A Fish Out of Water || Open
Drivel. Utter drivel. Two pasts, two sets of memories. Two nonsensical lives that involved much contrariety. A girl who wanted nothing more than to spend hours in an ocean and a mermaid who dreamed of land. It seemed like each was a dream; a vivid, beautiful dream. The mermaid saw things that the human wished too but the human knew of so much more than the mermaid. But both wanted what the other had.
A mermaid of all things? Some mythological creature that killed sailors for sport. Her life seemed nothing like that tale–well, no, that wasn’t entirely true. Her…past life(?) certainly knew of mermaids who would do such a thing but she wanted to do the exact opposite. She was so strange. But that was not nearly as strange as what her life was now. Her father reduced to the very thing he hated? It was a laughable! It was unrealistic.
This had to be some vivid dream, some joke.
Ariel blinked rapidly, her hand coming up to stroke her hair out of her face. The person she was holding a conversation with (was it a conversation?) was interrupted by her daze. She was no longer paying attention to whatever they had to say. Were they yelling at her? Angry, happy, sad, annoyed? The pain in her head could not make sense of it. She could think nothing but the throbbing pain from overthinking, overanalyzing.
A part of her felt like falling from never having used these limbs before. These new strange limbs? Feet? Legs? Those..aren’t hers. That was Ariel Balik’s. What was her if this wasn’t merely a dream? As more memories started to come back to her it felt more and more like her human life was the dream. And that was a very unsettling thought. Her human life was the one who knew anything about this Mythos place.
How did she get here?
“I…have to go.” Ariel interrupted, still unable to make sense of what this human was saying. She was clearly off balance; like a baby on its third attempt at walking. Turning around she took a couple steps before stumbling to the ground. What a wonderful job muscle memory was doing.
“Hi, my name’s Aurelie and I’ll be taking care of you this morning,” Aurelie said in a flat tone, not bothering to make eye contact with the person sitting in her booth. “Do you know what you’d like?”
Aurelie chomped on her piece of gum and pressed her pen to her paper, ready to write down the customer’s order. A couple of seconds passed but no answer came. Annoyed, Aurelie rolled her eyes, “Do you need a couple more minutes?”
She wasn’t expecting the woman to suddenly rush out of the booth, then stumble and fall. “What the...” Aurelie said, shocked. She blinked a couple of times, trying to process what had just happened. “So, uh, do you want that order to go?”
