Free Mermaid in Chelsea Creek by Michelle Tea Page A

but all of it was pretty. Buckets and buckets of regular, everyday glass somehow bashed into dazzle. The more she thought about it, the more she liked it. There was something about a piece of smashed windshield tricking you into thinking it was a priceless diamond that conjured a sort of respect for the glass. She was proud of it, as if it were a living thing that had pulled off a clever feat. It still felt nice to plunge her hand into the cool bin of beads, felt just as cool on the sun-hot skin of her arms as when she’d mistaken them for jewels. Sophie felt relaxed among the glass. They were all equals here.
    She found a bucket containing chunks of multicolored, rounded beads that looked like a giant bin of candy. Her mouth watered. She’dforgotten to eat breakfast, and her hunger for salt lingered. Would her grandmother feed her? She had never seen the woman eat, only smoke. Even at the Fourth of July cookouts Kishka would sit with a cocktail in a plastic tumbler, knocking the melting ice against the sides, and take drags off her dramatically long cigarettes. Kishka liked charring marshmallows over the burnt grill, but after she blew out their tiny fires and plucked the blackened crackling of the skin she threw the rest of the candy away, half-melted and sticky in the grass, to be scarfed up by a junkyard dog.
    The rumbling sound faded as Sophie plucked her way through the barrels and bins. The vibrations had settled in her bones and now felt natural. She climbed atop an overturned bucket to reach a row of shelves stocked with those charming, antiquated bottles that had been spared from pulverization. The height of the bucket increased her view of where she was—Angel’s place, whoever that was. She could see Ronald up the hill, his head plopped onto his chest, unconscious on his stool in the brutal sun. The glare of the day on the great heaps of trash was too much to look at. It burned a wall of light onto Sophie’s eyes, she had to blink it away to see again. When she could, she noticed the pigeons. A wide flock of them, assembled on the roof of the crooked building, staring at her with their small, orange eyes. Sophie felt that she’d been caught, but doing what, and by whom? A gang of scabby birds? Rats with wings , her mom called them, throwing handfuls of uncooked rice into the gutter outside their house as if someone had just been married, butno. Supposedly the rice expanded in the greedy birds’ stomach until their insides exploded.
    â€œReally?” Sophie had asked, skeptical, disapproving that her mother was wasting perfectly good food this way.
    â€œYou do what you can,” her mother said, resolutely, upending the plastic bag, shaking out the final grains. Sophie never even saw the birds come for the rice. They stayed high above, their scabby claws clutching electrical wires, and the rice grew grimy in the street below, carried away by insects and rain.
    Once she noticed the pigeons, Sophie could hear their coo , a breathy whistle beneath the steady locomotion of the rumbling sound. The roof was dotted with wide glass bowls of rainwater, and some of the birds bathed in them, their wings stretched surprisingly wide, creating an upwards splash with their scrawny bird legs. Sophie, already in a state of enchantment from the heaps of crystalline glass, found her senses unexpectedly pleased by the pigeons. Their coos were delicate and steady, like a room of devotees chanting Om . The architecture of the wing was magnificent, wide and strong at the base, a flying muscle, tapered at the tip. The perfect stripes of the feathers, lightest gray to charcoal, the iridescence of their heads, the fuchsia and green of it matching the gleams of certain glass in the barrels below. Sophie watched the pigeons bathe like a hunter who’d stumbled upon a nymph in an old myth. She moved carefully, as if her activity would startle them into the sky, but they had been watching her for longer than