An Allusion For Anderson

By Aeriel Holman

Once upon a time, in the damp cream colored sand, sat two ingénues silhouetted against a hazy sun. The night has not yet risen behind them, and the scene is awash in a pearly gray and champagne pink. There is beauty, calm and natural, as they stare together at rolling breaks of the sea lines. The moment is fleeting, but filled with a vague sense of impending repetition as the sun and moon will rise and set again in hours, and the ocean will continue to lap against the shore.

The women rest away from the remaining members of their party, who still dare to brace tepid waters in the late evening. Under a mammoth umbrella, enfolded in sheer garbs, both young ladies glisten pale in the fading light—freckles littering bare shoulders on one and a flushed redness on the cheeks of the other.

The taller has shoulder-length hair—vibrant amber like the spark of dying embers—which waves naturally as flapper-curls. Her attitude would match the characteristic description almost flawlessly. The body she holds is brazenly emaciated, shown in its ample-bosomed and long-legged glory. While at the same time she candidly hates her body, she flaunts it before others.

The second young woman is much shorter, much rounder; from elfin face to childish toes digging in a teal, threadbare blanket. Her hair is long, scattered from salted wind into tangled tendrils that resemble melted honey. They are coagulating along the undefined lines of her spine and forearms. She wraps a charcoal colored pashmina about her, not from the chill setting in, but because she is burning; burning from unrelenting shame. This shame stems from being in the face of open and honest sensuality that radiates from the companion nearest her.

Said sensual companion tips back a swan-like throat as she drinks pomegranate-flavored vodka without care. Presenting it to the blonde, who hesitantly reaches out to take a swig—only one—the redhead utters her first smoke-tinted words of the entire outing: “You writers prefer whiskey or something though, huh?”

“Depends,” the blonde replies after a stuttering gulp with a voice that was meek and childish, “Some liked scotch, and bohemians’ notoriously liked absinthe.”

“Oh, that’s right. I should have brought you absinthe. To match your eyes,” the redhead said as she took back the alcohol. She sent a sly smile as she traced a pointed, painted nail along the saliva-wetted rim. 

The blonde managed to tear a fruitless laugh from her suddenly parched throat. Instead of the topic of liquor, she hitched in a breath to ask, “Did you like meeting everyone?”

Strands of gold floated down to folded knees as all attention turned to the redhead. Soaking in the undivided sight, lengthy legs stretched out. One trim arm balances the weight of a thin body so the other could wedge the bottle between perspiring thighs suggestively. The blonde did not look, focusing on wide eyes searching the liquid landscape of the rolling ocean. Dark blots of human shapes could be seen clustering across the horizon, the sounds of laughter swallowed by splashing and cries of hungry gulls.

“They didn’t talk to me much,” she said. It was lacking, but not untruthful.

“You seemed preoccupied,” came the careful observation from the blonde. The redhead shrugged, lifting a knee and dropping it beside the curve of the blonde’s backside with a hollow meaning. There was a clenching inside her rounded stomach, echoing the crash of the waves against the mainland. Yet, she remained still.

“That one guy—“

“The Satirist?” the blonde clarified as the redhead scowled.

“He was rude. Kept telling me to ‘go away’ and kept pushing you,” the redhead continued as if there was no interruption. Ire had her normally attractive face sullen, pulled down.

“He does that. He didn’t mean it,” the blonde somewhat lied as well, because it was easier than explaining the whole truth, “He’s sort of like a child. Just teasing because that’s what he does to the people he likes.”

“Eric doesn’t,” is the curt accusation. The blonde says nothing, absinthe eyes staring placidly, and the redhead’s leg twitches. A moment does not stretch awkward in the burgeoning starlight so much as fills with intense understanding that neither woman comments on.

“You were talking to him on the phone, then?” the blonde asks eventually in part masochistic curiosity and part uncertain resentment.

“Of course,” the redhead snorted in a voice that is not mean, but nor is it particularly kind. Descending is a weariness that creeps into the bones. Things remain unspoken, unidentified as time meanders on. The sounds of passing families along the pathway to parked cars halt their conversation for proprieties sake. Children innocently remark on the smoothness of their discovered conches and the bleached integrity of sanddollars. Once the redhead turns to see they are left alone she nods in the vague direction of the seething plane of the asphalted lot. “He offered to come get me for a date.”

“Ah,” is the sound the blonde makes. It is pointless to ask if her friend accepted. Both know the answer.

“I’ll need an hour shower to get the smell off,” the redhead says with a sigh. She hoists the vodka up, swirls the bottom, and takes a drink. Her mouth closes obscenely around the column and her throat bobs the slightest bit.

The blonde glances away, shifting finally from the heated bulge of a hairless knee pressing against her damp buttocks. Drawing her pashmina closer to her soft figure, she inquires, a bit taken aback, “You mean the smell of the sea?”

“Yeah, I don’t know why anyone would even like it,” she said while lowering the bottle and placing it like a barrier between them. “It’s like sewage.”

“How unromantic,” the blonde replies. She gives the frosted bottle a contemplating once-over. A fourth of the liquor winks in the emergence of beach bonfires, passing headlights, and the last beams of sunlight—it was tinted like blood letting out from a wound.

“I forgot, you like the ocean,” the redhead recalls, casual. The blonde shrugs, reaching for the bottle instead of continuing the increasingly depressing small talk. “Which is fine, I guess, if you like the cold and medical waste and crowds and sunburns.” With a smirk, the redhead eyes the blonde as she cautiously raises the bottle, gently urging a swell to flow down and fall on her pink tongue. “Though, you like playing in the water mostly, don’t you? Well, I can’t bear a grudge for a girl wanting to get a little wet.”

It takes a minute as the blonde ponders the emphasis on the word before she sputters the vodka out in mortified bubbles. Her mouth is coated, cottony from the alcohol, and shines as a lustrous stream seeps over her chin and plunges daringly into hidden cleavage. It soaks all the way down to the navel, pooling for a second, before continuing a path southwards. The blonde scrambled to mop it away.

“You did that on purpose!” the blonde accused, tone raising in pitch in quickly summoned anger. Anger at who, however, was a feeling left unanswered. A few from the party swiveled unfocused heads over to the noise. Nonplused, they continued raving and jumping over the higher tide coming in.

“Maybe…” the redhead says. The blonde glowers, waiting before braving to take a third sip. Almost bored, the taller woman moves over to drape one arm across bent knees and another along the junction where shoulder meets neck. “What’s so great about the sea to you anyway?”

“Mermaids.”

 The redhead blinks long coffee colored lashes on marble skin in slow flutters.

“Except mermaids aren’t real, hun,” there is a factual, almost pitiful consolation to the words. The blonde ignored the unwanted, unneeded (despised) pet name, as well as the implication by its use.

“My favorite fairytale is by Hans Christian Anderson—The Little Mermaid,” the blonde started. The redhead made a noise, and the vibrations thrummed across the blonde’s naked ear. The silhouettes of the two were entwined now. The vodka bottle turned their blurry outline into an indecipherable Rorschach in the sparkling dusk. The drink relaxed the blonde, because her tongue danced about to tell the intimate details of her favorite subject, “Rumors about its origins say that Anderson wrote it for a teacher. A male teacher. Anderson placed himself in the role of the mermaid, you know.”

“Ah, how nice,” the redhead yawned. She was listening, warmed, running delicate fingertips through waterlogged, honey-hued hair.

“Actually… the tale ends sad—“ the blonde paused, choking. However, the emotion as well as story was lost when a chaotic buzzing broke the delicate embrace. It came from a lodged place amongst the padding of an unused, risqué swimming top of the redhead. Both jolted from a previously unnoted trance strung in the air between them. 

Immediately, the mobile phone was plucked up. True to the careless nature of machines, the phone opened a text message that shattered a fresh intimacy that had grown in the moments of the descending sun.

“Eric is already here! That tricky bastard! Said he’d let me know as soon as he could sneak away from home…” her normally alto voice grew into a climbing mess of uncoordinated octave jumps. Immaculate fingers clacked against a keyboard screen and the redhead rose unseeing, insensitively groping for her packed tote. The blonde shoved it toward equally painted and delicate feet that fumbled with glittery slippers.

“Oh, okay.”

The vodka bottle in the blonde’s hands felt empty despite the sloshing contents. She hesitantly rocked to standing, swaying with the breeze. Bits of ash from the gathering bonfires tickled the edges of the wind. This was followed closely by the heady smell of dissolving gasoline and combusting logs breaking into a faded plum sky.

“Want to meet him real quick?” the redhead questioned, looking up with testing eyes. The blonde gave her a smile that splintered, covering up the distaste boiling in the pit of her vodka soaked stomach.

“No, someone has to watch all the stuff,” she said, waving a hand downward to the umbrella, towels, and hodgepodge of beach bags piled together. Contents spilled out, a leaking tube of SPF 75 hardening along a ridge of crusted sand. It was a good enough excuse as any.

“Right. You have a ride home?” 

“I’ll ask the Satirist. We live in the same area.”

The redhead paused. She glanced down at her phone, an insistent beep flaring the screen an obnoxious paisley. A momentary frown flashed across her sharp features. Still, the blonde saw the swift answer—Coming—to the message before the screen went black. Then, with a quick embrace for the blonde companion, she turned away. 

“See you for church tomorrow!” she sang with a flippant wave.

The blonde lifted a hand, fingers crunching in a pathetic farewell. She waited until the dim light enveloped the slim figure of the redhead—similar to how her lover would in some high-class hotel for a few cheap hours. Standing silent for a few minutes, she waited just a bit longer. 

The redhead did not return. Nor did she even turn for one last look.

Eventually, the blonde found themselves moving into the snapping winds to join the party bobbing along a darkening ocean. Foam stood out in ghostly lines of undecipherable patterns as she came to a sudden halt before the lapping waters. Her toes sunk into the cold sand of a wetted plateau.

Maybe, I’ll get lucky, thought the writer, and just turn to foam like Anderson’s mermaid…

Except mermaids aren’t real, hun.

So, she stepped into the sea.

By Aeriel Holman