“Well, um, let’s see if the documentaries explain it,” he said with an uncharacteristic amount of discomfort. “I will get them all queued up. You bring all the food over to the coffee table. It looks like we are having an inside day.”
With that, the two of them sat down on the sectional with a spread of French toast, pancakes, hash browns, bacon, and eggs.
“Not fish eggs,” Monty was quick to explain when Iris’s lip curled. That was the one seafood she could never bring herself to eat—something about the texture making her gag—but her mother liked to have them served at all their royal meals. And, apparently, it wasn’t becoming of a princess to try to discreetly spit the eggs into her hand and feed them to the snails that always hung under the table, hoping for scraps.
She didn’t let herself remember the time she’d tried to hide the eggs in her seashell bra. Only to have them come floating out when she’d been dancing with an important selkie political figure.
Iris poked dubiously at the eggs. Even though they were yellow and fluffy and didn’t resemble anything close to fish eggs.
On the screen, a generic-looking man with a hangover tummy and round glasses moved into frame in his tweed suit.
“Did you just swim to the surface? Crawl from thedepths of the Earth’s core? Come screaming through another dimension? Welcome. This isThe Surface World: A History and Survival Guide.”
Iris’s eyes went wide, surprised such a thing existed. But also a little comforted that she wasn’t the only creature to feel much like a fish out of water—flopping around helplessly.
“In this series, we will examine the core behaviors of human beings: movement, communication, mating rituals, beliefs, and recreational habits …”
“Oh, B-roll,” Monty declared as the narrator appeared beside two human beings, naked as the day they were born, standing there with blank expressions as the man used a stick to point to the various points of their bodies.
The lessons went on from there. Until Iris not only knew the proper words for all human organs but also why so many felt shame at their nakedness.
She could hardly believe what she was hearing. The parts that made humans who they were—breathing, pulsing, needing—were considered … inappropriate?
It was no wonder they covered everything up in so much stiff fabric and scrambled to look away at the sight of nipples.
It was all so fragile, so performative.
She missed the salt and softness of merlife. The honesty of bare skin. The comfort of the water to carry you away when things felt too heavy.
And everything on the surface felt like too much to carry on her back.
“But more on this topic inDisc 7: The Laws and Lawlessness of Humans,” the narrator went on before launching into an explanation of strange human habits.
“I still don’t understand the human obsession withtelevision,” Iris declared a few hours later, flopping back against the cushions, bored out of her mind.
Even if she had learned a lot.
“That, my sea fairy, is because you have yet to experience,” Monty declared, reaching for the remote control, “soap operas.”
“Why would anyone write an opera about soap?”
To that, Monty did nothing but groan and declare she would see soon enough.
To his credit, she was deeply engrossed in the make-believe characters within two episodes, no matter how absurd their storylines.
At some point, Iris was vaguely aware of Henry and Finn in the apartment but decided to ignore their existence completely.
It wasn’t until Finn declared to Henry that he was going to take a shower before they headed out that Iris declared, “Don’t forget to thoroughly wash your penis.”
You could have heard a pin drop in the silence that followed.
It took every bit of control Iris possessed not to burst out laughing.
“Wh … what?” Finn asked.
Looking at him right then, Iris was pretty sure she understood what Monty meant when he said someone’s ‘flabbers’ were ‘fully gasted.’
Iris schooled her face into a mask of wide-eyed innocence mixed with genuine concern.
