The Little Mermaid
Photograph by Yoojin Shin
By Yoojin Shin
Many years ago, I used to have a dream. I say a dream, because it was one dream, occurring over and over again for several months. Usually the dream went like this. I opened my eyes and felt a strange lightness in my bones. Then a deep mass of smooth, warm currents enveloped my skin, which soon made me realize that the feeling of lightness was actually me floating in water. Next came fear: even though I had this dream several times before, dread overcame my body like slow-spreading poison. Why was there so much water? This sense of dread was vague, without reason, but pervasive, and I soaked it up like a derelict seaman. The whole thing was water, everywhere you looked was blue water. I was in an oversized fish tank filled to the brim or a pit of the deep sea. It didn’t matter. Feeling my nameless, impending doom, I drifted like a bloated dead fish.
But strangely, as I drifted, dread faded away like the tide. Soon, I was moving my arms and swimming in a place that was as blue and cavernous as the Pacific Ocean. I drifted, swam, and drifted again, watching streams of light glimmering through the water. Then it came to me all at once: where I was floating, or drifting, was my room. Things like my bed, my desk—my enormous mahogany desk that my mother personally shipped in from Boston to make me an “old-school scholar”—and my bedside lamp were suspended in the water, swirling in slow motion. Everything was under water. But there was no panic, or the sense that I had to get out of water to breathe. Because I could breathe.
I was never sure how or when the dream ended, because when I opened my eyes again, I was back on my bed, my back snug on top of my mattress, everything crisp and squeezed dry in the bright California sun filtering through my window.
This dream first began when I moved back home to San Francisco after graduating from college. Some years of distance now allow me to say that, during that time, I was spending my days without a plan. When my mother—a dutiful and pragmatic woman—suggested that I get a temporary job, I responded to her in earnest that I was, indeed, looking for a job every day, writing countless paragraphs about how a career in banking would change my life for the better. But in truth, I was just reading—reading in my room, a café, a park, or really anywhere I could sit down with a book. Sometimes, when I didn’t feel like reading, I dragged out a chair to the front door just to watch the people in my neighborhood. It made me feel like an old woman and I liked it.
But I think all of this unnerved my mother, who must have thought that her bright first child was losing her edge. Once or twice, she told me that the more I waited, the harder it would be for me to get a nice job. A nice job that covered dental and allowed you to live alone.
When the thought of losing out on jobs with dental coverage didn’t scare me into action, my mother made a decision to utilize me in whatever ways possible. So I became the house cleaner, car cleaner, gardener (mainly weed-pulling), and grocery shopper, sometimes quintupling up as my mother’s legal assistant, filing documents (friendly divorces versus bad divorces!) and typing up handwritten notes.
My most important job, however, was to look after my little sister, Julia, who was just short of eleven years at the time. Julia, with her hard-pressed little peanut of a face, had a rigid schedule for a kid. On most days, she woke up at six a.m. with my mother and had breakfast. She liked two breakfast sausages and one piece of plain toasted bread with butter, but no eggs, and precisely a half cup of milk. When mother left for work at around seven a.m., she remained on the dining table to draw on her sketchbook for about an hour, until I trudged out of my room at eight a.m. Depending on her mood, she kept me company during my belated breakfast, intently staring at her morning’s work while I crunched on a bowl of fruit cereal. She then brusquely retreated into her room to read until lunch.
After lunch, she met a tutor for an hour, per the request of my mother who wished to prepare Julia for the junior high curriculum. Despite a floating rumor in the neighborhood about his past as an alcoholic, this tutor—a slightly balding, red-nosed man in his thirties named John—was paid exceptionally well, since he had built a reputation among the Korean mothers around the block as being able to send their children into selective, private junior high schools. The sessions took place on the dining table, and I watched over them from the living room couch, also per the request of my mother.
Julia refused to talk or meet John’s eyes, but she was dutiful enough toward her tasks that John rarely had to fight for her attention. Which meant that the sessions were almost always dreadfully uneventful. So I frequently dozed off, ensconced in the cooling leather of the couch, with John’s velvety voice echoing through the house.
After the tutoring session, I took Julia for a walk to the nearby park—this was the most compulsory daily agenda—and there, she sat on a bench and talked about birds: birds of all kinds, but especially the white ones, like egrets, seagulls, and cranes. She didn’t particularly talk with me. She just talked and I nodded. Other times, she didn’t talk at all. Then sometimes I took her to do various chores, like grocery shopping or a visit to the doctor’s. Once in a while, she followed me to a neighborhood café in the afternoon, where she sat intently and read again with a half cup of milk. She never had any playdates. She didn’t have many friends, and we were similar in this regard.
When I had to deviate outside of this routine (and I’ll admit, there weren’t many occasions to do so), Julia was watched by her usual nanny named Paula. A good-natured middle-aged woman, Paula was recommended by my mother’s colleague, who also had, in my mother’s words, a child with a strong temper. But Julia grew glum and irritable whenever Paula was around, or so she reported back to my mother. Once, Julia threw her lunch plate on the floor, the whole deal with brown rice and mashed peas and syrupy teriyaki chicken, because she got angry. Then, startled by the sound of shattered china, she started to cry—cry so desperately until her throat failed her and she fell asleep, mute and worn-out and sad.
Why did she get angry? My mother asked carefully, nonchalantly. Paula had no idea. But she added cautiously: She’s a difficult child.
Once, but only once during the summer, things almost blew over. We were having a late dinner, after a particularly difficult night of getting Julia to eat. We had cooked white rice and a pot of spicy beef soup alongside the usual arrangement of small side dishes and she had refused to eat any of it. We assumed in silence that she was irritated by her day with Paula, because she usually loved spicy beef soup.
“If you don’t eat, you’ll have to starve.” My mother said curtly, matter-of-factly, not meeting Julia’s eyes.
Julia shook her head and whimpered. “No! No, no, no...”
Soon, she began shrieking. “No! No! No!”
She went on like this for a while, droning on like a screeching, broken doll. My mother, who was trying her best to keep her broiling anger hidden beneath a layer of placid indifference, flinched and grimaced, until finally, she cracked.
“God dammit, Julia!” she yelled, clanking her spoon down on the table. I flinched and glanced over at Julia, who set off immediately into a screaming cry as if she was just waiting for this moment to release her gush of tears. I scrambled out of my seat to get her off the table, but before I could hold her arms, she began hitting herself in the head with her palms. Our dishes began to clank precariously as her elbows banged against the table.
Without hesitation, I grabbed Julia’s bowl of hot soup, lifted it off the table, and dashed over to the kitchen counter to set it down. Meanwhile, my mother grabbed Julia’s wrists with the swift jerk of her practiced hands, until Julia became aggravated enough to fall off of her chair and begin writhing on the floor.
I sat quietly on my chair as my mother stood up from her seat, circled around the dining table, and lifted Julia up from the floor with a monstrous force. I stared at Julia’s small face—bloated with blood, wet with tears and snot and leaking spit—and watched as she resisted, kicking and screaming and scratching. My mother, however, was a practiced veteran in these events and managed to half-lift and half-drag Julia across the dining room, up the stairs, and into her room.
The door to Julia’s bedroom clicked shut. When my mother came back to the dining room, I could still hear Julia’s piercing screams and cries from behind her bedroom door.
I watched again in silence as my mother sat back down on her chair, dug her spoon into the rice bowl, and began chewing in earnest. She then glanced at me and gestured for me to eat.
My mother ignored such things well. She was good at pretending, even when everyone else knew that she was pretending. This was why she was a good lawyer, and this was also why I wanted to expose her, ram a stick into her pretense and pry it open for everyone to see.
Julia’s muted screams, which were still echoing in the background, had made me lose all appetite and I left my portions untouched.
I gave my words a slow emphasis. “Get a nanny that’s trained to take care of autistic children.”
My mother, who was blankly weaving through her soup with a spoon, looked at me with a slight sense of betrayal in her eyes.
“It feels like a fucking sanatorium in here,” I hissed, getting worked up.
“Do not curse—”
“But it does, mom. It fucking does. Keep this up and you’ll have two insane children, instead of one.”
I leaned back on my chair. There was a small shift in my mother’s face, and I knew that she had simply decided not to listen to me anymore.
“Paula’s an excellent nanny,” my mother said quietly, with the firm decisiveness of a lawyer. Then she dutifully shoved a spoonful of rice into her mouth.
Of course, my mother never got a specially trained nanny. So after a while, something like a sense of guilt began looming inside me whenever I left Julia. The simplest solution was to stop doing things on my own. And that’s what I did.
*
Sometimes my dream had fish inside. The amount of fish and the types of aquatic animals roaming around in the water around me evolved over time, from small numbers of tiny, glistening silver fish to a large stingray. My body would be suspended in the water, and sometimes, my limbs would come dangerously close to a black stingray whirling through my bedroom, riding a swift, cold current. In the beginning, I felt a paralyzing sense of fear around these animals—the stingray with its large clump of wet, black mass, encircling me in almost a sinister, frantic dance, and a school of shimmering silver mackerels racing through the living room, zig-zagging their path around the floating couch until whoosh! They sped past me in a rush of motion.
Startled, I would wake up, abruptly thrown into an air of mundane silence and warmth. I would feel the crispy dryness of my bedsheets and realize, once again, that the water was nothing but a dream.
I always remembered the dream in intense, enervating detail. Once, I told my mother about this dream over breakfast, and she laughed and told me that maybe this was a sign for me to visit the aquarium. Or did I want to eat roasted mackerel?
After she left for work, I decided that I did indeed want to eat a roasted mackerel. So while Julia was taking an afternoon nap in her room after her usual walk to the park, I took the bus to Chinatown to buy two fresh mackerels. That evening, my mother came home from work, marinated the mackerel in her signature garlic sauce, and roasted them on the pan. Julia, who presided over the dinner in an unusually gloomy reverie, commented: “I don’t like dead fish.”
*
I didn’t have many friends to begin with, but my lack of friends was particularly evident during those six months. Most of my acquaintances were traveling—the post-college trip across Europe! The excitement!—or, in some cases, already working. I supposed there had to be some people who, like me, moved back into their parents’ homes, but if there were, they surely weren’t posting about their lives on Instagram.
The only person in town was Emilia, who went to the same high school as me for two years before dropping out. She later got her diploma via online school, and was now working as a café manager. We met frequently throughout that summer, both because she was the only person in town and because she was the only person I liked from high school. Julia, who was not to be left alone under any circumstances, accompanied me.
“Hi Julia—” Emilia would always say, smiling broadly. Her small teeth, yellowed from years of consistent smoking, peeked through her matte red lipstick, or sometimes purple lipstick, as she liked to change between these two colors. She knew from before not to try to hug Julia or pat her on the shoulder. Julia never said anything back to Emilia, which made things awkward, but after meeting for the third or the fourth time, Emilia seemed to have grown accustomed to her silence.
“She’s a bit tired today,” I said, peering at Julia’s face. She was biting her hand. I told her, you’re biting your hand. She looked at me, took out her hand from her mouth, and began staring off into the distance.
Emilia liked her job as a café manager. She really did, she said. Twice. It was definitely better than being a barista, and she could never manage an office job anyway. She was moving her body, she was interacting with different people, and she was paid better than most people in customer service. Then she rubbed her left collarbone, complaining that her skin was sticky from the sweat. She had lost a lot of weight from last year, which made her collarbones protrude, and she seemed to like this new development.
“I should get a job,” I mumbled contemplatively. I stared at my half-empty cappuccino, and I immediately regretted spending four bucks on it. Had I applied to any jobs yesterday? A light rush of anxiety leaped through my stomach, but I quickly pushed the thought aside. Julia, sitting next to me, was bouncing her legs together and reading a book all about toucans. She had finished her half glass of milk.
Emilia seemed sympathetic. “If shit hits the fan—” she gestured like a schoolteacher, which was ironic because she was anything but a schoolteacher, “which, I doubt it, because you are super smart and overqualified, but if it does, I can probably get you a job at the café.” Then she quickly glanced over at Julia, who was mumbling the words as she read.
I didn’t want her café job. Besides, the thought of grinning at customers and twisting ground coffee into the espresso machine until your fingertips turned brown wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I committed to Columbia. I looked at Emilia and her blonde-streaked hair.
“Thanks,” I smiled sheepishly.
Before hopping into Muni, Emilia hugged me tightly and reassured me that I needn’t be too stressed. I assured her, really, I wasn’t. My lack of stress was the cause of my stress. We laughed, and I watched her disappear beneath the station, feeling a strange rush of relief. I turned to Julia, who was standing next to me but looking elsewhere.
Let’s go home, I whispered. Mildly fatigued, I began walking, and she followed.
One particular variant of the dream had very light and warm water. It was as if the bright summer sun was filtering directly into the house, warming up the water and everything inside it. I floated through the house, now more or less adjusted to the process. By this time, I had even developed the ability to think about the various components of my surroundings, not just passively experiencing them. I wondered about the television, the refrigerator, and the other electronic appliances—what would happen to them? Were they ruined? During this dream, I discovered that our house had grown vegetation along the bottom crevice between the white walls and the wooden floor. Some areas in the hallway were padded with thick moss, and the expensive hallway carpet, displaced and shriveled, floated across in front of my eyes like a lost traveler.
At some indeterminable moment, I thought I heard the faintest echo of music. I suppose memories often arrive and overlap without reason, which was why, tangled in my bedsheets in the morning, I recalled my childhood in South Korea, when I would submerge my head into the local swimming pool and hear the day’s selection of underwater music. I would float, the bright chlorine blue wavering before my eyes, listening to the indefinite echo of Mozart’s Figaro. The music in my dream had exuded a similar feeling, although I could no longer recall what exactly I was hearing.
The feeling of submerging my head in a pool stayed with me for a couple of weeks after that. The days grew hot and I rotated through my routine, and I felt like I was drifting through the water, my ears just beneath the surface. Sitting next to Julia at the park, I grew bored and restless. I sat on the living room couch, listening to John’s soft murmurs as Julia did one math problem after another, and the feeling grew even more stifling.
So one night, after staring at the ceiling of my room for what seemed like hours on end, I re-downloaded Tinder. Then I swiped through profiles of bankers, consultants, and software engineers with nice teeth and sporty dogs.
Owen was twenty-seven with a glistening Tinder profile. He worked long hours at a consultancy, but was a self-advertised enthusiast for great wine, biking trips, and books. He appeared in front of the expensive Thai restaurant in a smart navy suit and a tie. He was a little short for my taste, but he had a soft smile that made me feel warm.
When I told him the story about submerging my head into the pool, he nodded understandingly and asked, “Do you go back often, then?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Why not?”
Why hadn’t I gone back?
“I guess I just never had the occasion for it.” I paused. “I did go back a couple of years ago, just for a week, when my father died.”
After a brief silence and a quick passing of usual condolences, Owen said he understood, he himself hadn’t been able to visit his extended family for years. His maternal grandparents lived in Ohio but his father was German, so all of his paternal grandparents and relatives were across the pond and he only saw them during marriages and funerals.
“Besides, nowadays I like to take my vacations to go somewhere alone. Last time, I went to Japan. Beautiful place. Have you been?”
I imagined myself in Japan, and then I imagined myself having a job to afford a trip to Japan.
“No, I haven’t. I heard it can be very expensive.”
“It was,” he agreed good-naturedly with a small frown, shaking his head. I liked that he did this. “But it was good practice for my Japanese. I’m trying to improve.”
“You speak Japanese?”
He shrugged modestly while chewing on a spoonful of curry. He made sure to swallow before opening his mouth again, which I also liked. “It’s just functional enough to work with clients. I wish I could speak more fluently. So I’m working on it.”
I sat in the dimly lit restaurant, wondering what other languages he spoke, then feeling small at my own failure of neglecting Korean. I vaguely thought of the Spanish classes I took in high school and regretted not taking more in college.
“By the way, I’m a super big fan of Japanese cinema. I’d love to show you my favorites sometime,” Owen added, smiling. I smiled back and nodded.
The next date, I ended up in his huge apartment in SoMa, staring up at the pebbled ceiling of his bedroom. The sex was remarkably average but Owen had offered me organic orange juice, a spare (wooden!) toothbrush, and an invitation to spend the night. Exhausted and wrapped up snugly in his thousand-thread Egyptian cotton bed sheets, Owen fell asleep quickly.
He had told me earlier in the evening that this was his first weekend off in a long while. He had just closed a project with a very important client from South Africa, which was why his boss gave him the right to turn off his phone for the weekend.
South Africa, I thought.
Listening to his sound, even breathing, I felt a bead of sweat coagulated on my forehead and wondered what the hell I was doing in his house. Then I hated myself for wasting time, precious time that I couldn’t get back.
I could re-learn Spanish and move to Mexico.
I quietly slipped out of his bed and picked up my underwear from the floor. I wedged myself into the little thing, balancing myself against the wall of his room, then groped the dark floor for my dress. I didn’t want to turn on the light and wake him up, so it took a while to find the right clump of cloth on the floor. The blue silk slip, which had been dry-cleaned prior to the occasion, was crumpled in the corner of the room. Owen had peeled it off and thrown it out of the way without looking at it enough. Feeling remorseful, I stood in the darkness and pulled the expensive dress over my head.
As I turned to leave the room, I glanced back at Owen. He, like many others in his position, hadn’t noticed a thing.
That night, the water felt strangely calm, like the stagnant waters of a closed lake. Feeling my body buoy off of my bed, I stared up at the blurred ceiling of my room. In the placid movement of the lake, my hair floated upwards, black and glossy and wavy like seaweed. As I floated and sank at the same time, I wondered if this was what people saw before drowning to their death.
Next Wednesday afternoon, Owen invited me to see a movie at his place. As I sat on the living room couch listening to John’s whispers and Julia’s rapid pencil scratches, I stared at this message. The slow spread of dread gnawed at my stomach like an intestinal worm. To my own surprise, the thought of seeing Owen again—with his pale belly and warm hands and pebbled ceiling—thoroughly repulsed me.
Feeling my chest burn like I had swallowed a lungful of seawater, I blocked his number and deleted Tinder.
*
When summer was inching towards autumn, I took Julia to the aquarium. She dressed herself in a billowy linen sundress, and following my suggestion, put on a light cardigan. I asked if she wanted to bring anything. She thought about this for a second, then nodded, went into her room, and silently packed a series of small notepads and black pens inside a small red bag, which she strapped across her torso. She wanted to draw the fish.
The slopes of San Francisco were steep, especially where we lived. Around the time when Julia was first diagnosed—which was around seven or so—I used to offer her my hand every time we had to go down the slopes, but she always adamantly refused, snatching her hand away close to her face. After a while, I learned to let her gingerly side-step down the slopes alone.
So we went, side by side, down the slopes and through the crowds and across the streets. The cooling breeze of late summer shifted through the clouds.
The Bay Aquarium is in one of the piers. Swarms of tourists crowded the walkway to the aquarium, with street performers thudding and drumming and blaring and shouting in an excited frenzy. Seagulls and pigeons flew by. I glanced at Julia, sensing her nerves unsettling.
“I don’t want to go,” she said abruptly, her feet planted on one spot.
“What?”
“I don’t want to go.”
I looked back at her. Her small figure was standing grimly within the passing crowd. The tall palm trees loomed overhead.
“What do you mean, you don’t want to go?”
Without warning, she shouted at the top of her lungs. “I don’t want to go!” She suddenly seemed on the verge of tears. She stomped her feet on the ground with the entire weight of her body. A group of tourists turned to look at her, whispered to each other, and gave me an expectant stare. I felt my ears flush.
A barefoot man bounced his hands on makeshift drums made out of water buckets. I stared at Julia. She had wrapped her small head with her hands.
I walked up to her. “Julia, we can’t go back now.”
“I don’t want to go!”
“Don’t shout—”
“No! No! I don’t want to go!”
Looking down at her, I felt a sharp, violent impulse to slap her across the face. Or better yet, to leave her and walk home alone. Then she would cry and cry under the hot sun, sweating and confused and sad, until some sympathetic stranger took her to the police station. She wouldn’t learn any lesson, but at least she would suffer.
*
It took some time before I convinced her to sit down at a nearby bench looking to the pier. The small fish boats floated restlessly in the docks, the seagulls flapped their wings, and the fat sea lions cried in the distance. My mind distant and blank, I wondered if any of these fish boats still fished, or they made their living out of hauling around gaping tourists across the small pond. A homeless man in dirty rags came by to ask if I had any change. I shook my head and shooed him away.
“We can rest here. Do you want ice cream?”
I looked around at some stalls on the street selling ice cream, churros, and bottled water. “Churros?”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to go.”
I sat down next to her. “But we’re so close!”
“I don’t want to go.”
I looked at her, sighed, and stared off into the distance. I was tired—it was an unexpectedly hot day and we had walked for a long time. Then it occurred to me that maybe she was tired, but she didn’t know how to say it.
I stood up and walked to the closest red food trolley. Shocked at the exorbitant, almost insulting, prices, I cautiously purchased a bottle of water. When I came back to the bench, Julia hadn’t budged one inch. Her hand clutched at her small bag.
“Look at that seagull,” I pointed to a large seagull, bobbing around in front of us.
She looked. “It’s super fat, isn’t it?” I asked. She blinked.
Feeling a sudden rush of thirst, I opened the cap of the water bottle and took large, satisfying gulps. The icy condensation of the wet bottle melted in my hand.
“I don’t want to go.”
“It’s okay, we don’t have to go.”
We sat in silence for a while. Then she looked at my water bottle.
“Do you want some water?” I asked, and without waiting for her answer, presented the bottle in front of her.
She took the bottle with both of her hands. Then, without hesitating, she carefully unscrewed the cap and began to take small sips. Seated side by side on the bench, we each stared off into the distance, and the rancorous echo of tourists and street peddlers and cars and seagulls and waves seemed to fade away into a stony silence.
We must have sat like this for twenty minutes. Julia was the one to break the silence. “Let’s go,” she said.
I looked at her. She was vaguely looking at my direction, clutching at her bag. I nodded and stood up. She followed.
Inside the looming darkness of the aquarium, the great depths of the sparkling blue stretched out before us. The deserted interiors created a silence that was vast and ever-knowing; and I wondered, briefly, how I would feel as a whale, lonesome but magnificent, gliding through a deep, dark ocean.
Julia and I stood in front of the fluorescent jellyfish for a long time. Across a seemingly infinite span of electric blue, these strange creatures floated upwards, sideways, and downwards. Glowing in a transparent shade of pink, they pumped their way forward, then they let go, aimlessly drifting down, down, down, until they found the strength to pump and pump again.
“Do you want to draw these?” I asked quietly.
She stared at them for a while. Her glazed pupils were a sea of blue, with glittering jellyfish swimming inside. Then she shook her head.
The underwater tunnel was the most fascinating area for her. Save for one or two families, we were alone in the tunnel, and she spent a good while standing still, craning her neck up to the ceiling where sharks and stingrays swam across in good spirit. After a while, she took out one of her small notepads, and began drawing them in earnest, her mouth slightly ajar. I stood next to her and waited, peering back and forth between her notepad and her subjects. In the end, she produced a whole page full of squiggly black sharks and small fish.
When she finished drawing, she mumbled something underneath her breath.
“What?” I asked again.
“Why do you never swim?”
Puzzled at this question, I mulled it over.
It was a tricky question, because I did swim. In fact, I swam a lot. I had grown up swimming, even competing for my high school team. Surely, she saw me swim many times.
“But I do swim,” I said.
“No, you never swim.”
I sank back into myself, even more confused. Why would she ask that I never swam, when she saw me swim many times? Did she mean that I chose not to swim?
We walked across the tunnel. A large swirl of silver fish, maybe salmon or maybe mackerel, swam overhead in a big circle. Then a fat, brown, ordinary fish swam through them, disrupting the trance. Splotches of light gleamed above the fish, like the scatters of summer light filtering through the small waves of the swimming pool.
“Did we go somewhere where we were supposed to swim and I didn’t swim?”
“No,” she responded curtly.
After a while, she looked at me. Never my eyes, but at my nose. “In our house.”
“What do you mean in our house?”
“When our house has water. You never swim. You just float.”
I blinked several times. She continued to march through the tunnel, determined to get to the other side, and I trailed behind her, unconsciously slackening my speed. When our house has water?
Towards the end of the tunnel, she stopped abruptly, and looked up at a large black stingray. She shrieked in surprise, pointing to the animal in utter happiness.
“It’s like Marshall. He looks like Marshall.”
“Marshall?”
Her words quickened. “Marshall is a giant freshwater stingray. Marshall comes to our house. Didn’t you see?”
I was dumbstruck during our trip back home. I felt nearly sick at some point, with the pit of my stomach turning inside out.
When we returned to our house, I put Julia to her weekly bubble bath. All the while I warmed the water, poured the bath oil, and tossed her favorite rubber toys inside, I felt my stomach twist into a sharp coil, unwind itself, and twist up again. After Julia undressed herself and gingerly stepped into the water, I watched her carefully wet her hair into one thick strand. Then I sat down on the toilet with a book.
After reading several pages of the book, I closed it, and watched her some more. She was playing with her miniature shark.
“Julia?”
She didn’t respond and kept on waving her shark around. But I knew she heard me.
“Did you have a dream that you were swimming with fish?”
I felt the warm condensation of the bathroom soak into my skin. Julia said whoosh, and plunged her shark into the bubbly water.
I was persistent. “Inside our house?”
“It’s not a dream,” she said. “And I swim. But you just float, and I don’t know why.”
“Do I?”
“You just float, and then sometimes look at things.”
“Do you see me?”
“Yeah,” she said matter-of-factly. “But I play with Marshall, so I don’t see you a lot.”
That night, I had the dream again. Bathed in a turquoise glint of shallow water, the hallway outside of my room had grown a long stretch of coral reefs. Their presence didn’t surprise me; somehow I had known that they would be there. The layers of stony corals were intricate with tips, folds, and crevices; and in the deep silence of the water, they harbored swarms of colorful fish that were riotous with life, quick in movements and phosphorescent in their glow. As I floated through the hallway, I spotted groups of small fish with orange stripes flittering around clumps of pink anemone, and I paused to peer at them, wondering why they seemed so familiar.
Towards the end of the hallway, the water grew bluer and the currents became stronger. Suddenly, a forceful curl of the water pushed me from behind, swallowing me and sweeping me along so that my vision blurred and my limbs grew numb—and I thought, in the violent swirl of the currents, that perhaps this was my end. But when I closed my eyes in a vague sense of acceptance, the water slowed like the tide lapping against the shore. Opening my eyes again, I felt my vision clear, and I was hypnotized by what I found: Julia, dressed in her baby pink pajamas, laughing and gurgling up large bubbles, swishing her arms in the densely blue water as an enormous black stingray circled her, tickled her, and brushed against her.
When I woke up in the morning, I had tangled up my whole sheet within my legs. I laid there for several minutes, basking in the sunlight, thinking about nothing and everything. Everything and nothing. It was as if my ears were still plugged from water, the thick liquid oozing out from my ears and my body.
In the kitchen, I found my mother cooking spicy sausages on a pan. Julia sat on one of the kitchen stools reading intently about waterfowls.
“You’re up late,” my mother observed lightheartedly. “But it’s okay. Julia told me you two walked all the way to the Pier.”
“Yeah,” I mumbled, and sat down on the dining table. The bright morning sunlight streamed through the living room windows. Still half asleep, I subconsciously checked out the television and refrigerator. They both seemed to be working fine.
“I’m going to stay home today,” my mother continued. “Go see Emilia, get a coffee, converse with other people.”
I smirked and glanced over at Julia. She was so completely engrossed in her bird book. What was it that was so captivating about birds? Was it the way they looked? I had spent my entire youth fending away pigeons and thinking that every white bird was a seagull. Animals and birds and such had never really interested me.
I didn’t even know what those Nemo-fish were called.
I sat in my seat numbly for several minutes.
“Julia,” I called out.
As always, she didn’t respond. She flipped a page in the book in earnest.
“You know Finding Nemo, the movie? What kind of fish is Nemo?”
She flipped another page. My mother finished the sausages, placed them carefully on three plates, and asked me if I wanted eggs. I nodded.
“Clownfish,” Julia blurted out loudly.
My mother glanced at her, amused. “Did you see them at the Aquarium?”
Julia looked up at me, and I looked at her.
“Yeah.”
Then she quickly nodded to herself and went back to her book. That night, for the first time in several months, I slept without a dream.
Yoojin Shin is a recent graduate from the London School of Economics who has been nurturing a lifelong love for the creative arts. After accumulating an eclectic range of experiences in journalism, academia, and the fine arts, she launched the Baram House with Natalie Anderson over a plate of cheesecake. You can learn more about her artworks and writings at www.yoojin-shin.com.
