Title: Sea shells and all the things he left behind
Summary: Dick Grayson didn’t go to the beach. He didn’t watch any ocean documentaries, he didn’t talk about his childhood and he most certainly did not work with the mers at Blüdhaven’s Ocean Life Rehabilitation center. And then they brought in a kid clinging to an injured mer and Dick was 9 years old again and drowning.
AN: @thursday-batfam-prompts Prompt 7: Mermaid/Siren. Inspired by Gifts From the Sea.” Please go read that story!!
Dick already knew it was going to be a bad day when he got up. His back hurt and his throat itched and he had the taste of seawater on his tongue, though maybe that was just residue from his tears. Dick couldn’t recall what he had dreamed, but when he closed his eyes, orange flashed in front of his vision.
It was better if he didn’t remember.
Dick contemplated staying home sick, playing catch up with another happy kids’ show he had missed out on when he noticed his phone vibrating. It was nothing new for Dick to wake up to a hundred messages or more - the benefits of being friends with a lot of people who kept odd hours.
To his surprise though, it wasn’t the Titanic Idiots group chat blowing up his phone, just Wally. He was getting a new message every second - either Wally was taking his break way too early or they had an emergency at work.
Dick’s shift didn’t even start until twelve and it was what - nine in the morning?
Instead of bothering with reading through all of the messages, he just called Wally. The phone rang only once and his friend already answered.
“Dick! Holy fuck, you need to get your ass here like immediately we’re way too understaffed and nobody knows what we’re supposed to be doing Roy already called up OLRC main office this is why you don’t let a bunch of volunteers and marine life bachelors work on their own without any superior supervision of you know the people who have actually been trained to deal with-”
“Wally. Breathe. Calm down. What���s going on?”
Dick could hear Wally take a few deep breaths before he continued speaking, only a bit slower than before. At least Dick could make out where a sentence started and where it ended.
“We’ve got an emergency. A kid showed up with an unidentified and severely injured mer today. We think it’s a mermaid, but it doesn’t have a tag from what we can tell, and it’s super hostile, well as hostile as mermaids get given they’re the shiest mers, so we can’t get near it. The kid won’t speak either and separating the two already probably broke Donna’s arm. We need some more manpower here.”
Dick couldn’t wait to eat breakfast. Nutella, marmalade, honey - whatever would get rid off the salty taste on his tongue.
“Wally, I don’t work with the mers, you know that.”
“Yes, Dick, and I’m sorry, but you’re the only guy we’ve got.”
Somehow Wally managed to ooze his frustration and worry over the phone. “Please, Dick. You can look after the kid in the meanwhile and I can help check on the mer, but we need someone here.”
Dick’s premonition proved to be true. He should have just stayed in bed. He marched into the direction of his wardrobe, checking if he still had any clean clothes left.
“Give me thirty minutes to get dressed and grab breakfast and I’ll be there.”
“Thank you so, so much. I owe you.”
Wally’s evident relief made Dick smile. The redhead was Dick’s oldest friend. He had helped Dick find his place in a world he hardly understood, willingly shared a dorm with the resident weird kid and had managed to get Dick this summer job in-between college classes, if anything, Dick owed him.
“No prob, Wally,” Dick replied and ended the call.
He quickly grabbed an old pair of jeans and a shirt he was pretty sure was one of Roy’s hand-me-downs. Their small kitchen was always stuffed full due to Wally’s metabolic disorder, so it didn’t take much time to find something sugary and eatable that would still fill him up and prepare him for the stress that was to come.
Twenty minutes later, he was standing in front of Blüdhaven’s Ocean Life Rehabilitation Center. Dick didn’t even study marine biology. He was taking theatre classes, set on his goal to be as far away from the ocean as he could possibly be.
Yeah, that had turned out exactly like planned.
Not trusting himself to not stall any longer, Dick stepped into the strangely deserted building and headed straight to the part where they kept the mers. Before he could even reach the actual aquarium though, Wally already caught him.
His friend looked way too tired for someone who started his shift two hours ago. He stood right next to a couple boxes, his right hand holding an energy drink while his left was occupied with a donut.
“Dick!” Wally exclaimed and quickly swallowed the food in his mouth. “You’re here!”
Dick just rolled his eyes and focused on everything but his stomachs doing flips. “You did ask me to come. So where’s the kid?”
“In the office right here,” Wally said and pointed at the closed door behind him. “The kid’s not speaking at all. We’ve tried every language we’ve got between all of us, even some clumsy ASL, but the kid won’t react. Wouldn’t even look us in the eyes. And since he still has a knife, we don’t want to surprise him. CPS has already been notified, but they’re overrun as always and won’t come until the afternoon, but maybe you can get him to talk? You’re great with kids.”
That was an exaggeration. Dick was good with kids because he could keep them entertained and tell them the stories that captivated them. Generally speaking, that included kids up to age twelve. Everyone above that? Nope, not Dick’s age group.
Dick sighed. “I mean, I can try. Just don’t expect much, alright?”
Wally smiled, exhausted, but as bright as always. “I’m not expecting a miracle, Boy Wonder. Let me just finish and I’ll introduce you. If he doesn’t start screaming on sight seeing the terrible bags under your eyes-”
“And whose fault are they?”
“- then I’ll leave you two and look after the mer.”
Wally inhaled the remains of his snack and wiped his mouth clean on his jacket. Then he slowly opened the door.
The office had been pretty much emptied. Dick recalled that this was Dinah’s office/private break room, but she was on vacation until the end of the month. All of her belongings must be in the boxes.
When Dick and Wally entered the room and the kid looked up, measuring him. The boy had dark hair and his skin was quite pale by comparison. His blue eyes were sharp, evaluating. He definitely wasn’t keeping silent because of shock then.
The boy was dressed almost normally, aside from the old blood sticking to his hoodie. He wore jeans that had obviously been wet in the past hours. No wonder if he had shown up with a mer - Dick should have asked Wally how that had gone down.
“Hey, kiddo,” Wally said. “This is my friend Dick. He’ll stay here with you now if that’s alright?”
The kid didn’t react. He kept staring at Dick and playing around with his knife and the cord of his necklace. Dick studied it and almost took a step back when he realized what he was looking at.
Shark teeth, dark black scales, corals, fish bones, and two shells.
The necklace was identical to the one Dick had stuffed in the darkest corner of his dresser, except Dick’s had seven shells more, one for each year he had survived. Dick had almost thrown it out in anger multiple times, but in the end, he’d always kept it and felt guilty for even thinking of destroying it.
Suddenly, the puzzle pieces slotted together smoothly.
Dick had grown up multilingual until his parents had died. And then, after, he’d spoken only some English. His primary language had been his adopted father’s language made up of clicks and snarls.
“Who are you?” Dick asked, his throat almost hurting from the sounds, and finally, the boy paid attention.
His expression was a stunned one, like Dick’s question had torn down a wall so high you couldn’t even imagine anything lingering behind it.
While Wally looked at Dick like he was crazy, the kid already had tears forming in his eyes.
“You speak!” The kid still had a strong English accent, he couldn’t have been learning to speak for long.
“I was taught, like you,” Dick replied. “What are you doing here.”
“You speak,” the kid only repeated, hope almost choking him. “You’re human and you speak! You’re eldest-who-can-fly-on-land.”
Now it was Dick’s turn to be stunned while the kid started crying for real.
“You’ve got to help us. He’d got hurt badly after missed-love-bright-as-the-sun died and then venom-in-his-blood came and he said not to come but I didn’t know who else to turn to-”
“He-” Dick’s eyes went wide and he jumped up. “Come with me, now.”
“Dick, what the hell is going on?” Wally shouted as Dick turned into the other direction and leaped into a sprint.
He and the kid quickly followed him, but all Dick could think of that they were going to be too late, that he wasn’t going to make it-
“Dick, what are you doing!?”
“Siren!” Dick shouted back. “The mer is a siren, not a mermaid!”
Behind him, Dick could hear Wally starting to curse. None of the people on shift were actually experienced in handling anything above a selkie. And if the kid was as close to Bruce at the necklace suggested, then he wouldn’t just stop at a broken arm, no matter how injured he was.
Dick pretty much kicked the door to the aquarium open, and not a minute too late. Roy had just fallen into the water and a massive dark body was pulling at his clothes while the others desperately tried to reach for him.
Why had nobody broken the cabinet with the tranquilizers?
Dick didn’t hesitate, he didn’t even bother to kick off his shoes or get rid off his jacket, he just jumped right into the water, followed by the hysteric sounds of his friends.
“Where is my son!?”
The water engulfed him and Dick is seventeen and leaving the next, fifteen and on the surface for the first time in years, thirteen and complaining he’s slower than Kori and Babs, eleven and falling asleep on scales, nine years old and drowning alongside his parents, except he got saved by-
“Bruce!”
The siren suddenly let go of Roy, who struggled to get back to the surface and just stared at Dick like he couldn’t quite believe he was there.
“Dick,” Bruce said. “My eldest-who-can-fly.”
The name Bruce had given him when he’d taken Dick into his family had changed. Somehow that was still what caught him off-guard the most.
Dick had left screaming, spitting poison, but he was the-eldest now, not the-reject-who-left though that opened a whole other can of worms.
Bruce looked less like the predator he had just moments before. His eyes were still dark and cat-like, and his massive black tail with razor-sharp fins lingered in the deep of the pool. He had more scars than years ago, never mind the many festering lacerations they needed to take care off as soon as possible.
But Bruce’s expression was made up of terrified hopefulness. Dick was glad he didn’t have a mirror. He didn’t want to know what face he was making, but going by the sound of roaring waves in his ears, he was close to heartbreak as well.
“Hi, Dad.”
The words were much too weak for what he wanted to say but-
They’d have to be enough for now.
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FORGETTING A FATHER
or, I've Lost as Orpheus
by Sarah McCann
September 10, A Shatterin
In the house, vigilant
(a disgusting vigilance,
including sleep)
I am a kid in a kid’s room.
Playing with the wall,
I’ve wrapped my fingers into some skull
on the far one— a transparent shadow mass,
the light rushing around my hands like a bandage.
An hour earlier I jailed a night toad,
only one inch long, only thirty seconds long,
then flicked him off (toads, with their gentle
bones and the grace in their double-stretched skin,
still are never shes).
I flicked him back in the grass.
Crumbs of meaty earth in my palms
left from the toad’s umbrella toes.
I spread the wart-dirt all across my cheeks
to blush into ugliness,
to become a troll.
I remembered, though, that I didn’t want anything
to do with being a toad. The mud ran like lava
down the sides of the sink.
Dad, you are lying dead in the next room
with your dog tags on.
My hips could not hold my weight,
or the weight of paper, even
if I could will myself to stand.
Your eyes are the size of your pocketwatch,
even closed.
I am afraid.
I will sleep awake tonight.
The first dream was like this:
You’ve gone to change your name.
The explanation: onomatopoeia
and you love me.
I think: you’ve just been around too long
Chincherinchee.
Waratah.
Gaga.
The next:
The ship went down.
Candles thicken the unhealthy smell of the room.
Dad, you have turned into the one wearing a séance.
You forgot to talk to me.
I played the knife game today,
fingers spread on the glass cover of the coffee table.
The problem: my eyes closed
too many times. My hand looks chewed,
a loose piece of knitting.
How is it that, still,
we can keep someone dead in the house?
A whale on land is not hematite,
striped silver, not liquid,
not mercury, not a whale.
This whale, dragged from the dune
and sandy, is no one I know.
Grounded completely.
He was never that.
A heap of rotting hay.
I’d burn it tonight if I could.
Do you hear that, Dad?
Dirty clothes.
Fireplace left over
from a fallen down house.
Ears where lightning struck
eyes squirrel hollows
nose a shriveled sunless branch
no mouth (he was quiet)
hands the oyster shell shapes
of fungus wing flutters
his knees tight gnarled knots in the skin
the leaves a halo bothered by wind.
September 8, Distilled
I took the sleeper car to see him the last time.
I had been drinking since Mom called.
I found this on a club car napkin:
The train windows are drunk—
lips licked with whiskey,
brown-tainted, swallowed in caramel.
Pine trees dip through the slurred puddles
dragging their lacy feet.
When we are quick
the trees are whipped into mud.
Burial mounds aching, all stuck through
with bones, aching in solitary pain—
lost hills of death— now
run together like ocean waves.
Even the creek we travel with
begins to look liquid,
fast as glass, and slips along
shimmering and ridged like a clear earthworm.
The man who left this at the bar
was wet, from the knees down.
I imagined about him:
I see a man right now
in the middle of a business suit
in the middle of a rain
finding a seat on the sidewalk
then pulling a garbage bag over his head
all around him.
I immediately think of punishment,
lost babies that people throw
in dumpsters
in plastic.
I think to save him.
He is just hiding.
Again, there are babies in my head.
When you can’t see, there is nothing
truer, that no one can see you back.
The man is simply in a place
with not so many colors.
It isn’t that he disappeared.
That can be blamed on the rest of them.
The rain has something to do with this:
the black of oil churning in circles
separating to turn into everything.
Wings of color, all directions.
The man looked down to see his grief
diving and swimming in smiles.
And a car ran over this.
When he crossed the street,
some splashed on his shoes.
He caught a little of the all in his pant cuffs.
So he sits.
None of this is important though.
It matters that he is still there,
that I am still with him,
though across the road.
But in the train.
Nearly there.
Now I am wishing there is no drink limit:
I empty the whisky into the hollow-eyed
tire swing. It drips slowly out, like a sloppy tradition,
from a nail-hole in the tread.
New whiskey, steeped in old oil and dirt road,
rubber. I sit underneath, mouth open
to catch the tired rain. A golden
looking glass down my throat. Spreading.
The train slows in time to my blood.
The amazing thing about me
is that I am as pale as water
in an ash marble fountain.
You can see right through my skin.
Lacy capillaries twinkling like angels.
My dejected, frown of a liver.
Downstream, muscles wrapped as Valentine gifts.
Ovary arrowheads.
Lungs, one broken wagon wheel.
My ribs, flirty, and always slightly unzipped,
show a winking heart, like a lighthouse.
I direct everyone home.
September, One Wing
The trees—long-lasting fireworks.
This branching in everything:
streams fall in ribbons, broken around a rock
arms to fingers
little thoughts, like “Kiss me there”
limbs into “and there”
to the twig of “one more”
lightning
Nothing stays one, together.
But nothing ever comes unattached.
Look at each cold breath
growing lie a crystal tree in the air.
Every bit of air drawn in
is immediately lost in a web of veins
tributaries ending in still more gossamer.
It is just as possible to branch in a circle
as it is to fall together there,
but the branching is what lasts.
September 12, Grub
A lovely dinner— guests easy to please— and not after long
we napped in the backyard in the bog.
I floated down to dine with nine
corpses this evening.
We ate the flower’s meat
twine-green bones.
I prepared this salad:
unzipped the muslin dress of lettuce,
split and spilled the whole heart
of a carrot’s arrow,
cut the diamond of an onion chandelier,
unplugged a throbbing tomato from its juice.
I did more. My fingers are stained radish.
All our life’s work is dying.
Look at any face.
you will see shriveled kidneys
left too long in an oven.
at the same time, a bloated
liver strung with a flood of poison.
knees crumbling in a concrete way
from their business in the slums.
(I am taking the body apart again)
the library of the lungs
each book weighed with mold.
I tossed a few of my own teeth
with salad, for croutons.
September 10, The Last of the Season
I hate to realize what I’ve been doing
since ten. Raking in the wind.
Peeling impaled leaves, leather
butterflies, off my rake.
It is homemade and wooden.
I may as well have a broom.
Trucks encourage the wind and, the lonely
ones, on the road for weeks,
see me, a girl, and yell out.
They must miss some one.
I think, if Sisyphus and I were the same age,
we’d have a good time.
I could walk on top of his rock
like a log roller, rake in hand,
sweeping the wind to get the flyaways.
Whoever finished first
would buy the end-of-the-day
beers. We could finally sleep.
Dad would rather leaves rot
in our marsh of a lawn than to rake.
His plan was a forest
of mushrooms and the under-stone smell
that clings to the legs of grey
feathery insects. Our yard was left
to its own. Once,
it thought itself into a pond
and drowned.
I stand between the wind
and my lighter
and touch each of the eight
shriveled fingers.
A rake on fire
looks like a strange, scared man.
I dropped him in the gutter.
September 13, Burial
To think like a tree, first let yourself
into the ground. Sometimes your roots
go down, sometimes you must dig
a hole to stand in. The religion of dirt
heads into toes, then rides the sap
up the body. It slows you down like meditation.
Tar for blood. Now, a tree.
The touch of onion chiffon on fingers,
a wet light bulb,
the way a sharp star smells.
Onions look like full clouds
when the clouds are so large
the veins of the sky thicken
soon to rush again with rain
turning the land rusty.
The clouds all day have looked like my dog—
not the shape of Aslan,
but the pipe smoke quality of him—
something you feel like you should
be able to hold, but can’t.
Each swelling of the skin
of the clouds is a single curl of Aslan’s fur.
He actually stayed on my bed
when I put him there
for two minutes
with the window’s wind on his nose
then ran off to find
where the breeze went.
I stayed at the window.
Some of the grass after the long assembly
decided that the air was no good.
The rebels (the union)
have started growing back into the ground,
head-first and loopy
like a strange, one-color needlepoint.
The trees, when they heard about all this
grew mournful. Again.
It’s nothing new. They cry about having lost
everything, and they have.
They look like they have.
The stage of winter.
Teachers say it is the less light
that throws people on their knees
in the snow.
It is really the teacher of the trees,
their tragedy. A little Oedipus,
part Hamlet, and always Death
of a Salesman. The no communication
that is communication.
The trees think they are sad, sure.
But they are making people cry.
With all this nonsense going on,
the tulips have decided to stay in
their leafy eggs forever. A dreamy
hibernation that lasts,
swirled in satin licks,
the insect-black inside.
Clouds bandage the bruised sky
above my unhappy yard.
Aslan has come back
his head under my hand
for a second.
Is it coincidence brains are shaped like clouds?
A tree’s tiara?
September, Graves:
those that are cared for every Saturday,
marble rinsed down, dead daisies removed,
azaleas trimmed
those set in diagonals
with rose marble, not ash
enumerous
those that are warm
boiling over with dirt
ones that are empty, not drawn yet,
but surely will be
above the ground
below
rain-riddled, or roots
dusted with lilacs,
with the taste of dusk
ones sculpted as angels
those with candles in wind-proof glass
ones for children, with dolls
with snow on top
sometimes, the ocean
forgotten
the skin, when one dies alone
those that have been robbed,
lockets snapped from crackling spine
rings slid off white sticks
the skin, when one wants to die
September 30, How I Made The Day
I went diving in a water cave,
a dark-lit, placid, ocean grave
where sharks were sleeping like dull blades,
and kept far from the nightmare waves.
Stalagmites crawling with sea lice
this well where Mayans sacrificed
held gold that seemed to melt like ice
when I brought it to the surface for light.
Each honeyed tear dripped again to the ground
to form a glassy, glowing mound
like lave worming, turning sound
the cursed gold coiled pools around.
I saw this frozen light become
a thousand eyelids, then just one.
It opened to let out the sun,
from under this water the day was spun.
A tarry sea was tempered to
the water that can teem and chew,
a phoenix and a wildfire brew.
The ocean from black drowsy gold to blue.
After All, Renovations
The finish is inching off the floors.
Unpainting itself in rays.
Unraveling your work.
Your fingers were splintered
like a cactus. And now,
are sinking into wood,
spilling into each bare fiber.
There’s your whirlpool
thumbprint— no,
a mat dark in the plank.
Is that your elbow’s scar
I’m standing over?
My toe closes your eye.
No, that’s not right.
A tangle of knee? Dizzy.
Turn around,
turn it all back to wood.
October’s End, All Souls’ Sunset
Skeletons clank woodenly in the dark Light through the ribs—
wind all over Mexico. a dead red prism.;
The blanket on you, Witch costume, ragged at the knees.
frozen prism, Stringy hair, echo of fringe.
was woven on such a night, A painted girl pulls her hat, turns
strings of dusk shy, at a dog.
the weft, Later, the real demons,
stars strung as shy warp. the children gone.
You were born after sunset. Your face is so open,
It is right you should be gone eyes closed, and always begs:
at the same time. “Just one more sweet.
Children are begging pesos I’m in light up to my elbows
as ghosts. A small devil but not drowned yet”
alights at my elbow. The blanket settles.
A skeleton has begun to show through The cloth holds onto your old body,
the settling blanket. the wind to the shore.
http://www.mortarmagazine.org/forgetting-a-father
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