A free preview
Hi friends! As I transition off of Substack and on to Patreon and a TBA website that will serve as a permanent free archive of all B+ Squad stuff (will explain more once it’s ready), I’ve been trying to come up with fun rewards that will make backing my Patreon financially feel worth it for people.
To that end: $10+ patrons will now get weekly access to some of my other unreleased writing; starting with an in-progress novella called Mermaids of New York that I’m hoping this experiment will incentivize me to finish (it’s currently just shy of 17k words, though, so there’s a fair amount to read!).
Curious to know more? I’m including the first section of the story below. If you’d like to know what happens next, feel free to join me over at Patreon!
1.
It was somewhere around the fifth or sixth beer that he said it. Up until that point, Carlyn had been mostly enjoying her conversation with Jeremy — enjoying it enough to continue drinking the beers he was buying her, anyway — but as things were starting to shift into that intimate, maybe we’ll go home together, territory, Jeremy started musing about the future, completely unprompted.
“Do you ever think about just saying fuck it to everything and like, moving upstate and starting a farm?” he asked. Or maybe it wasn’t a farm — the alcohol had done a number on Carlyn’s ability to remember details with any real accuracy — but certainly something involving a lot of grass and acreage, a real back to the land vibe.
“A farm?” Carlyn responded, trying as hard as she could to keep her tone neutral, as though she could get this night to be salvageable purely through force of will.
“Well, yeah,” Jeremy continued, taking a long sip of his beer. It was something fancy, small batch or small brew or whatever they called it. Carlyn didn’t really give a shit — she’d drink anything as long as someone else was paying for it — but Jeremy did, which really should have been her first sign.
And then he said it. “I mean, New York’s great and all, but no one actually wants to live here forever.”
Instantaneously, like she’d been struck by lightning, Carlyn knew the evening was over. This was not the man for her, he never had been, and the only reason she’d spent as much time with him as she had was because she didn’t know what else to do with herself these days. But this slander, it was too much for her. She excused herself to go pee, and when she got to the bathroom door she just kept walking, pushing her way past the crowds until finally she was out of the bar, on Essex Street. The crisp night air smelled like freedom. Carlyn turned left and started walking, making a right when she reached Delancey Street. The rush of the traffic soothed her nerves, drowning out the noise of the bar, the irritating drone of Jeremy’s voice — he was irritating, she could see it more fully now that she was back in her element. And the closer she got to the East River, the more calm she felt, the water’s brackish scent the only aromatherapy she ever needed.
There was no one in the park when she got there, which was good, because she was feeling impatient. On a different night, she might have happily killed some time strolling through the park, walking by elderly men fishing and young lovers curling up on the benches until she’d found a private enough area for her purposes. But tonight, she didn’t have to dawdle. She quickly made her way to the waterfront, practically breaking into a sprint, clambering up the metal fence until she was precariously perched on top of it. And then — so quickly that if anyone had been watching her, they’d almost certainly assume Carlyn was just a figment of their imagination — she swan dove into the water, her legs fusing back into a fishtail as she descended into the river’s depths.
—
If you asked Carlyn where she was from, she’d usually start with the vague, basic answer of New York City. If you pressed her for more specifics, she’d say that she grew up around DUMBO, that she’d spent her childhood playing on the beach between two bridges. And if you caught her at the right moment, when the precise combination of alcohol and other substances had brought down her defenses, she’d lean in conspiratorially and tell you that actually, really, she’d been born and raised in the waters of the East River.
Nobody actually believed that there were mermaids in the New York Harbor. New York City wasn’t the kind of place where things like that happened. It was too modern, too cosmopolitan, to be home to anything as fantastical as mermaids. That was the kind of thing you expected in New Orleans, maybe, or certain parts of the Caribbean. And yet — as Carlyn would happily tell you if you plied her with enough spirits — New York was actually the only place that mermaids existed. It was something about the specific combination of pollution and aquatic life and — as Carlyn remembered from the stories she’d heard in childhood — humans with a penchant for concrete footwear. Somehow, that cocktail had given rise to a whole new breed of life; life which, despite some noble attempts at expansion, seemed incapable of existing a particularly significant distance beyond the boundaries of New York City. Sure, Carlyn had some cousins who’d grown up in the shadow of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and there were some distant relatives over in the Newark Bay, by Bayonne, but that was about as far as anyone ever went. Even a place like the Hamptons had to be a day trip: the further out they swam, the weaker they got, as though there was some essential life force they depended on back in the heart of the harbor.
Not that Carlyn minded. The East River had always been her home, and she was perfectly happy to stay there. She loved exploring every inch of it, each day bringing a new surprise as the tides washed in something new. She loved swimming in the wake of the ferries and the tour boats, following the Circle Line as it circumnavigated Manhattan. On an adventurous day, she’d make her way out Rockaway and disappear into the crowd of sunbathers, or wash up on Brighton Beach, where she’d down caviar and vodka with the locals. There was always something to do, always some new place to explore, and Carlyn felt sure that in the salty embrace of the harbor, she would always be truly happy.
Well, until recently, anyway. Lately, “happy” had felt like a hazy memory to Carlyn, something she knew she’d experienced, but couldn’t quite access. Trying to remember what “happy” felt like was like watching the world through glasses smeared with Vaseline, or eating a sandwich wrapped in bubble wrap. She could get the gist — but the gist was pretty much all she could get, along with a sour plastic aftertaste.
It was this general malaise that had led her to Jeremy. Not Jeremy specifically, but the general kind of person he represented. Every night she’d surface on one of the East River piers and make her way to whatever bar seemed the most happening — usually something on the Lower East Side, though she’d been known to go as far north as Murray Hill, if she was feeling it — and settle in for a night of free drinks and tepid conversation.
It was surprisingly easy to bar hop as a mermaid. No one ever asked her for her ID — or, well, when they did, they always seemed to be won over by a smile and a story about how hers had just been stolen — and money was never an issue. Men were always happy to ply her with drinks, provided she gave them the impression that there was a chance she might go to bed with them. Which was easy to do, since more often than not, Carlyn went to bed with them.
Technically, Carlyn’s mermaid anatomy was different from that of a human woman, but she preferred the kind of sexual partner who was too many sheets to the wind to actually notice a light dusting of scales around the nipples, or the fin like frills that functioned as her inner labia. As long as she was warm, wet, and willing none of these men seemed to think too deeply about who — about what — it was who’d landed in their bed. In the morning, she’d slip out quietly while they were still asleep, neatly avoiding any conversations about “cell numbers” and “Instagram handles” and attempts at further contact. She liked to keep things simple: if they ran into each other at the bar again, she’d make another night of it, if not, so be it. Detachment was easier than attempting to explain why, exactly, she didn’t have a cellphone or Instagram or whatever it was the latest guy was on about.
This had been her plan when she’d run into Jeremy. Slide into the bar stool next to him, smile, flirt, drown her inhibitions in alcohol and follow him back to the studio apartment he called home. It wasn’t the most elegant strategy, but elegance wasn’t exactly a quality that mermaids retained on land. It was a functional plan — probably the most functional thing about Carlyn these days. She would drink his craft beer. She would follow him home. She would fuck him, and she would pretend that the ecstasy of drunk, anonymous sex was a sufficient substitute for happiness.
At the very least, the sheer force of these men’s desire for her helped shake something loose: in those moments in their beds, she could almost believe she’d wiped some of the Vaseline from the lens, that a corner of the sandwich had come free from its oppressive wrapping. Almost.
But then, you know, Jeremy had gone and fucked it all up. Carlyn wouldn’t say that her standards for men were particularly high — how high could they be when she limited herself to the crowd that made up last call in some dingy LES bars? — but she had to draw the line somewhere. She’d only pursued men who seemed kind, or at least had some attractive qualities that she could focus on while trying to pound her consciousness into oblivion. She had to be above going home with someone she actively disliked. And even in the depths of her malaise, Carlyn knew that the one thing she disliked above all else was people who’d casually dismiss her home.
—
As she surfaced from her dive, Carlyn realized she felt different. The city lights seemed brighter than they had in a while, a certain sparkle dancing along the waves. She’d lost touch with how beautiful it was here, how lucky she was to be one of the rare and privileged mermaids of the New York Harbor.
Maybe things wouldn’t feel so bad forever, she mused. In the glint of the night, she could almost remember how it had felt to be truly, blissfully happy in the embrace of the harbor.