If you read this you'll turn into her

If you read this you’ll turn into her.

Okay queen, go off, smirked Lucy, lit a cigarette and checked the time. It was 11.15 and she had promised to have selected the finalists for the Brussels short story contest by midnight.

She didn’t wonder what would happen if she didn’t do it in time because there was no possible discussion about it: she had been the initiator and the promoter of this whole shebang to begin with. It had all begun a good six months ago.

Lucy was a frustrated writer. It wasn’t a unique conundrum. Many people she knew were frustrated, and that was without considering their artistic pursuits. There was the seemingly neverending news of war from just beyond Europe’s borders, which was objectively horrifying at first and had gradually become the normal course of the day. After a certain point, something had cracked. The protests in front of the European Commission had become fewer. Whether it was because of escalation from the police or a general feeling of a rush of air shooting out of a slashed tire was unclear. Even online dissent turned from the tone of something needing to be done, to sardonic commentary about Western leaders, to not much to do with real life at all, unless it touched on AI which, despite everyone using ChatGPT as their personal therapist, still felt far removed from daily life.

Lucy worked at a human rights NGO which didn’t eat into her free time too much. She considered herself lucky because she was able to save channeling her righteous outrage for working hours, which freed her up for other pursuits, like writing, dating and working out the rest of the time. Lately she hadn’t done much of the latter two. The consequences of the war were felt in daily life, from the high price of cherries to the lack of summer holidays her friends were taking this year. There had been a time, Lucy reminisced as she took a slow drag with her head tilted towards the window, when she’d said to her ex “I’m bored, let’s go to Hamburg,” and they’d gone, not because she or he were rich, but because there was a certain golden age of travel after they’d graduated college up until COVID and things were affordable and peaceful for most Europeans in a way that no longer seemed to be the case.

Everyone she knew seemed to be struggling. Of course it wasn’t the same as having bombs falling down from the sky above your head, but Lucy could see that there was an uptick in homeless people on her daily commute. People who looked erudite and had some nice clothes to their name were living on the street. One woman in particular haunted her because she would just wail out loud like a toddler. Something was happening, apparently slowly at first, but the wars and recessions were bleeding into her daily life, too. Great changes were afoot. Many of her friends with great profiles had been unemployed for far longer than seemed reasonable. She had made peace with her lower paid NGO job and was grateful at last for the stability and the benefits her work provided her.

With love avoiding her and she avoiding the discipline that would require a physical upgrade, Lucy set up this concept. A Brussels short story contest in English. Everyone she spoke to about it agreed the multilingual city needed one. She had gotten a few people to spread the word and had her friends enter the stories. It was awkward. She saw how badly her friends wrote and how unimaginary some of their ideas were. She was looking for more of a community of writers. She imagined meeting new people whose faces would come from the shadows of parallel lives and metro stations she had no reason to go to before to talk about the depth of the human experience in the kind of shadowy contexts that only literature could capture. Like politically charged love between a Republican and a European socialist. Or an abusive partner who bemoaned his partner having had an abortion. Or a narcissistic mother laughing at how her twenty-four year old daughter unloaded the dishwasher.

The last thought really struck Lucy. She was so angry when she thought about her mother. The heat in her body rose faster than when she thought about orphans getting bombed. She knew it was selfish but she couldn’t help it. Some of those orphans had mothers that had loved them, she knew that much. They probably knew more love than Lucy had in her short life. Nothing Lucy had done had ever been good enough for her mother. Not as a child, not as a teenager, not now as an adult. She couldn’t remember just being held or cuddled by her mother. It had happened a handful of times with her great aunt and a couple of mom’s friends when she was very small. Lucy remembered pressing herself into them, feeling their femininity emanating through her, to afterwards be shunned by her mother if she ever tried to do the same.

Maybe that’s why she was into this short story contest. She needed to prove something to someone.

11.30. Fuck. She was tired and unfocused and thus escaping into fantasy. Lucy pulled herself up straight and looked at the story in front of her. It was the last one she had to judge. She had a pile of three and she was sure that the odds were they would win, but she owed it to this author, Kara S. Pilker, to read her story, too. The name almost sounded fake to her, but she decided it was probably just exotic. She put her cigarette out, gulped some water and tapped her cheeks with her fingertips.

If you read this you’ll turn into her.

She’s not what she seems. There are a lot of legends about her with a geographical spread from Persia to the East of Europe. She lived on rocks in the sea and in swampy riverbeds. Because of the sailors and the ships that used to come by so frequently, she had to retreat from the open waters. Her presence is more felt below hanging trees and boggy surfaces. Still water where bugs gather.

There was something choppy about the writing, but there was also layered intrigue. The choppiness could be a question of intentional style. Lucy decided that it had hooked her enough to continue pushing through.

She can be found in groups, but those tend to be more of special occasions. Ceremonies and rituals often linked to harvest fests or the full moon. They are at the same time…

Many things were at the same time. She was both fulfilled, for example, and struggling for money. She had a sense of helping people and also of being entirely useless. She felt that her circle was full of good people and also those she judged harshly for not knowing how lucky they were. It was frustrating. Lucy lifted her legs up below her to squeeze them onto the chair. The short story in front of her read more like some kind of manual than something that was about to happen. There was no protagonist, there was no event, there was no challenge, no string of bad words or complaints that could be perceived.

11.41.

She had set up the contest months ago and this was the last story she had to read. She did owe it to her contributors, she felt, to be honest about it, although she had one very good story and two decent ones she felt fully comfortable awarding the prizes to. She wanted to be honest, though, and so should Kara S. Pilker complain or challenge her, she at least wanted to be prepared enough to defend her position. She had to keep going.

The type of feminine creature I am describing is largely perceived as mythical, but in fact she is real, and it’s not just a being that lives in exotic destinations, but very close to home, too. She can be found wherever there is water, even in the city of Brussels, from the canal to the Moroccan hammam, from an art nouveau swimming pool to the inside of a sink…

This line tickled Lucy. She found it funny to imagine a woman-like creature inhabiting a sink. She flexed her toes. She was starting to feel heavy in her feet. It would just be a little more reading, then she would take five minutes to submit the stories to the portal to be looked over by the other judges, though there was already tacit agreement that her decision would determine the course of the contest. Then off to bed.

All the women I know understand that she is real. We have seen her, if not been her ourselves. Our voices have been used to seduce and manipulate, to challenge and to charm. We have also been persecuted ourselves. We all have those stories. And at this moment, the challenge is her quiet strength rising.

Yes, though Lucy, scratching between her calves, then looking down to find, first with concern then with sudden palpable horror, that her lower legs were webbed together. She jolted, at first in disbelief, but then quickly accepted that it was real. Her calves were pulled together, and her feet were growing together as she watched with horror into fin-like formations.

If you read this you will become her.

No way. No fucking way. This story was actually proving to be what it promised from the first line. It was horrible, terrifying, discombobulating, throwing Lucy entirely off balance, but it was a masterpiece and she hadn’t even realized it at first.

Damn, that’s good writing.

Her eyes went back to the beginning of the story. It was 11.52 by the time she regained her composure and got to the line about the moon phases. She was simultaneously re-sequencing the short story winners in her mind. The two rather good stories, one about a dog who solved crimes and the other about a windmill that oversaw four hundred years’ worth of events in a small town in the Netherlands, were really in a tie now for a troubling third. The second place winner would have to be the AI robots that, programmed for war, ended up turning on one another to create love among the wreckage their human engineers had developed.

She felt a palpable itch below her knees. The skin was fused there now, too, and it was getting hot.

Damn it, Lucy grabbed her computer and started hopping unsteadily to the bathroom. Halfway there, she remembered her cigarettes and hopped back. She almost toppled over a few times out of not being used to the situation, but her determination to publish a great story kept her going, as did her honor in the sense that she had to know what she was running in her first short story contest before she hit submit.

At 11.56 she flung her fin off the side of the bath and felt palpable relief at the trickle of water cooling her down.

Mermaids have skills that are not known internationally. In Russian folklore, for example, it is known that they climb trees.

Lucy flicked her fin and admired, for a second, the way the overhead fluorescent lights danced off the blue and purple scales. She was happy her roommate was visiting her parents this weekend, but only because it would give her a few days to adjust to this new reality.

A couple of minutes before midnight, she was sold on Kara S. Pilkers’ story as the winner, but she still powered through as custom demanded, speed-reading the text for a second time as she could feel her thighs fused tight together, ending in a seamless line just below the mound of her belly.

Precisely at midnight, she selected the story, then copy and pasted it and submitted it into the agreed upon portal for the rest of the short story judges to evaluate. She couldn’t wait to hear what they thought about it, particularly Eric. She wondered what a man would think of this story. Talk about changing the world! Having done the hard work, she slid into the bath and spent the next few minutes working over the same submission procedure for the other two stories. The dog’s tale would win third place. With all her respect for windmills, she had to give preference to living things after what she had just experienced.

Relieved that she had completed her deadline in time, she lowered herself into the water and thought about how she would have to put on shoes the next morning. Maybe she could call in sick and get a pair of those transparent platform shoes where fish swam that were a fad in the ‘70s. Her mother would call it a daring choice and maybe even scoff at Lucy’s decision, but she herself had never run a short story contest before.

Smugly, Lucy splashed her tail in the bath, and thought about whether she should and how she could thank Kara S. Pilkers. She opened her inbox and saw an e-mail from the lady herself. Smiling, Lucy opened it and read it with increasing horror:

Dear judges, please do not read the attached story! It was sent to you by mistake, and it’s not a short story, it’s a spell! Please do not read it. I have tried to recall it but I think it has already been opened…

My short story that I wish to be considered for this contest is attached, it’s about a fruit fly that falls in love with a plate of paté, I hope you will consider it instead…

Lucy’s heart skipped a beat. She hesitated, thinking about pulling the plug on the whole contest, but then her tail fanned out involuntarily. Maybe it was a spell, but it was also literature that could change the world, and that was what she wanted her contest to be known for. She smiled and pulled her laptop with her under the water.