Off the coast of Pozzuoli, a ship arrived. It anchored in the middle of the ocean. At sunset, a girl stood by the taffrail looking curiously at the sailors. She wore a pale blue translucent gown, a shawl that partly covered her head and was pinned to the dress around her shoulder blade, a glittering band around her forehead, and a brunette hairdo. Curls trailing down her delicate nape from a tight neat bun on the back of the head. She stood with her chin up—a phantom in the last sunlight. If anybody could see her, they would get the willies and run. She was a xeroxed typescript—a pale glass reflection.
The sailors were busy lowering the anchor. She spotted some divers too, leaping into the ocean, headfirst. She sighed and looked away, not a sign of care on her smooth paper-white forehead. It seemed just like the other day, when she was ribbon-dancing in this very blue flowing dress on the African mosaic floor of her villa overlooking this same ocean.
Her Roman villa once stood on massive white pillars. A russet pointed roof rambled down its spacious perimeter. Painted warm walls of orange hue, bells hanging down the deep arched Alentejo blue. The garden was decked with the heavenly gifts of roses, cypresses, rosemaries, and mulberries around a sauna built over the sea’s natural hot-spring vapors.
Suddenly, a panic attack seized her. A demonic volcanic eruption struck the core of the villa. She rushed out into the front garden, her parents right behind. Shutters shook. Tremors cracked the precious earth in sharp jagged hairlines, choked the psithurism of gossamer verdure. Lava-laden, the colossal-pillared villa collapsed, never to rise again, into a rock-solid bottom. Her city, Gaiae, also sank into the ocean bed, inching into Poseidon’s sea palace. Poseidon raised the ante; big waves engulfed the rest of what was left.
The girl hollered her tale to the divers. They were here to put together her fractured city under the water. Nestled within its mighty stucco walls. different life forms had taken new roots. Oysters, shellfish swam unhindered. Other kinds of plants sprouted through its ruptured villa walls—a new home for many, but a sea museum for humans. Strangely, there was peace in this darkness, where sunken spirits roamed freely, where this Roman damsel waded. She gradually changed into a lithe sea-nymph. The waves cloaked her within in warm embrace. In time, she grew a fin much like her new marine friends, she joined their inner circle.
Hundreds of years passed. This diver ship set sail through the ancient waves. The damsel who hadn’t aged even one day since the city’s demise saw the keel of this vessel. Her curiosity piqued, the sea-nymph peeked at this ship through the blue edgy underwater—this ship named Destiny. The nymph dived into the ocean’s depths and saw many divers hovering over her African mosaic, studying it in minute details. She transformed into an apparition of a blue girl in a flowing gown to catch their attention.
Human cries shuffled through the waves. An inked memory of a breezy lawn—long gone. The blue girl waded toward the cries at a great speed of light; she appeared on another water zone. She viewed a ferry undocking at the shore. It was full of commuting cars. However, a mini yellow car, an Austin, was sliding down a slope just as the ferry pushed away. This, a river, she realized, not her oceanic wonderland. No matter, the mini-Austin was precariously close to the river’s open mouth.
The car’s brakes had given out, the driver, a sitting-duck with his family of four. A beautiful young wife by his side and their two children were in the back. The wife prayed inwardly to her Sufi ancestors, “Am I going to drown like this with my young family in this voluptuous river?” The car couldn’t make it. The loaded ferry was leaving, all eyes were on the approaching vehicle, wondering what the driver was doing. The driver of the car frantically pulled the hand brake and pushed hard on the foot brake, all in vain. The brakes had stopped functioning.
Poseidon knew it. He empowered the Roman girl to change into any desired shape. A blue girl, she rose from the depths of the river, a mythical brawny creature, pushing back the car off to the crest of a hill, not too far, out of danger. The car was steady on a clearing. The driver exited the car without delay to find his savior, who appeared and vanished in a blink, a blur—a mystery to the man. She changed back into the girl longing to find her Destiny.
Destiny was waiting on the placid sea. Where the river and the ocean blended. Onboard the ship, over her citadel, the blue girl stood with the glittering band around her satin maiden forehead. Gaiae lay underneath like Atlantis through thousands of generations. Today, though, it basked in the limelight of the timeline the divers had set to do their formidable task, to revive the lost city in its former glory. What a lark! All were under the sea.
When the girl boarded Destiny, she felt optimistic. That the divers might lift her, too, out of the fate sealed into this morbid sketch—a lithe sea-nymph, a muscly creature, a xeroxed dancing girl in a blue flowing gown. Transformations and apparitions, an antique piece in the ocean bed. Of all the things she was, the one thing she was not, flesh and blood. She pined to dance again to the sweet tune of her garden’s psithurism.
First published in Alien Buddha Press Zine #41
Mehreen Ahmed is an award-winning Australian novelist born in Bangladesh. She has also won multiple contests and nominations for short fiction, such as BOTN and Pushcart.
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