Commission: Siren Sorority

There were always things that marked a particular family out as different, whether it was a quirky tradition that they observed without fail and which meant nothing whatsoever to an outsider, or simply the habit of still speaking in the language that they had brought with them from the old country when surrounded by kin. But there had never been anything of that kind for the Jefferson family before the fateful day that saw an accident send the car containing Cassie and Maddie’s parents plunging to their premature deaths in the bottom of a deep ravine.
  When all of the dizzying legal matters were settled, the fact that Cassie was technically an adult meant that she was suddenly informed that she was the head of the remaining family, owned the small house by the lake in which they had all lived, and was now the guardian of her sister, effectively the sole parent of a girl only two years her junior. For a couple of years they had struggled to deal with the emotions that came with what had happened, as well as living the lives of teenagers in the modern world, and though things seemed to have normalised in the space of those years, it was beneath the surface that things had begun to grow strange and somewhat eccentric in the lives of the sisters.
  To begin with, Cassie had little time for the dreams which came almost every night, shaking her head of russet blonde curls at the very notion that there was anything to be worried about and simply ignoring them in favour of the many more pressing things that required her attention in the real world. But then the quieter, more withdrawn nature of Maddie’s character was all the more likely to lead her to contemplate a dream as something more important than a night’s passing fancy, as if her pale complexion and straight, black hair made her more the epitome of a fairy tale princess that could easily be enchanted by whimsy.
  It was over coffee every morning, before Cassie grabbed her bags, keys and mobile in the usual dash for the back door, that her sister tended to mention the dreams, and it was not the subject matter, in of itself, that caught her attention on that specific morning.
  “I had it again last night,” Maddie said, “the mermaid dream.”
  “Sweet,” Cassie hardly acknowledged the comment. “If they keep up until your eighteenth, I’ll buy you one of those stretchy tails they sell on the internet – I’ll even help you film one of those godawful mermaid series on YouTube. You know the ones, where the nauseating teenage girls always discover that their mother was a mermaid, and that’s why they don’t fit in with the popular kids!”
  “I had a purple tail,” Maddie repeated an often shared detail of the dreams, “and you – you had a blue one.”
  “What do you mean?” though her sister could not see with her back turned, Cassie had frozen in her progress to the back door.
  “Just that,” Maddie shrugged. “You were in the dream too, as a mermaid, with a blue tail.”
  Cassie quickly retraced her steps to the table in the middle of the kitchen floor and sat down opposite her sister.
  “And what did we do, in this dream?” she asked, trying not to sound too desperate for the answer.
  “I dunno,” Maddie shrugged again, “mermaid stuff, I suppose – we swam around a lot, went looking for interesting stuff on the bottom of the lake, spent a lot of time platting each other’s hair, which took so long because of that load of tangles that you have on top of your head, by the way!”
  Cassie tried to act casual as she changed her normally rigid morning routine, sitting down opposite her sister and pouring herself a cup of the very coffee that she was utterly against even having in the house.
  “Is that all we did?” Cassie asked.
  “Why are you suddenly so interested in my mermaid dreams?” suddenly Maddie was looking her straight in the eye, scrutinising every inch of her elder sister’s face for a clue as to what ulterior motive might be behind her uncharacteristic interest.
  “Oh, no reason,” Cassie lied badly.
  “Sure,” Maddie gave her a saccharine smile, “then you’ll not care if I don’t answer the question, will you?”
  “Okay,” Cassie threw her arms in the air, “I’ll be honest with you. I’ve been having some dreams about mermaids too. I just wanted to compare notes, you know? See if yours were any different to mine. There’s still that dream encyclopaedia of mom’s in the study, and I’ve thought about looking up mermaids in there. But I’d not plucked up the courage to do it, and I…I don’t know, maybe I thought if other people had them as well, then they’d not be as likely to mean something crazy.”
  “Sure, sure,” Maddie changed the tone of her voice to sound more sympathetic, “we can look in the book together. Jeez, is it that important to know what we did in a silly dream and as a couple of goofy mermaids?”
  “It’s dumb,” Cassie admitted, “but yeah, it’d help me!”
  “Okay,” Maddie sounded resigned but still surprised, “okay – we swam around a lot, picked up junk off of the bottom of the lake, messed around doing our hair, and then we sang for a bit. That was funny, actually,” she paused to laugh before going on. “It wasn’t like sirens luring sailors, or anything. We were just sitting there, on this rock, belting out Disney tunes like bad karaoke!”
  “Really?” Cassie tried to sound amused, even as she felt a shiver run through her body. “What were we singing?”
  “That was it,” Maddie laughed again, “that was the weirdest thing – we were both mermaids, but we weren’t singing Part of Your World, or even Under the Sea. We were doing our usual thing of absolutely murdering Whole New World!”
  Maddie burst into more peals of laughter, but soon stopped as she registered the look on Cassie’s face.
  “Yeah, that’s really weird,” Cassie said, after a long silence. “It was weird when we did the exact same thing in my dream too.”

From that point on, the sisters became almost obsessive over their mermaid dreams, making detailed logs of all that they could recall as soon as they awoke in the morning and doing the same if they chanced to awake in the middle of the night when the memories were fresher in their minds. They scoured the dream encyclopaedia for clues as to what they might mean, soon coming to believe that the trite explanations they found, all of which centred around doubting their femininity and being secretive by nature, were simply not good enough. To the sisters, it seemed that the dreams were too frequent, detailed and deep in terms of what took place in them to be wholly explained by a simple passage in a book, and that was even before they accounted for the fact that they were a shared experience between the two of them.
  Their daily lives continued largely unaffected, indeed the focus and shared drive that they developed for exploring their dreams gave each of them a sense of purpose and discipline in its execution that made their other habits become more organised from sheer need. Indeed there were times when the sisters realised that their shared dreaming was becoming almost as real and absorbing as the lives that they were living whilst awake, and when the time came each evening to retire to bed, it was almost as though they were not saying a brief farewell before falling into a routine sleep, but rather before they stepped over a threshold and into another world altogether.
  Maddie, always the artist of the family, began to fill the walls of her bedroom with sketches in pencil, charcoal and ink of herself and Cassie in their mermaid dream-forms, and her sister could not help being amazed at the details that endured in them from the nightly sessions of swimming beneath the water of the lake. Unlike mundane dreams, which were quick to fade once the concerns of the waking world returned, these remained as vivid and vibrant as any memory attached to their daily lives.
  Neither of them spoke a word about the mermaid dreams to another soul, not from any formal agreement that it should be kept private, but more from an unspoken and instinctual feeling that what they were experiencing was theirs alone. The sisters did not want the mysteries of the dreams analysed or explained by an outside party, because to them they did not represent one that needed to be solved. In addition there was the ever-present fear that what they had been granted was special, a unique indulgence that had been given in secret and might as easily be withdrawn if that strange and unspoken confidence were to be broken.

On the day of her twenty-first birthday, Cassie had no plans to meet up with friends or even leave the house to celebrate. Instead she had chosen to stay at home for the weekend and spend the time with Maddie, partly for the sake of dealing with the realisation that she was now officially the head of the family in the eyes of the law, and surreptitiously to broach the subject of college applications with her younger sibling.
  Both of the sisters were gifted students in their chosen areas of study, and while Cassie was already feeling guilty at the letter of acceptance she was hiding at the bottom of a drawer in her room, she knew also that Maddie was almost guaranteed to be offered a scholarship to pursue her art as well. It would mean them both leaving their home by the lakeside, living apart in different towns or cities, even maybe in different states, but Cassie was sure that neither of them could remain as they were, living in semi-isolation by the lakeside and effectively in the shell of the lives they had enjoyed when their parents were alive.
  It was a little after midday, with a mild midsummer morning giving way to what promised to be a slightly warmer afternoon, when Cassie put down the pen and notebook that she had been using to make a record of their latest series of excursions beneath the imagined waters of the lake. She had meant to lean over and make an encouraging comment about the sketch that Maddie was making on a large spiral-bound pad, hoping to gently steer them towards the subject of her studying art full time at an institution with a sound reputation for the same.
  What stopped her was a sudden flush of unsteadiness, sweeping from head to toe.
  “Woah,” she steadied herself on the arm of the sofa as she resisted the dizziness that came along with it, “head-rush.”
  “You too?” Maddie looked up from her pad, a questioning look on her face.
  “Just now, when I tried to stand up,” Cassie said, “it’ll pass.”
  “Don’t hold your breath,” Maddie shook her head. “I’ve been feeling woozy all morning. That’s why I’m sitting here on the floor and not on the sofa – I had to sit down before I fell down. Luckily I was already carrying my drawing stuff when it hit me.”
  “Think it was the takeout we reheated for supper last night?” Cassie asked.
  “Tasted fine to me,” Maddie shrugged. “Say, have you got a dry mouth as well?”
  Cassie nodded, only then realising how scratchy and parched her throat felt.
  Instinctively she reached for the bottle of water on the low table by the sofa and unscrewed the cap, drinking off almost half of the contents before she even realised she was doing so. Both of the sisters were in the habit of carrying plastic sports bottles and filling them with water throughout the day, and so they were always to hand. The liquid relived a little of the feeling that had been tickling her throat, but it did nothing at all to ease the dizziness, which, if anything, was getting steadily worse with each minute that passed.
  “This isn’t good,” Cassie shook her head as she fumbled for her cell phone, “I think we need to maybe call an ambulance.”
  “Seriously?” Maddie asked.
  “Yes, seriously,” Cassie nodded. “I’m feeling worse by the second.”
  She tried to swipe the screen of her phone and dial 911, but there was something jerky and awkward about the way her fingers moved that made the familiar task almost impossible. Cassie made a frustrated sound and tried more than once to persevere before she totally lost her grip and dropped the phone down the side of the sofa.
  “Damn it!” she cursed.
  “It’s happening to me too,” Maddie sounded increasingly worried as she held up one hand and showed off how hard it was becoming for her to hold onto the pencil with which she had been sketching.
  “This feels like one of those seizures that Mom used to get,” Cassie had a hand to her forehead, as she spoke, though she could not have said if it was to check her temperature or just for the sake of supporting her head in general, “when she had the majorly bad headaches that used to put her out for the best part of a day.”
  “But we never got them before,” Maddie replied.
  “No,” Cassie agreed, “but Mom told me that she only started with them when she was in her twenties, that she didn’t get them when she was younger either.”
  “Wow,” Maddie rolled her eyes in exasperation, “thanks for the shitty inheritance!”
  Had she not been gripped by the weird sensations that were keeping her from getting a handle of what was going on, Cassie would have been quick to scold her younger sister for speaking about their late mother with such a lack of respect, but as then she was also sure that Maddie would not have done so under normal circumstances either.
  “God,” Cassie almost shouted the word out of plain shock, “what the hell!”
  There had been a sudden and gut-churning sensation of something convulsing in the very core of her body, every muscle between her navel and knees seeming to pulse and flex at once and in a manner that was utterly unfamiliar. At the same time, Cassie’s legs went as stiff as a board, pointing out in front of her so that her bare feet stretched as if she were standing on tip-toe, both limbs rigid and unmoving once they were in that position.
  The only thing that she could compare the feeling to was the intense experience of dislocating her shoulder years before and the sensation of a part of her body being wrenched, first out of true, and then back into its rightful place, with the latter being more painful to endure than the former. But now it was as if entire portions of her body were moving of their own accord, muscles shifting, tendons switching the ways in which they would move and bones warping their very shape.
  Cassie wailed in genuine pain as she felt something rip and tear inside of her abdomen, and saw the undulations that the process was creating beneath her skin.
  She was wearing nothing more than a short denim skirt and a vest-top on account of the warm summer weather, and as she slid down on the sofa, Cassie could only watch as her legs literally began to change shape before her eyes. The first true wrenches of transformation began beneath her skirt and then moved steadily downwards, as she felt parts of her body rearrange themselves and the muscles in her thighs change their shape, at the same time her skin puckered and tightened, making her feel as though it was trying to shed itself and conform to a radically different texture all at once.
  As soon as the changes took hold of the portion of her legs that were not covered by her skirt, Cassie saw that they were rapidly turning into one single limb, joining together and leaving no trace of a divide. In addition their skin was erupting into what could only be described as scales, pushing their way above the surface, the same colour as her flesh to begin with, but quickly darkening until they became a glossy shade of sky blue, catching the light as they did so.
  She recognised the colour almost instantly; the dreams had been so vivid.
  “It’s coming true,” she gasped through gritted teeth, “the dream’s coming true!”
  Maddie said nothing in reply, merely watching helplessly as her elder sister’s legs knitted themselves together and became covered in their new layer of scales. By the time the transformation reached her ankles, there was no longer any trace of Cassie’s former shape, just one long continuation of sky blue, and they both stared in silence as her feet finally melded together, her toes beginning to flatten and flare out as a thick membrane formed between them. Within seconds, Cassie no longer had feet either, as they became an ever-broadening caudal fin which spread across the boards of the floor beneath her.
  Similar membranes could now be seen between Cassie’s fingers, perhaps explaining the stiffening of her hands, and even as she gazed down at them, Maddie’s gasps and the direction of her gaze alerted her to the fact that she was already growing matching fins from the edges of her ears and up the length of her forearms. Smaller fins had also sprouted from the sides of what was now clearly her tail, and as the pain of her transformation began to diminish, she could not help but be amazed at the sensitivity that these new appendages seemed to possess.
  “Cassie,” Maddie reached out towards her, “you’re…”
  “I’m a mermaid!” Cassie nodded in confusion, holding her webbed hands up to her eyes, as if the improved light would somehow disprove the fact.
  Even as Maddie tried to get up and come to her sister’s aid, she was doubled over by a sudden pain and curled herself up into a ball on the floor.
  Cassie cried out in wordless alarm and flopped onto the floor, rolling gracelessly to the younger girl’s side, her mermaid’s form clumsy and awkward in the middle of a house intended for humans and not being’s deprived of legs.
  It did not take as much as a word from Maddie for the newly-transformed mermaid to guess that the same process was now underway in the other girl’s body and that her sister was about to suffer the very same fate. There was no time for Cassie to have even a single thought about how to stop what was happening, and she was not sure that there was anything she could have done if she had, so all that remained was to do the best that she was able to comfort and support Maddie as she succumbed to the changes wracking her body.
  Unlike Cassie, Maddie had not been so lucky as to have been wearing a skirt when the transformation took her, and so she soon found the merging of her legs hampered to a terrible degree by the sweatpants she chose to relax around the house in. Her sister did all that she could to help, pulling clumsily at the waistband of the pants with her webbed fingers, succeeding in hastily scratching and pinching the girl’s rapidly changing flesh almost as often as she managed to ease them down by a few short inches.
  But inch by inch, the pants came down, followed almost too closely by the progress of her legs forming into a tail and her skin puckering into a coat of shimmering scales, purple in colour and a stark contrast to her pale complexion. Only by redoubling her efforts and giving into the fact that her hands now had a great deal more in common with unwieldy mittens than a pair of dextrous gloves, was Cassie able to keep ahead of the changes and finally yank the pants off of the younger girl’s ankles and feet before they disappeared from sight, being replaced before her very eyes with a violet caudal fin that was a close match to her own.
  It was almost impossible to tell if the intense sounds that Maddie was making were merely exhausted gasps for breath or actually pained sobs as the fins that marked the completion of her transformation into a mermaid unfurled from the sides of her tail and her hands grew webbing of their own. But Cassie chose to interpret the lack of tears around her sister’s eyes as a positive sign and ascribe them to her being physically taxed and worn out, just as she felt herself.
  She tried to stroke Maddie’s hair, but soon found that her newly-webbed hands were less than ideal for the job, becoming tangled and threatening to snag painfully. There was also the obstacle of the fins and fronds that now extended from her sister’s ears, in as much as Cassie could not be sure if they were either delicate or else too sensitive to be touched, and so she settled for placing what she hoped was a comforting hand on her shoulder instead.
  Maddie became silent and glanced down at her sister’s hand.
  “Suits you,” she said with a rueful laugh, “the colour – brings out your freckles.”
  Cassie laughed at the ludicrous nature of the statement and the insane notion that they were sitting in around in their own living room, swapping compliments about the particular details of their newly-acquired tails, as if mermaids were real did the same mundane things as the average person in the street.
  “You too,” she shrugged as she gave into the situation, seeing no other alternative presenting itself. “I’ve always told you how jealous I am of you being the dark and mysterious type. Now this happens to us, and I still end up as the plain, straight-up vanilla mermaid. You, on the other hand, get the colour that just screams mysterious siren!”
  “This is so crazy,” Maddie laughed a little manically. “How come we’re joking about this? Shouldn’t we be screaming the place down and losing it? We just turned into fricking mermaids, right before our own eyes!”
  Cassie was silent for a moment, thinking clearly for the first time since her transformation.
  “Remember what Ethan Hawke says to Julie Delpy in that film where they wander around Paris?” she said eventually. “I mean the scene where he talks about them studying people who won the lottery and people who lost a limb or something. He says that they found the people that were happy beforehand were still happy afterwards, whether they won the money or lost the leg, and that the same was true of the miserable people too – the important thing was that something really epic happened to them, and they pretty much stayed the same kind of person regardless.”
  “You mean we’re just a pair of dumb bimbos that’ll chat about our hair,” Maddie gave her a half-joking scowl, “whether we’re mermaids or not?”
  “Shut up!” Cassie shot back. “No – what I mean is that whatever’s happened to us, whether it was losing Mom and Dad or having to learn to get by on our own and make a home out of this place and a life for us both. Whatever it was, we managed it and we kept a hold of who we were and what we meant to each other through it all. After all of that, how can becoming a pair of mermaids be anything like as much of a challenge?”
  “I suppose,” Maddie sounded non-committal.
  “Think about it,” Cassie urged, not wanting her sister to sink into a well of depression, not least because she feared doing the same herself, “this is the twenty-first century. It’s not like we’re going to have to join a freakshow to get by, is it? Everyone works from home these days, we can order whatever we need online and have them leave it out on the porch without even having to be seen.”
  “What about school?” Maddie asked.
  “We’ll do correspondence courses and study online,” Cassie tried to keep up the momentum of what was rapidly becoming a speech, to outpace Maddie’s perfectly logical objections.
  “That’s what Mom did,” Maddie said, seemingly at random.
  The unexpected mention of their mother sparked a thought in Cassie’s mind, and she the fact away with the look of concentration that suddenly spread over her face.
  “What’s up?” Maddie asked in concern. “Did I upset you by talking about Mom?”
  “No,” Cassie dismissed her concerns gently, “no, it’s not that. It’s just that you mentioning Mom and all of the things we’ll have to do now that we’re apparently destined to be mermaids for real, it made me rethink some stuff that I’d always kind of taken for granted. Like why exactly do we live all the way out here by the lake?”
  “Dad always said he hated crowds,” Maddie answered.
  “Yeah, but did that stop him throwing big-ass parties up here, or taking us into the city to see the Thanksgiving parades?” Cassie pressed on as her sister began to look thoughtful. “Why have we all got our own bathrooms when the place is so small? Did Mom really have to hide herself away when she had those migraines, or was there something else going on?”
  “What…what,” Maddie stammered, “you think Mom was a mermaid too?”
  “It’d make a whole lot more sense than just that they were a pair of eccentrics that deliberately did things that screwed around with how they were supposed to be eccentric,” Cassie concluded.
  “Maybe,” Maddie replied as she drained her bottle of water completely.
  Cassie licked her lips at the sight of her sister drinking so deeply, and then copied her actions with the bottle that she had been carrying with her as well.
  “Maybe we should leave speculating until later,” Cassie gasped, “because I feel like I’m gonna die if I don’t get rehydrated in a serious way pretty soon!”
  Maddie did not even nod in agreement this time, instead resignedly turning over so that she was laid upon her belly and began dragging herself bodily across the floor towards the door. Cassie followed her lead, noting how heavy her tail felt behind her and how it seemed capable of doing literally nothing to help her move on land. For all of the times in their dreams when a mermaid’s form had been a delight to possess as they swam through water, finding herself transformed into one on land was a great deal more like being a seal than an elegant siren.

The sisters remained silent as they crawled towards their respective bathrooms, branching off when the doors presented themselves and then each only knowing that the other was still present on account of the twinned sounds of a mermaid struggling to haul herself into a tub which had been designed for a human being to merely step into. One after the other they finally flopped into the bathtubs, resting for a moment to catch breath before turning on the taps and sagging backwards to relax as the water began to fill the space around them.
  Cassie had always enjoyed the sensation of taking a bath, but now it was something more akin to a person that had been terminally short of breath inhaling oxygen and finding relief, as her entire body seemed to become instantly more supple, her muscles releasing their tension and her limbs becoming almost limp.
  In contrast to how much of her body relaxed, she soon became aware of the fact that the effect of the water upon her scales and fins was quite the opposite. Where the former had appeared somewhat abrasive in the open air and the latter flopped a little even when she flicked and twisted them, as soon as they were under water they felt as though they had come to life.
  Her tail floated instinctively and her fins rippled in keeping with the way the water flowed.
  Cassie sighed from the sheer pleasure of being in what she supposed was now her element.

It was dusk when Cassie finally heard the sound of her sister making her way along the floor of the hallway, through the open front door of the house and out onto the porch with the agonising slowness that they were both beginning to come to terms with as the only speed possible for a mermaid on dry land.
  Maddie reached the step where Cassie was sitting with her tail stretched out before her, and she swung her own around and sat with it hunched up to her chin and her arms wrapped around it, just like a human might have done with her head on her knees.
  There had been no agreement between them to meet on the porch at that particular time, and Cassie had been happily alone there, watching the sunset for maybe half an hour before being joined by her younger sister. But neither of them truly needed to speak in order to confirm what had brought them out of the house in the first bloom of the evening and where they were headed to next.
  Cassie simply looked her sister in the eye.
  Both nodded at the same moment.
  And then, clasping their hands together for a few seconds in gesture of mutual support, they lowered themselves down from the steps at the edge of the porch and began, what was for a mermaid at least, the long crawl towards the lakeside.
  Not for the first time, the sisters would spend the hours of the night beneath its surface, swimming amongst the fish that shimmered in the twilight water and exploring the rocky landscape of its very bottom.
  But for the very first time, they would do so in the waking world.
  And they would do so as mermaids.