Between shows, you reapply your eye makeup, adjust the underwire in your scanty iridescent bikini top. You pinch off some Sara Lee crumb cake, but not too much or you’ll have to do an extra half hour of abs on your day off. Creepy looking maintenance men poke their heads into your dressing room unannounced, pretending to check the fluorescent lights, but you know better. They should be greasing the air compressors, cryo-stirring the oxygen tanks, checking the air hoses for leaks. For fuck’s sake. And the mermaids keep getting younger every year. The new girl is only a junior in high school. She’s the reigning Florida state champion in the butterfly. Shoots through the water like a torpedo. You cover yourself up and turn away until the men leave, then pop in your earbuds and let Ariana’s voice airlift you above all this. Soon the theater curtains will part. Below the surface the world will go silent and still like an empty cathedral. You’ll dolphin kick your way into the memories of four hundred tourists from Illinois, Wisconsin, and Ohio, clapping and waving at you from the other side of a thick wall of glass. You’ll kick your artificial tail, you’ll smile your artificial smile. When the last show ends and the people go home, you’ll remove the smelly, latex tail, you’ll remove the waterproof smile. You’ll catch an Uber home because your car is in the shop. In the evening, you’ll dream of being a real, authentic mermaid—not a pretend one, not a performing one, not even a beautiful, glamorous one, but just a common, ordinary one, plunging into a bottomless sea, turning pikes and pinwheels in the crystal moonlight with no one watching but the stars.
