Recognition hits me.Delina. Beautiful child Delina.My friend Aida’s younger sister.It’s not Aida. My eyes hurry over the villagers but don’t see my friend. I expected to see Aida presented to Leith, not Delina.
The light of the bonfire at Delina’s back makes her skin even darker as it also makes her eyes and shells glint provocatively.
Checking Leith’s expression, I find him priming and smitten, with a grin on his face bigger than I’ve seen in weeks. A lightness lifts my weighted heart. He grabs Delina to him and plants a kiss on her lips.
The villagers cheer and a sneaky tear falls from my eye. I wipe it away before anyone notices.
Part of me wishes, covets deeply for a celebration like this of my own. Of dressing up in the village’s finest to offer myself to a male who has traveled from afar to be mine. To lead him by hand to my bedding and take his manhood into me…
I clench at the fantasy.
The same way I clench and moan late at night as my body hollows out with emptiness. I’m longing, desperate to be sated by this shadow male who doesn’t exist. This other half of me who would forever be missing.
I sigh.
Then, like always, the loneliness settles through, filling my void like a chilly breeze, and I hide my face.
Tulia noticed when my first blood came, when my breasts grew, and when my eyes began to linger on the mermen who would sometimes come to visit and smile at me. They liked luring me close with the promise of a simple kiss, only to laugh at me and go toy with their playmates. How I gazed upon them with the envy nipping at me now, wishing I could do the same as them.
Tulia was as a mother to me during those years as I tried to grasp what was happening to my being, why I cared so much for a mate of my own. She helped me understand that all my nights would be lonely. And that there were other ways of finding satisfaction… Like caring for my tribe, helping the elders, and protecting my brother so another may not long as I do.
I lift my raw palms to my mouth and blow on them again, cooling the burn.
Delina leads Leith away into the dark.Goodbye, brother.
His nights will never be lonely. And because of that, there may still be a good future for our people.There’s pride in this as well, I note.I helped make this happen.
Aida appears out of nowhere, joining me now that our siblings are gone.
Her fellow tribesmen begin dancing around the bonfire as a freshly cooked feast of fish and fruit is passed around.
“I thought it would be you,” I whisper, dropping my hands, facing her.
“The elders think Delina will bear more and healthier young than I,” she murmurs back.
Pain laces her voice. Aida’s been looking forward to this celebration for years, believing Leith would be hers. We both thought my brother would be hers.
Aida doesn’t look much like Delina, having inherited the paler brown skin on her mother’s side. Unlike Delina, Aida is tall, lean, and sharp of features. She does not follow her younger sister’s style in heavy braids but keeps her curls pulled taut, away from her face, to tumble wildly down her back. Bracelets line her arms, and feathers adorn her tied-back hair in a wild array. Aida wears a small headdress of shells. Her eyes are just as slanted as Delina’s, but Aida uses the kohl on her face sparingly.
She and I couldn’t look more different.
She’s so beautiful it hurts.
Whereas I have pale blond hair almost the same length as Aida’s, though mine can not hold a curl unless it was dried with ocean-water, and even then, a curl it wasn’t but a weak bump. I keep my braids loose—if I even put the time in to fix them—and kohl isn’t something my tribe utilizes. We live away from the jungle’s shadows, and our camouflage was that of mute coloring and white shells to reflect like the sands. And though my skin is gold from sunlight—my hair the same—it’s still light compared to Aida’s richness. Sand’s Hunters wear mainly snakeskins and croc hides, where Shell Rock weaves shells, fish scales, and seaweed nets to cover our skin. We take after the mermaids that play in our lagoon.
Aida once told me her father’s people came east from the dry wastes to settle and join in unison with a tribe already established on the Mermaid Gulf.
“Will you be okay?” I ask. My loneliness and longing are nothing compared to Aida’s.
“Yes. I’ve had my time to mourn.”
She lies.
This isn’t only a bleakness of a dwindling future for our people, but so much more. We see the elder men of our tribes and wonder why there aren’t as many now as several generations ago. We see the love and care and stoicism they share with their mates, with their children, and wish we can have that for ourselves.
The red comet above casts its muted red light atop us.
I exhale. “Do you want to join me in Shell Rock and stay with us for a season?” It’s the best I can offer: a reprieve from the mating courtship that was soon to happen here. I raise my palms back to my mouth to blow on them again.
