Kendra. Jane Keehn
remains, since only the top half of the body has been found. If anyone has information regarding missing persons in the area they are encouraged to report to the local police.
It was a man – not one woman or two women – a man.
However tragic for the poor attacked man, it was not her tragedy. Kendra flipped to the local weather report on the inside page and caught the Newsagent's owner stabbing a suspicious look her way.
She memorized the prediction and closed the newspaper, tapping it neatly into place on the stack.
- Can I help you find what you’re looking for?
the man asked her.
She caught her metal crutch pole on the edge of the shelving and hopped slightly to balance herself.
- Just deciding what to read.
She smiled as she steadied herself and knew she was pushing her luck with this bulldog of a man who had caught her too many times reading great chunks of things without paying.
She limped over to another section of the shop and picked up small reel of fishing line and a pack of golden swivels, cupping them in one palm while her hands gripped the poles aiding her balance while she shuffled to the man behind the counter.
- Actually, I need these.
She smiled as she paid for the fishing items while pocketing a handful of sinkers.
The coins she used fell out of a small leather purse and left sand and crunchy metal shavings on the newsagent’s counter.
The man shot a glance at the Kendra when she moved her hand across the top to scrape the debris away.
- Keep the change.
She smiled at him and shuffled out of the door knowing that the dirt she’d left behind and the limping of her weak legs meant that he was disgusted by her and was no longer looking at her as she snuck a newspaper under her arm and held it against her body, balancing it alongside her crutches.
Kendra grappled onto the walkway that led to the picnic section of the esplanade.
People stepped off the footpath to avoid her limping, her swaying, her unnatural movements. They lowered their eyes when she passed in her dark clothing. Her stumbling and look of helplessness meant that most of the town’s folk left her alone without feeling the need to ask if she needed help.
It was an age old trick that Kendra’s ancestors had used to pass unnoticed amongst land-dwellers. After a day of hiding in the shadows Kendra felt secure in the bright lights of the fair flashed, casting shadows on faces as they smiled right past her as she made her way to the old aquarium.
The crumbling giant concrete Poseidon statue watched over the entrance, his trident long ago broken into a single pole protruding from his massive fist. Rugged fencing and underwater glass cages used to keep dolphins, seals, penguins and even sharks in concrete caves for humans observe. They could be looked at during the day from the safety of the shoreline or fed by hand by humans who perhaps needed more protection than any of them.
Years ago the crowds stopped coming and the dolphins were either released or transported to the bigger underwater observatory beyond the Harbour.
Kendra found her footing carefully on corroded white bricks behind the concrete cage. She looked to the shoreline – a group of skateboarding boys skidded around the gravel of the old car park.
No one could see Kendra lower herself through a break in the wall. She placed her crutches under the cracks of a shallow rock pool. She undressed, rolled her clothes into a plastic shopping bag and stepped carefully toward the other side of the room that used to be a small storage space for feeding the marine animals.
She pushed the weight of her body, balancing on her stumbling, slender legs and slippery feet as she inched forward.
Kendra slipped naked through the gap clutching the bag as she grabbed onto the white painted rocks of the aquarium’s narrow ledge.
Inching towards the lapping tide her too-supple feet lost their grip and balance and she stumbled and fell forward, breaking the fall with her shoulder.
Her hair draped over the bag as she stood up, looked around and jumped into the deeper pool below her. Only the night air looked down at her.
No one disturbed her body’s transmutation as she was swallowed up by the water.
Emily - Chapter 2
The work room smelled of linseed oil and wood shavings.
Emily sat hunched over a block of solid wood as big as her dog, Leo.
She wore plastic goggles and green overalls as she worked with a chisel and mallet, cutting into the block where she’d drawn the outline of a fish-tailed woman in thick pencil.
This was her space.
The Mandalay Maritime Centre had a work room where Emily could do her computer drawings then replicate them onto the block. Transforming the wood into a figurehead took more skill but her Grandfather had left her his old tools and had shown her once how to slice the block at just the right angle with the sharpened chisel.
With a quick tap from the hammer, curls of wood shavings dropped to the floor, revealing a humanoid figure. Emily ran her hand over the hips of the figure. She could almost see Meg’s small hands holding on for life.
As the figurehead’s shape became clearer, from the cutting away of the extra wood, Emily embraced the dusty, saw-dust flecked body with her ink-stained hands.
Her stained finger nails contrasted with the light Marri timber as she rubbed the roughness away with light sand paper. Her touch was as light and as precise as if caressing one of her lovers.
Her hands delicately felt along the shoulder of the female cut-out and smoothed over the shape to feel if the roundness was perfect.
Emily needed Meg’s mermaid for the Mandalay replica in the Museum.
She wanted the original for the sake of history and truth, but in her absence, Emily would create her own mermaid figurehead from old photos and ship’s plans. Her replica would complete the Mandalay exhibition she was working on and help her to honour her grandmother’s memory and place in local history.
The wooden square at the head of the figure stayed flat and blank as Emily finessed the body of the mermaid. Known only from an old photo of the coal ship before she left Norway for the Australian coast, this beauty may have been one of the wreck’s casualties, but before she had vanished forever, she had saved Meg.
Emily wanted to do her justice, so she was saving the more intricate carving of her face until last.
She would use her Grandfather’s delicate and fine wood-working tools to create beauty from raw wood.
Something from nothing.
A woman from a dead Marri log.
Kendra - Chapter 3
Sometimes Kendra’s skin itched for the water where her tribe had come from, but she tried to limit her body’s transmutations.
She needed the ocean for food and once a week she needed to sell something so she could buy paper, candles, matches and fishing line. She didn’t like to steal but sometimes it was the only way of getting what she needed to maintain her messages to her mothers.
The abandoned Aquarium was useful for entering directly from the ocean. A year ago a concrete wall had collapsed onto a group of kids spraying graffiti over the plaster casts of maritime legends and now everyone was scared to trespass there.
Kendra found the familiar break in the pipes underneath the enclosure. Her naked human body lay drying and fully formed on the cool grey cement, rolling to its side over to the cement ledge where seals used to feed in front of happy summer holiday crowds. Kendra stumbled softly across the small caged