Siren Bay

VIII

December 19th | Twelve days until NYD

I watched with Leah as Benji came back with our coffee orders, setting them down on the smooth wooden table outside the café. The sun beat against our backs but Leah drank her hot coffee without flinching, Benji, like me, waited until it wasn't the temperature of hell.

Leah looked at me over her dark aviators, now clean and dry from the seawater they'd been drenched in. You wouldn't have guessed that a mermaid had handed them to her from the ocean last night. "Now that we're finally out the house and away from your nosey grandma-"

"Hey," Benji cut in. "My Gran's a saint."

"She's still nosey Benj'," I added, as I held my hot chocolate carefully. "She's a nosey saint."

"...I'll accept that. Go on Leah." Benji innocently sipped his matcha coffee, the green foam the same colour as his shirt.

"As I was saying," Leah looked pointedly at Benji for the interruption, but he was smiling unapologetically. "I'm glad we're away from any eavesdroppers so we can talk about all our new friends."

I sighed. "You guys both know what I know now, what's on your mind?"

Leah blinked. "We met mermaids yesterday. Actual mermaids."

"Do you think it's true that if you kiss a mermaid, you can breathe underwater for the rest of your life?" Benji wondered aloud.

"Well I'm sure Jason would be happy to test that theory for you Benji," I said, grinning when his ears reddened.

Leah waved our banter aside before I could leap in and tease Benji further. "They kinda gave a lot of half answers though; like, what kind of earthquakes can change someone to be human?"

"I don't think-"

"Hang on Syl' let me rant." Leah set her black coffee down. "We've just discovered that mermaids are real, but not in the sense that Disney let us believe - and that six of them, in time with the earthquakes last year, went from human to half-fish and have been hiding in our coastline since. How, exactly, is no one thinking about this?"

"Do we know if the earthquakes happened?" Benji asked.

"Yeah I looked them up last night when we came back," Leah said. "You two were asleep."

"They didn't answer Benji's question about their glowing tails," I rested my hot chocolate down as well. "I've wondered that since I saw Henry again, their tails. That's not a normal mermaid thing, I've not seen that before."

"How many mermaids do you know?" Benji teased and I scrunched my face up at him. He only laughed in response.

"It's not something seen in a lot of fish either," Leah drank more of her coffee. "I spent another hour or so Googling last night when you two crashed."

"What'd you find?" I leaned forward when she fished out her phone from her large bag - I spotted a new book titled Ingo amongst her things - and Leah flicked her purple hair aside so her determined expression wasn't hidden from us.

"So, I looked through a whole string of fish to see what kind of tails they were, and I thought maybe from there I could see if that fish had any glowing traits... I dunno if it was the smart route but it was the route I went with at one am." Leah admitted, and showed Benji and I a picture of a deep brown fish with a vertical tail, like an eel.

"That looks like them." Benji zoomed in on the picture with a frown. "It's not a hundred per cent though?"

"It's the closest I could find - I searched for Australian fish with an eel-like tail and I found out that we have a lungfish."