Free Mermaid in Chelsea Creek by Michelle Tea

crooked, wooden building Ronald had pointed toward, Sophie became aware of a steady, powerful rumble. If she’d lived in a different part of the country perhaps she would have stopped and braced herself for the rolls of an earthquake, but Massachusetts didn’t get earthquakes. They got blizzards in the winter, a sheet of frozen white that canceled school and turned the rules of the road upside down—the streets teeming with sleds, and the cars, buried under mounds of snow, now things to climb upon and slide down. They got hurricanes sometimes, winds that could blow you down, that beat the trees until their branches snapped, until their trunks tumbled into the street, the giant snarled mat of their roots upended, dripping dirt. But no earthquakes, no volcanoes, nothing that could explain this jumbling, rumbling sound—so loud Sophie could feel it like the bass of very loud hip-hop blaring from the supersonic car speakers of a Bellingham Square lowrider. It grew louder as she neared the building and its ringed fortress of tall, round buckets. The vibrations climbed her bones. As she came upon the barrels, she saw that they were shaking, and was stopped by the tremble of what they held inside. Jewels? Jewels. Jewels! Like a cracked geode, each rust-scabbed, dingy barrel was brimming with rough sparkle. Millions of pebble-sized chunks glittered blindingly in the sun. One barrel contained bright green jewels, thecorners smoothed to touch. The next, deep blue jewels, like droplets of some Caribbean lagoon. More barrels held cold, dark green jewels, the hard color of the Atlantic at winter. She picked up a handful, half expecting to see angry waves trapped inside, like bugs stuck in amber.
    There were red jewels—rubies?—and so many barrels full of crystal clear jewels, each cut into different sizes, that the abundance of sparkle hurt Sophie’s eyes and caused her to gasp in excitement. Diamonds? She plunged her hands into a bin, slid them deeper and deeper, until she was up to her elbows in diamonds! They felt cool against her skin. She lifted her hands and let them rain from her cupped palms, falling between her fingers, a chunky waterfall. A neighboring barrel of milky white jewels stopped her. What would this be? She wracked her brain for a gem that looked like this, solid and white and smooth, like the bumpy, antique lamp her mother kept by her bedside; milk glass she called it. Milk glass. Glass.
    As quickly as Sophie had been sucked into the rich fantasy of junkyard treasure, so quickly did her imagination spit her back out. Glass. She felt about as intelligent as Ronald, whom she had left up the hill with a stool stuck to his pants. Of course there were not bins and bins of precious jewels being stored at her grandmother’s dump! What a lunatic, to think so for even a moment! Was she a child, after all? Sophie burned with private embarrassment, and was glad to be alone. Certainly in all her wonder, she would have blurted something about the diamonds and rubies and emeralds that were now, clearly,the rubble of beer bottles, the smashings of jars, and the glass of shattered car windows tumbled edgeless and smooth.
    Sophie crept deeper into the space behind the barrels, observing rows of smaller buckets filled with jagged glass shards ordered by color, waiting to be tumbled. Shelves made from scrap wood held bottles that looked tremendously old; words and designs rose from their surfaces. Sophie ran her hand over one, feeling the word elixir roll beneath her fingers. She divined an order to the mess, a system: which barrels held finished products and which were next to be tumbled, empty shelves waiting for more raw bottles to come in, and shelves holding bottles too precious—antique?—to crush and crumble into ornamental debris.
    Once she accepted that the shining nuggets were nothing but unexceptional bits of broken glass, Sophie’s wonderment returned. Nothing was precious here,