark waters.

He turned and smiled, his pointy cusps growing in front of her eyes. She always loved that part, like they were excited to see her.

She lifted her skirt a bit, and they both watched her legs fuse and extend into a long blue-silver tail.

“It’s a city of magic, only everyone is chasing the wrong kind,” she smiled, and so did he, the whites of his eyes gleaming as white as his fangs. His bright smile lit up the branches of her heart, she felt less alone next to him. She flexed her tail like Popeye’s, catapulting herself into the water. She disappeared under the frothy surface, only to reappear several feet away. She turned to him and waved high as an Olympic swimmer. When she returned, she had the seaweed hair and saltwater lips he always wished to puncture, but Mermaid blood wasn’t good for him.

He waited for her to return with handfuls of little silver fish wiggling like extra fingers in her palms. He would puncture them underneath their eyeballs and suck on them like half-empty ice-cream cones. It was a dirty habit, but it kept him from dirtier ones, she figured. She always said a little prayer for the fish as she scooped them up with her long fingers, the kind of prayer she heard while sitting outside the blue stucco church on her block in her Daytime Life.

Her daytime life was one of walking and writing and waitressing at the restaurant. Everyone at the restaurant assumed she was an actress, and she just said yes, for she was always pretending to be something she wasn’t. Normal. Normal like the girls who came into the restaurants with their boyfriends and split the bill. Normal, like the owner, who paced back and forth counting busboys’ mistakes and bar tips till nighttime.

Nighttime was always messier than Day, even for normal people. She’d watch them roll out of the restaurant on Friday nights at 2 in the morning like rowdy sailors on port call. They’d swerve like vampires with full bellies, leaning into each other’s necks. She would watch for the glint of fangs, but never saw them. What she saw were watery eyes, like everyone had been swimming too long and had gulped too much salt water. Drinking too much salt water was an easy way to forget, every guilty mermaid and merman knew that. She wondered what these land creatures could want to forget so badly. She watched them lean out the restaurant door, sea sick into the night streets, then totter off like small boats in choppy waters.

But Monday nights she did not have to pretend. Monday nights she could lean on his shoulder and watch the sky turn off and the city turn on. Monday nights she could grow into herself and he could, too, and no one would flinch.

Is it possible to be star-crossed in a city where the stars aren’t visible? Where people wish on themselves instead of far off fire-planets, where windows light up at night like stacked constellations, florescent and electric, all in rows?

‘When you live in a city with no stars to wish on, you have to wish on each other,’ she thought. It was morning. She nudged his brown curls with her fingers and rolled over, pushing bare toes into the sand. They’d fallen asleep at the feet of the city again. He opened his eyes like little half-moons and smiled, his fangs now rounded off like used pencil erasers he could safely run his tongue over. It was Tuesday, and her lunch shift started at 11. He had to be at the bike shop in Jersey City by twelve.

He trusted himself now that it was broad daylight and all of Manhattan was sunlit and sparkling like some innocent thing. He nuzzled his nose into the nape of her neck and she giggled, wiggling her toes and kicking up sand spray. She wrapped her arms around his and tried to soak him up like a sea sponge. She wanted to hold him like water, her night boy, her secret. Her fellow freak, her comrade. Here in the daylight they were just Boy, and Girl.

“Later, gater,” he lifted himself from the shore, gathering his things. Then he scooped up the hollowed bodies of silver fish discarded like empty beer cans and began to walk off toward his bike. She imagined him later, with a wrench in his hand and grease on his cheeks like a football player and felt that familiar growl in her heart. She imagined him there, and her in the City, and her heart suddenly turned into the darkest part of the ocean where no fish live, where the dark is so dark it feels palpable, like tar. She sunk there for a moment before reminding herself to push off with her tail, move toward the light, come up for air. It wasn’t good to stay in that dark place for too long.

“Later,” and she made her way for the morning city, where everyone was pretending.

“Pancakes, or omelets? The kind with cut up veggies like peppers and mushrooms? Or grits and butter rolls with gobs of honey?” The girl at the counter looked hungrily into her boyfriend’s eyes, absentmindedly twirling her toes around his ankle.

“Coffee coffee coffee,” he said.

Mermaid girl delivered, black coffee from a heavy-bottomed pot. The boyfriend’s eyes lit up and he took a sip. Mermaid watched the couple charge themselves with chemistry and caffeine and felt the salt water itch at the back of her throat. She thought of the boy. It was only Thursday. Four more days until her weekly date with Vampire Boy, her secret.

“How I wish I could be like them,” she thought. Out in day hours with arms around each other like expensive jewelry. Out, sun-drenched, with hands in each other’s back jean pockets. Girls with two long confident legs for walking city steps, and boys with mouths that couldn’t hurt too much. Being someone safe with someone steady, who wouldn’t change.

At dusk that night she sat on the church steps again, and felt that growling. The way her tar-heart growled, knowing there was something under the water. She only had an hour before the sun went down, before she best be home in the bathtub imagining he was there, or down by the docks, hiding in the shadows. She watched the shadow of the church cross inch its way across her notebook page, warning her of the time like a clock-hand. She tried to write stories of anything but him, but he had those fangs and that swagger and that wrench and oil that seeped into everything she did.

“Why did you come to the City?” he asked. He was on fire again, lighting cigarettes and burning them out. His teeth were still soft enough not to puncture tobacco.

She looked into the city. “There’s something beautiful there,” she said. “Some magic, some sparkle. You know how the sidewalks on Fifth Avenue sparkle like they have glitter in them when the sun hits them right? Its like that. If you look at it the right way, the city is all glitter and glitter always rubs off.”

He smiled, his kind of relieved thankful smile where his eyes stayed tired. He loved her for her optimism, for the way she could go to the deepest of waters but always come up for air. He didn’t think he’d have the strength, like if he swam to the bottom-most reaches he’d just stay there and sink like a stone.

“You are a ray of light, Mermaid Girl,” he hugged her, hard.

“And you are my night boy,” she whispered into the tip of his ear so the words could drip down his ear canal. She pulled away because she felt something and knew they were growing. The white tips, long and hard, his dangerous smile. And she felt her skin turn to scales and fin and there they were again, half together and half apart, completely understanding each other, but completely different from each other at the same time. They held each other and watched the city turn, too, into its monstrous grin of fangs and molars, darkness and light.

“You know this can’t last,” he whispered. He always sounded like he had a little lisp after his fangs grew in. “We are too different and I’m not made for swimming.”

“You have not seen what I’ve seen under that water,” she said. “Stranger things have evolved under there, their own species. There are a lot of miracles in dark places, you’ll see.”

Her eyes turned to two blue pools and suddenly he was swimming in them and he understood. The way her force kept her going, the strength of her delicate lines. She looked at his sharp teeth, sharp cheekbones, sharp eyes, and saw how soft they were, really, how they only wanted to be hard so they could reach soft things.

And the little silver fish stayed safe and untouched in the water that night, and she hardly noticed the blood. He tried to be gentle because she was a strong thing, a different thing. She was a thing that believed in light in the darkest of places and he was hungry for something like that.

When she woke up the next morning her feet were the first to reach out for him, 10 curious yawning toes. When her toes couldn’t find him she opened her sleepy eyes. When her eyes couldn’t find him she searched her mind. It was Tuesday? Yes. And they always woke up on the shore together like two washed up things, but this time he was gone.

He had left, and after the shock of it, cold like plunging into ice water with nothing on but a fin, she knew it had been inevitable. And the ocean in her tar-heart grew quickly and she found herself splashing in the darkness of it. She thought her heart had bottomed out, had grown deeper, and that she had forgotten how to swim and would surely drown.

And something strange happened after that. Couples in the restaurant would order pancakes with whipped cream and strawberries with hands on each other’s thighs, and this only made her nauseous, not charmed, as if she’d eaten the pancakes all by herself. If she saw a boy with dark flashing eyes and sharp cheek bones like him, she felt the faintest of growls in her heart. Nothing more.

At night she no longer grew her tail even though she always waited for it. She sat in the tub for hours, past the time her skin had pruned. Her legs stayed separate, foreign to each other. It was like she had been split in half and could no longer do her nightly mending and deep-sea exploring.

Every Monday for several weeks she went down by the water. Down where Manhattan beamed its thousand-watt grin, smiling with secrets, fangs aglow. She waited, kicking her toes in the sand all night. When the sun came up she looked around for a boy on a motorcycle or remnants of punctured silver fish, but there was nothing. One time she even went to the bike shop and looked around, but there was no boy with grease on his sharp cheekbones like a vampire football star. There was no one at all.

At first she missed him, then she missed how she used to see the couples in her restaurant when she knew him, foreign but romantic. Now everything seemed dark. Then she missed herself, permanently split in two. “I guess I’m like everyone else now,” she thought. “Broken in two and pessimistic.”

She even tried staying past her shift at the restaurant one night, drinking glass after glass of blood red wine. But she left feeling nothing magical. She was sure she’d drank gallons of salt-water over the days, too, her own tears, but it did nothing to help her forget. All she could do was remember.

Maybe he’d been right. Maybe she was naive and this was a nighttime city, a darkness city. Maybe they had been too different, though she had thought they were so alike. Maybe myths get swallowed whole by such sharp corners in this City. Maybe the reason he looked for magic was because he didn’t believe in it. Maybe it didn’t exist.

The next Monday night she plunged in. Walked right down to the water and jumped with legs, like two pogo sticks. It was different than it used to be, when she propelled herself with one long sleek fin.

It was quiet under the water. The quiet was peaceful and deep. She was thankful for something peaceful and deafeningly quiet to hush her mind. Her heartbeat dropped from her throat back into her chest. She heard it echoing through the water. She flailed with her legs, useless things. They slowly moved her upward, like helicopter wings just revving up. Everything was different now.

When she ejected, she looked back at their shore, then at the City grinning. No tail, no fish, no fangs. Just a big gaping mouth puffing out smoke. The Empire was soaked red because it was Valentine’s Day, but she was alone.

Oh, Vampire City. You were not supposed to be so blood-hungry. And weren’t mermaids supposed to be survive always in the dark corners?

A helicopter’s wings beat the air overhead. The bird was a vulture, the bird was a mother whose nest had been destroyed and who was in wild mourning for her babies. Under water the girl’s legs beat like helicopter wings but she struggled to stay afloat, bobbing up and down in the water.

And for the first time she felt it, the sharpness growing in her own mouth. She almost sliced her tongue before she knew what had happened. It was dark even with the bright lights of Manhattan looking on, and she was hungry. She was hungry for something full of life, hungry for something she was missing.

She dove under the water. She swam as fast as her puny legs could take her, the salt water of the ocean whisking all the tears off her cheeks.

She took. Armfuls of flashing silver fish, anything with tails and beating hearts. She tried out her fangs, they sliced like butcher’s knives, she drank and felt streams of electricity. When she came up for air she knew she was as dark and electric and hungry as all of Manhattan now. It was in her veins. She imagined her new teeth looked like Empire, dipped in red. She smiled and felt at home again, but still just as lonely.

The second dive she went deeper. Her legs were weak and ridiculous, but she still remembered how to swim and did her best. She looked for anything moving with life.

And that’s when she saw a flash of silver like a light-source, moving in the distance. Fear was fuel and she followed it. She grabbed at the tail thick as a tree trunk and began beating her puny helicopter legs toward the surface to examine her catch.

There, soppy, was a boy with a tail and a shock of black hair like matted down batwings. There was a boy with sharp cheekbones and a broad chest and the prettiest green and blue merman tail she had ever seen.

He took over, grabbing her by the waist with one arm, putting one slim merman hand over her fang-infested mouth with the other. He dragged her to the shore, where they lay on the sand panting and staring into each other’s changed eyes.

“Where the hell did you go?” She asked him, ignoring his tail.

“Nowhere. I mean, I felt different after last time, and had to get away, and then this happened, so…. What the hell happened to you?” he asked her. He had no lisp, she was the one with the lisp now.

She opened her mouth wide and ran her tongue over her fangs to demonstrate, accidentally slicing it. “I hate when that happens!” she began to cry.

He held her and she was shaking. She felt the urge arise, to consume, to feed, to take in what she needed most. The Empire tip looked over her shoulder as if egging her on. It knew what it was suggesting; taking was how it got so large and bright and hungry. She felt as if her senses were heightened and she could smell his beating heart under his skin.

“You were right, there are some strange hybrids under the water. And above.” he added, looking at her. He waved his tail and made some joke about Hudson River pollution and mutants and myths, but she barely heard because she was watching his beautiful face in the City’s reflected light. They were trying to convince themselves that the other was real.

Monday nights became, also, Tuesday and Thursday and Saturday nights. Down by the docks on the Jersey Shore, he would swim far out toward the city, bringing back wriggling bouquets of fish and underwater creatures for her to gnaw on. She thought she’d be better at restraining herself than he’d been, at least in the nighttime like this. And so far, she was right. They were gentle in the nighttime, two beautiful monsters, Merman and Vampire. But daytime was another story. They were just a Boy and a Girl then. A waitress and a bike shop boy. And, then, they realized, in a City like this and on days like those, anything could happen.

Sarah Herrington is a NYC-based writer. Her poetry appears in the anthology “Bowery Women”, and her fiction in the anthology “Just Like A Girl.” She has published work in dozens of print and online journals. Sarah has mentored and taught teen girl writers through Girls Write Now. She is a regular reader at the Bowery Poetry Club, Cornelia Street Café, St Marks Poetry Project and other venue. She is currently completing her first YA novel.http://www.sarahherrington.com