“Mermaid”

Night. Two old trees have grown together, their roots intertwined above the black mirror of a lake. Upon this natural throne sits one who remembers water more deeply than humans remember earth. Her enormous, inhuman eyes with long lashes have absorbed all the moonlight and that unspoken sorrow that lives on the border between dream and reality. Pearls in her hair are frozen tears she will never shed. In her hand she holds a white lotus, and down its petal slowly slides a single drop — a question and an answer at once. Her tail shimmers with gold — not the gold of a fish, but of time itself, which flows differently here, in the depths. She is not waiting. She simply is. The guardian of the boundary between the world of the living and the world of dreams.