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The Mermaid's Treasure -3-
🕑 Added 2018-05-28 15:20:39 +0000 UTCOh God. I was a girl. How could this have happened? Was I crazy? It didn’t seem possible that this was a dream, the gritty sand I was…sitting on made it impossible to believe in a dream that would include such sensations. At least, I wasn’t a mermaid.
“Are ye sure?” he asked, looking worried.
I looked at him. “That I’m not dreaming?” I asked.
He laughed again. “No, that you’re not cold. Ye look a bit… blue. It’s December and even this far south, that sand must be chill?”
“December!” I said, startled. It had been the weekend after the Superbowl when Edgar and I started our bike ride, late February. I looked around. The strange ship, a huge thing with three tall masts and no engines? The clothes he was wearing and the other fellow, too, like something from a gritty movie about the Revolutionary War.
“What year?” I asked. Maybe I had seen too much science fiction but time travel did occur to me. Why not? An even weirder thing had already happened, this wasn’t my body and at least time travel was theoretically possible. Wasn’t it?
“The year?” he said mystified. “Why it’s still ’62, the fifth or sixth of the war. And I believe it is the twelfth of the month. Sunday, we had sacred services at day break before we made anchor.”
He may have babbled on for a bit, but I stopped listening. If I asked him what century he’d know me for a crazy person. And war? What war? The Civil War, 1862? But that would have barely been started, not five or six years old.
It must be 1762. 1662? What did I know? Time travel might be more believable than waking up a girl, but it was still a stretch. I thought of something to ask. “Is George still king?” I asked. Oh, wait, George the III was king during the Revolution, was he king a decade earlier?
O’Reilly’s face clouded up. “Of England? Well, he sits on the throne.”
Oh, right. Irish. He probably didn’t like King George or England at all, for that matter. But 1762 was still the better guess. Hadn’t there been a war about that time? Unless I had landed in some parallel world? I didn’t read that much science fiction, but even the comics are full of stuff on alternate universes.
Down at the waterline, people were moving around the boats, but I didn’t see Babbitt anymore. “Mr. O’Reilly,” I said, “Your friend is probably on his way b-back, maybe we should head down to m-meet him?” My teeth were threatening to chatter though whether it was with cold or fear, I still couldn’t say.
“David,” he said looking at me with a goofy expression.
“David,” I said blankly, looking back. Oh, his name. I pushed hair out of my face again. Was I supposed to tell him to call me… Frank? I hated being called Francis which sounds the same as Frances which is a girl’s name and maybe that could be my name now?
I almost got a case of the screaming heebie-jeebies right there. I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry or toss off the coat and run for the swamp. Florida doesn’t have any hills.
He snapped out of it before I did.
He put out a hand to help me up, but I knew if I stuck an arm out of the coat I would be flashing him again. “If you could just turn your back?” I said. “David,” I added. “No one else is close enough to see.”
“Oh, roight, roight,” he mumbled, turning away.
I stood quickly and draped the longer coat more evenly over my shoulders, it hung almost to my knees! David towered more than a foot over me! I’d barely made it to five-foot-three before, and now I was… how short?
Did I just mentally think of him as David? I stared at his back. Wide shoulders, trim waist, firm butt. I was looking at his butt? Hysteria and panic loomed again.
Trying to distract myself, I stepped off the other coat and wanted to pick it up, but that wasn’t going to work. My tits kept getting in my way and distracting me, and if I bent over, they swung out in a way that was truly disturbing. I settled on holding the one coat closed from the inside.
“You can turn around,” I said.
He turned and smiled when he saw me. “My old coat never looked so foine.”
I snorted but it came out more of a sniff. I’d only been a girl for a few minutes, but I recognized flattery already. My hair, and I had a lot of it, was inside the coat with me, tickling my back all the way down to my surprisingly wide ass. And my feet, now that I was in contact with the sand, were getting even colder.
I turned in the direction of the crowd around the boats. “Let’s go m-meet M-m-mister B-b-b….”
“Babbitt,” David supplied. He peered into the distance. “He is returning now, and it seems the captain may be with him. Captain Elias Venable.”
I saw where he was looking, but the small boats at that distance were just blobs. Maybe from sea spray but now that I had noticed, the details of the big ship were blurry, too. “You can see the people in the boats from here?” I asked.
“Oh, aye. I’m sure it’s the captain. And the ship surgeon, Mr. Delay, with him.”
“Delay?” I said. “I hope that’s not a nickname.”
“No, it is his family name.” David chuckled.
“Surgeon?” I asked.
“Nearest thing to a doctor on a ship, lass. He’ll do to look ye over for any major hurt.”
We headed that way, me toddling along in my oversized coat, David beside me and half a step back. We got to the waterline before the boat did. There were other men there loading odds and ends of salvage into another boat. Barrels and crates and bales, mostly, along with some metal bits.
“Ye’ve the luck of yer countrymen, Mr. O’Reilly,” said one. “Ye’ve found the onliest treasure ever on these shores.” He grinned at me, showing five missing teeth in a face that was mostly beard and wrinkles.
“I swan we had coomed that stretch of sand, not twa hours gane, and found nae boot sam wood and a bit of ship’s brass,” said another. “Did ye just crawl oop oat t’sea, miss? Ben’t ye nae a mermaid?” They all laughed, and I’m sure I looked mystified.
He wasn’t the hardest sailor to understand, but their accents were all over the place, and they all wanted to talk to me. All of them were at least a head taller, and they were not clean nor did they smell good, though the sea breeze kept the worst of the stench away.
“Belay all the jibber jabber,” David told them. “Load the boat, the Captain’s coming, and he’ll stripe yer lazy bones if he sees you talking instead of working.”
They didn’t seem afraid of the threat but they got back to work with hardly a grumble and several smiles shown to me. I overheard them talking among themselves while we waited for the Captain’s boat.
“She’s a pert one, lookit that face, Mr. O’Reilly’s got all the luck, what’s the captain going to say, a mermaid on his boat, no place for a girl on a privateer.”
That last word caught my ear. I’d heard it before, but I didn’t remember where. I started to ask David about it but Babbitt on the boat hailed us about then, and David and three other men grabbed the line tossed to them and dragged the boat up on the sand.
Half a dozen rowers scrambled ashore and helped pull the little vessel above the waterline. An older man in a coat with brass buttons must be Captain Venable, and the young man in the olive jacket with the leather satchel must be the surgeon, Mr. Delay. They stepped out of the boat before it stopped moving and advanced on us.
“Who have we here, Mr. O’Reilly?” the Captain asked. “Is this the mermaid Babbitt has been babbling about?” He smiled at me. He was an older, wolfish-looking sort but seemed willing to joke.
“Captain Venable, Mr. Delay,” said David, “May I present Miss Frances Pennwarden, lately of the ship we saw last night. Miss Pennwarden, Captain Venable of the Adeline and Mr. Delay, ship’s surgeon.”
“You appear to be the sole survivor of the unfortunate vessel, Miss Pennwarden,” said the Captain solemnly. “Are you injured?”
“I don’t think so, sir,” I answered. It was weird being called Miss several times. “A bump on the head, I don’t remember being on any boat at all.” Then for some reason, I burst into tears. Relief at having someone who seemed to have authority to take over worrying for me? I have no idea.
My tears flustered everyone. Pretty soon, I was sitting in the boat between the captain and David and being rowed out to the ship. Several questions were asked of me, but I couldn’t find any answers to what was the name of the ship, where was it bound and where from except “I dunno” and a sniffle. Questions about my own origins or my family produced wails and eventually hiccoughs and the non-sequitur complaint, “I need a bath.”
My mom and dad, my brother and sisters, Edgar and my other friends, all gone? The whole modern world vanished? No more movies or bicycles or pizza or smartphones? And I was alone in a strange world and not even myself but some odd person who had tits and sand in her crotch and thought David had a cute butt.
No wonder I couldn’t stop crying.
The surgeon pulled out a flask and gave me a sip. I thought it would be water, but it was something he called a hot toddie. It was warm and sweet and comforting as it went down and pretty soon I was dozing.
