As
fall crept on and the storms got worse, the supply of monkeys
ran low.
At first, we actually prospered, because we were able to use the
monkeys that the other shops could not. The best monkeys for
making into mermaids, by most standards, were the suckling
young—their skins were pliant and they were of a size that
matched well with many common fish. But my mother, in her youth,
had developed a process that let her shrink the larger monkey
skins—even the full-grown monkeys who often died in defense of
their young and whose rough pelts the hunters would part with
for small coins—down to an appropriate size, without drying them
out too much to work with.
Thus we had survived ten years ago when the monkeys had been
exterminated from Isla Scimmia, turning the name into a cruel
joke that outlanders used to taunt the inhabitants for our dark
coloring and the heavy hair on our arms. More than half of the
families who made mermaids then had since left the island
altogether, some for Rome, some for the New World or parts still
more exotic. One notable family, a husband and wife and five
daughters ranging from a twenty-five-year-old spinster to a
toddling child, had all drunk arsenic.
Mother was disgusted. She'd held the family in high regard
before; along with her own, they'd been among the few original
mermaid-making families to survive when the mermaids themselves
went away, to weather the early storm of competition from Fiji,
to cope with the way the fish seemed to shrink every year and
the fickleness of the sailors who were always looking for some
new novelty. The eldest daughter had been her particular friend.
But these days, according to Mother, everyone was a degenerate.
She announced it loudly as she ducked into the workshop, shaking
the rain out of her loose dark hair. "Degenerates! Think they
can sell me stinking half-rotten monkeys for twice, three times
the usual price. They'd try to sell a shell to an oyster and ask
for pearls in payment."
She held two packages—by the smell of them I could tell that
she'd managed to find a few acceptable monkeys. She almost
always did, even when Annagrazia and I came home empty-handed. I
took one of the packets, wrapped in coarse oiled cloth, and
untied the ends to reveal one of the small grey North African
monkeys.
"You got the good kind," Annagrazia said, unwrapping the other
bundle and laying it on the table beside her knives.
"Too big," Mother said, and fished out a packet of glass eyes
from the pocket of her cloak. "It will take days to shrink them
properly." The shrinking process was Mother's pride and our
salvation, and she hated it – it was long, tedious, it produced
smells that gave her headaches. To hear her talk she'd as soon
never do it again. But she laughed at the women who came to try
to buy the secret from her.
Annagrazia picked up her knife and tried the blade carefully
against the inside of a coarse-haired leg. The lower half of the
monkey would be discarded, of course, but there was no need to
cut it to ribbons – the fur could still be used to line boots or
collars. "I like these grey ones though. They look the most like
real mermaids."
"Like those white-eyed idiots at the docks would know a real
mermaid from a hole in the fence."
"I don't care if they know. I know." She slid the knife along
the inside of the leg, skirted the groin, and split the belly. I
thought for a moment that she had cut too deep and the rotting
intestines would spill, but the knife glided along and left the
muscles in place. "Which reminds me. Did you get brown eyes?"
"Blue eyes. The sailors like blue."
"There never was a mermaid with blue eyes," Annagrazia said, as
she had so many times before.
"There never was a mermaid that was actually half monkey and
half salmon either."
When Annagrazia finished skinning the monkey, I took the body
away to clean and bone and see if any meat could be salvaged.
Just before the storms finally broke, I noticed that Annagrazia
was looking pale and sick. The quality of her work was falling
off a bit too – not enough that I could see it, but enough that
she cursed and wept at her tools before Mother patted her hand
and told her it was good enough, it would still sell.
Annagrazia threw her needle across the workshop and ran to the
kitchen.
Three days later, Mother sent me to the apothecary for
pennyroyal.
"You've left it too late," she was scolding when I got back.
"I haven't. I had an idea. I can make a mermaid that looks real,
Mama, when you see…"
"And your plan required fucking some sailor boy from the docks?"
"A man from one of the island families would have been better,
but it makes no nevermind. Our blood is thick. Anyway, my stupid
sailor boy was able to give me some brown glass eyes."
"You and those eyes!" I thought for a moment that Mother might
slap her. But Mother never slapped Annagrazia. She shook her
head and snatched the pennyroyal from me and went for the
kettle.
The baby slipped out in a mess of bloody unnamable fluid, and
never drew a breath before it was out of the world. Tradition
called those babies the happy ones.
"Let me hold it," Annagrazia said, and I placed it in her arms.
"There, look. The hair is so fine on the arms, and the eyes are
brown."
Mother smiled. "You're right. Our blood is strong. No sailor boy
in that."
Annagrazia reached for the knife she'd kept by the bedside in
readiness.
When the mermaid was finished, it was indeed perfect.
"The spitting image of my grandmother," Mother said
triumphantly. "This is the finest mermaid that has ever come out
of any shop on this island since our ancestors died out. The
price we can put on this – we could fool a ship's doctor with
it."
"We can't sell it," Annagrazia said. "It's too perfect. This is
the best thing I will ever do. I will keep it."
Then Mother did raise her hand to slap her, but Annagrazia was
holding her skinning knife and they stood staring at each other
for a long time.
"I will keep this one," Annagrazia said with a smile, "but I can
make more."
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