Total Lunar Eclipse by Jane O’Sullivan

After our results came back, we took a spliff down to the beach to wait for the blood moon, but it was cloudy so all that happened was a hellish glow and some ratcheting paranoia. I was already in a funk, but you wouldn’t let it go. Let’s walk, you said. To the headland. 

That’s where people jump. Jumpity-dee, jumpity-doo. I sang it, and I don’t know why that got me laughing but when we found the mermaid baby in the sand, we were still going fit to bust. We thought it was dead. I mean, it looked pretty dead under our phone flashlights. Its little body was half buried, its face fully schnitzelled, but then its tail went and twitched. 

Back at your place, you ran a bath, then drained it and ran a colder one. Get salt, you told me. More. And you sat in that bathtub until you were shivering, carefully wiping the sand off its round little tummy and pale, still little face. Again and again until its fists started to clench and its mouth started to open and close. Gasping.

The sound it made, I’ve never heard anything so angry in my life.

I brought half the fridge into the bathroom then, even your mother’s cottage cheese, but nothing worked until we got to the tuna and then it was on. Baby mermaid was some sick cannibal, and we had no idea what we’d done, or when we should take it back, or if its parents would sea-curse us, but after the cold of the beach and the cold of the bath you were just happy to have saved this one night, to have proved to me that it could be done.

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JANE O’SULLIVAN — Jane is an Australian writer. Her short fiction has won the joanne burns Microlit Award and Rachel Funari Prize, and been published in Island, Okay Donkey, Meanjin, Hex, Bull, Passages North, New Flash Fiction Review and Milk Candy Review. Recent non-fiction also appears in Sydney Review of Books and Adroit Journal.

Art by NOREEN GRAF — Noreen is a writer and visual artist living in Edmonds, Washington. Her fiction, poetry, comics, and creative nonfiction have appeared in Electric Literature, Bull, Hippocampus Magazine, Political Irony, Reckon Review, Oyedrum, MER, and other publications. She holds MFAs in Creative Writing and is currently at work on a novel.