The Lilac Vial
By Lost
I was surprised to hear my pastor say the other day that mermaids (or what I like to call Mammy Water and what he prefers to call Queens of the Coast) are mean. He clearly has never met a mermaid before—a sad soul obsessed with powers of darkness as he is.
Mermaids are creatures that love the sun and crave the smooth softness of water. Their fingers can send ripples through the river that, touching a girl, can make her fall in love. Mermaids are slimy and can never be caught. The slightest touch of their fins on your skin and your eyes harden into a very rare kind of emerald that makes you see the world as an enchanted place. Mermaids can sometimes transform into eels, but no eel can become a mermaid.
I saw a mermaid once. When she saw me watching her, she ran away into the middle of the muddy river but came back with three other mermaids that looked like her sisters. They sang songs of love, forgotten and regained, with voices too sweet to describe. When the birds joined them, I thought my heart would flutter away with my soul. The songs still ring in my ear even though I cannot sing them to you. They danced with a grace and beauty so delicate and yet so complex.
The more they danced, the more the dirt that made the river cloudy disappeared. I had never seen the river so blue and so pure. The night before, an unusual occurrence it was to see rain pouring monstrously from the clear and starry Harmattan sky. The rain washed away the copper-red dust for which Benin City is known. It ferried dust, dirt, and crud off streets, trees, roads and gullies and dumped them in the river. I remember sighing when I arrived at the banks before sunrise to capture frogs for my Introductory Anatomy class. Tip-toeing between globs of mud, I looked in vain through the turbid water for frogs. Even though I could hear their frightened croaks, I could not see them.
I cannot remember how long the mermaids danced, but by the time the morning sun came out to join the celebration, the water had gold shimmers. The river had become a bowl of greenish-blue liquid crystals, quivering in sheer delight at the touch of the mermaids' gyrating bodies.
Most of all, the mermaids were happy, skipping about in a world they had transformed by sheer joy into a garden. I found that even the trees swayed in childish excitement. The wind was perfumed and silky, chortling loudly and swirling around everything that caught its fancy. Grasses smiled a deep-green. Butterflies flapped in ecstasy, rousing moths, their nocturnal siblings dazed in deep sleep. The river bank on which I stood was a marble terrace, but jelly-like in texture. Around my feet, earth worms, caterpillars, bumble bees, and flowers laughed until tears fell from their eyes. I dare say I could not bring myself to capture frogs that made me chuckle by doing cartwheels on crystal-colored water. It was Eden.
Overwhelmed with surprised and half-sad that whatever it was that was unfolding before my eyes cannot last, I asked the first mermaid her name. It seemed for a brief moment that she was going to tell me. She did not. Her companions covered her mouth with their perfectly shaped hands, dripping with water, and off they went into the abyss of paradise where they dwelt beneath the river.
In an instant, everything returned to its former state: swampy river bank, coke bottles, FAN ice cream and pure water sachets, the awful smell from the catfish mud pits, my legs ankle-deep in marshy soil with decomposed twigs and God knows what else.
The mermaid paradise had, at last, been lost except for a drop of the crystal water caught in the air, the last to fall back down into the pit of mermaid heaven. I do not know what will-power propelled me, but I dived in the river and caught the droplet at the nick of time in my cupped hands.
There it is in that ornate vial you see on the dresser. You asked whether the vial is stained lilac. It is not. The color you see is one of the many strange moods of the enchanted droplet. As the day progresses, it changes its colors according to the many shades of the rainbow. That is why I expressed to you, earlier, my surmise that in the world beneath the sea, mermaids tell the time of day by color and not by a ticking machine.
Photo Courtesy: La12lasp
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