Cry of the Sea by D. G. Driver

men turned
their attention away from the tank and onto the corpses.
    “Remarkable,” Dr. Schneider said.
“Astounding.”
    Dr. Schneider put on some latex gloves and
began running his fingers along the deep blue skin of the mermaids,
which was drying out quickly. He poked at them and plucked scales
off their tails, all the while speaking aloud his thoughts about
the skin tissue and biology of the creatures. I knew that I should
be paying more attention, like Carter and my dad were. They nodded
their heads and said “uh huh” after every sentence Dr. Schneider
uttered. But I wasn’t following what the scientist was talking
about; all the tech talk bored me. While I knew that I’d have to
take tests and write essays about this kind of stuff when I went to
school, it wasn’t the reason I wanted to be a Marine Biologist. It
was the actual physical involvement with the animals that intrigued
me.
    Halfway listening to Dr. Schneider’s
monotonous scrutinizing, I stepped away from the table to watch the
living mermaid. She had stopped thrashing about and appeared to be
actively observing the men and the dead bodies with her hands
pressed against the glass. She winced every time the scientist
prodded at her sisters. Again, her eyes revealed emotions that were
anything but happy. They conveyed loss, loneliness, and pain all at
once. I was positive she could comprehend that the other mermaids
were dead.
    “I’m sorry,” I said to the mermaid, touching
the glass softly. “We weren’t fast enough.”
    The mermaid looked into my eyes. She
understood me. Maybe not my words so much, but she recognized the
sincerity behind them. Ridiculous as it was, a part of me expected
her to talk back to me. If it were a SyFy Channel movie, she’d have
a snippy English accent and would tell me important secrets in
riddles. In a Disney film, she might even sing. However, she wasn’t
really partly human with some uncanny ability to talk beautifully
in my language even though she’d never heard it before. She was
mostly some kind of fish with an upper half that looked vaguely
like a woman who lived under water where people don’t talk or watch
cable TV. So, instead of talking with words, the mermaid simply let
out a squeaking noise similar to the sound of a dolphin.
    The men heard it and stopped what they were
doing to gather around me.
    “Did she just make that sound?” Dr. Schneider
asked.
    “Yes,” I said. “I think she was talking to
me.”
    “That’s impossible,” Dr. Schneider said.
“That would mean she was sentient, able to think and
communicate.”
    “Well, why not?” my dad said. “With a
human ish head, why couldn’t she have a brain similar to ours
too?”
    The mermaid made that squeaking noise again,
much more urgently this time. She was definitely trying to tell me
something.
    I turned to Carter. “We should move the dead
mermaids out of her sight,” I said. “It’s upsetting her to see them
like that.” My dad and Dr. Schneider stared at me like I was crazy.
“Would you be okay to look at the dead bodies of your sisters while
people poked at them and talked about them?”
    My dad scrunched up his face. “Come on, June.
I agree she might be aware of her surroundings and trying to reach
out to us, but I don’t believe she thinks that clearly.”
    I stared at him hard. “Imagine standing there
and having to watch the autopsy of my dead body. How would you
feel?”
    My dad blinked and shot a look back at the
mermaid. The creature squealed again.
    Carter didn’t need any more convincing. He
responded to that third cry right away by picking up one of the
bodies and carrying it down the hall to the examination room. The
two grown men were a bit slower to understand that I was serious,
so I lifted the other body by myself until Carter came back to help
me. When we came back, I could tell the mermaid was still trying to
see what was happening by the way she swam back and forth along the
glass, but she seemed a