“I'm not sure it'll be that bad,” I replied.
“Oh, it will be,” she said. “I’m prescient that way. It’s in the blood, if you will.”
Kira always reminded me of a particularly beautiful seal - big sad brown eyes that were almost black, brown hair molded around her heart-shaped face. It was that look which had first drawn me to Kira, when I was heartsick from a broken romance – a boyfriend who was far more interested in his own insta-businesses than he was in me or anyone else. Kira’s beautiful, waif smile.
Kira held the drink close, as if trying to warm her soul from the coffee's inner heat. “There was a postcard I saw one time, from a native painter in the area who liked painting Orcas and other sea life, about twenty years ago or so. It showed the top of the Space Needle peeking out from the sea, with Orcas swimming majestically just underneath it. It was considered quite the conceit at the time.”
The grayish skies that had been threatening all morning finally burst into the heavy cloudburst that seemed to be the norm of late, the Sound’s waters whipped into a fury by winds that seemed to ignore the Olympic mountain range that had protected Seattle from the elements for so long. Rain splattered against the window, obscuring the now threatening vista of water.
“So you think we'll be seeing whales from the space needle soon?” I asked, perhaps more cynically than I intended.
“Soon enough,” she replied.
“Kira, that’s ridiculous. This is a bad storm season, little more.”
“Just like the one last year, and the year before. You're relatively new here, Tina. How far down would you say that water is?”
She pointed down to the wave tossed lake.
“Oh, maybe ten feet, give or take...”
“You can't see them now, but there used to be piers and great big warehouses on those piers, selling tschotskes to the tourists. I was an eight year old kid when this particular coffeshop opened up, twenty years ago. Those piers sat ten feet above the water line, and the vantage point here was about thirty feet up above the shops. You do the math.”
“You've got to be kidding - you're saying the water here has risen more than thirty feet? "I shook my head. "That makes no sense - it's only up like eight to ten feet worldwide.”
“I’ve worked out the physics of it – has a lot to do with columns of water and compressibility and things like that – but yeah, it does happen that way. The upshot's that the process hasn't stopped yet.”
“Process?” I ask, a little uneasily.
Kira gave me a look, as if she wanted to shake her head but didn’t do so for friendship’s sake.
“I have to get going – there’s a program at the UW that I’m involved with … I'll tell you about it when I know a little more.”
She got up, picking up the green mermaid coffee cup, then smiled a little sadly as she stared at it. “In the end, we’ll all have to grow tails, won’ we? ”
“Bloop, bloop!”
“Yeah,” she said, looking at me. “I’ll see you around.”
I watched as she walked out, her trim, compact body bypassing the other wet patrons just coming in, a selkie re-entering the pouring rain as if she was born to it. Perhaps she was. It would explain a lot of what happened since then.
1 comment:
I have always wondered what happened in the final chapters of "Ginny, the accidental Mermaid"
Is the entire story archived somewhere? I really liked the character, Virginia DelMare and would love to see the resolution to her being an accidental meraid.
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