Free The Republic of Love by Carol Shields

“The Boy Who Cried Wolf.”
    But it is not a good choice, not at all. Gordon, who is only six, cries when she finishes and pounds her arm and says she’s mean. His face twists into an ideogram of a face, and Fay, putting her head back on the soft pillows, quickly improvises a new ending. She makes the father in the story say he’s sorry about the wholething, that little boys have no business being out all night anyway. They need their sleep, and from now on the sheep are going to be put in the barn at night.
    Gordon laughs loudly. His laughter is ranged along a single note like an electric mixer. He has a trick of looking grave even when he smiles.
    During the night, Matthew wakes up crying. He has been dreaming about wolves. “Shhh,” Fay whispers, placing her hand against his cheek. “There aren’t any wolves here, I absolutely promise you. Not a single one.”
    She switches on a lamp, and together they inspect the closet and check under the bed, even peer into the dresser drawers and behind the curtain.
    After that he falls asleep at once, but Fay lies awake on the bed beside his compact, humming little body for an hour or more, trembling at what she has almost forgotten: the rivery end of memory, wolves, bears, nakedness, falling down holes, aimless and solitary wandering – all the rain and weather, in fact, of her own scrambled dreams.
    F AY’S MERMAID WORK goes back to the time when Morris Kroger presented her with the little Inuit sculpture and, unknowingly, set her on her way. She has yet to understand what mermaids mean, their place in the human imagination, but she knows how they look and behave. Hair, vegetablelike, weedy and massed. A face that is beautiful or cunning, and sometimes both. Lungs and larynx, a singing voice but without a song. Arms, usually rudimentary, but able to hold a mirror, and sometimes a comb. The torso may vary from slender to voluptuous; an earthy mermaid – is that possible? Very occasionally mermaids, as seen in art or described in legend, wear garments of some sort, or at least a piece of fine veiling or aquatic plant that flows over and partially conceals their high, hard, rounded breasts. There might also be a necklace or hair ornament.
    In the matter of mermaid tails there is enormous variation.Tails may start well above the waist, flow out of the hips, or extend in a double set from the legs themselves. They’re silvery with scales or dimpled with what looks like a watery form of cellulite. A mermaid’s tail can be perfunctory or hugely long and coiled, suggesting a dragon’s tail, or a serpent’s, or a ferocious writhing penis. These tails are packed, muscular, impenetrable, and give powerful thrust to the whole of the body. Mermaid bodies are hard, rubbery, and indestructible, whereas human bodies are as easily shattered as meringues.
    The asexual morphology of mermaids is obvious, there being no feminine passage designed for ingress and egress.
    The mermaid image in art is highly stylized, and Fay, responding to that stylization, and perhaps defending it, has taped over her desk a quotation from Leonardo da Vinci: “Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.”
    Mermaids are the color of water and of watery vegetation – brown, blue, green, silver. Mermen are found in art and in folk tales, and even merdogs and mercats, but among mythical fishy creatures, mermaids predominate.
    Some folklorists have suggested that mermaids are matter and spirit fused.
    Mermaids exist in all the world’s cultures and go back to the dawn of time, always gesturing, it seems, at the origin of life itself, which began in the sea.
    Once someone asked Fay a surprising question: Did she ever imagine how it would feel to be a mermaid? No, she said, never.
    In fact, if she ever thinks of herself as having a different shape, especially these days, it is more likely to be a sailor lost at sea.
    Frequently, people greet Fay McLeod with the question: How are your mermaids coming along?