The world is a woman curled around her knees. A child still in the womb of the universe. The oceans are her amniotic fluid. Underneath the seas her skin is pale and white, sometimes covered in wrinkles and folds, sometimes smooth.

On the surface of her skin is a castle made of glass, worn smooth in time. It is full of windows, open to the sea flowing through. The fish fly like birds through the water. Encompassing the castle are six gardens, full of undersea flowers. The gardens belong to six sisters, the daughters of King Triton. They are his gifts to his children. Their grandmother gives them jewels and gold to hang on their little trees and they sparkle like lights when the sun shines.

All six of the daughters are beautiful as forever. They swim ballets for the court spinning silks floating through the water in slow motion the way the audience can feel the currents of their movements. Their tails are gasoline on water rainbows scales crawling up their stomachs around their hips. They sing eternity. The youngest daughter is the most beautiful, admittedly. Her hair is rubies clearpure her eyes the color of the sea her skin pale as the inside of oysters. Her name is Lirea, and her garden is different.

Her garden has a bench, marble and slightly chipped. Underneath an undersea weeping willow sits a marble statue of a prince, his hips cocked a smile whispering across his face. Fern-like plants grow from the ground. A broken chest spills bolts of silks and diamonds into the sand. Lirea always sits on the bench and watches the sun rise and set through the water, her tail sweeping through the silk and diamonds, stirring up the sand.

At fifteen every mermaid is allowed to surface, to watch the sun set through the air and hear the birds sing. After her first sister went up, Lirea asked her what the sunset looked like.

"It is more beautiful through the castle," she said.

After her second sister went up, Lirea asked her what the birds sounded like.

"The fish sing more prettily," her sister said.

After her third sister went up, Lirea asked her what it smelled like.

"Like brine and rotting wood," she said.

Lirea's grandmother took her aside and said, "It will be your turn soon enough. You will see the world too, and know how wonderful life under the sea is."

Lirea turned her back and floated to her garden to touch the prince's face.

Her time come, she puts on her wreath of ocean lilies and breaks the surface of the sea with her head spinning.

The sun is setting, a gentle riot of color staining the sky. She catches her first breath of air inside her lungs, full of salt and fireworks and roasting meat. Her head turns as fireworks explode from a huge wooden ship quite near her. Flutes and fiddles are playing, dancing through the air. There are men and women flying quickly across the deck on leather slippers, on…feet and legs. Lirea holds her breath as a young man with night hair and fiery eyes steps to the rail and breathes in deep. He looks like the prince in her garden.

He looks down and Lirea ducks below the water, but their eyes clutch each other for a brief moment. He calls out to his friends, and they laugh, tell him he is drunk. Lirea floats just below the surface and watches him turn away.

She is so caught watching the revelry on board that she does not notice the storm. The only storms she has felt have been strong currents sweeping through the castle. This is the top-side version, and she is frightened.

The winds blow hard waves crashing over around through the boat. The sailors cry out and Lirea can hear their prayers echoing each other. The mast breaks over, and she swims frightened out of its way. She keeps her eyes open, searching for the Prince. As the yelling gets louder, so does the storm, and it climaxes as the ship keels over into the boiling sea. Lirea is frantic, watching the sailors and guests thrown in the water, and she forgets about the flotsam flying looking for the Prince.

He is flailing through the water toward a piece of wood already covered in men. Night is dark and soon the people's yell die down. The Prince cannot find his way. He is tired and he drops deeper into the water. So Lirea, following him below, swoops up and begins to swim with him.

She can feel his skin through his linen shirt. He is firm, a solid body. His skin is stretched full of a person. She is amazed. He is so beautiful.

She swims with him to the shore, white as her skin. A huge marble palace sits less than half a mile from the water's edge. People flock around the palace, dressed in silks and jewels some, and rags and scraps of paper others. Lirea is blow away by the wealth and the magnitude of these people, walking on their…legs.

She pulls him onto the beach, the waves tasting his legs because she cannot push him any farther. She hides her self behind some rocks to wait and see if anyone comes.

The rocks are cold, and her fingers curl around them until her knuckles are white and the edges of her fingernails are raw. Finally a girl comes, in a dress white as clouds clear as fog with tan dark skin and eyes to match Lirea's. She touches the Prince's skin and his eyes flutter. Lirea's heart shakes. The girl reaches down and helps him up. Lirea can feel his skin through the girl's fingertips.

She dives back into the sea, full of her own fog. She is tangled around his eyes. She sits in her garden for days sketching the edges of his face on the sculpture and no one can convince her to move. She chips pieces of marble from her bench and cuts her tail in long lines running up and down. Her blood floats gently away to a place where Purana waits.

Purana's hair curls black around her face, short because she is not what she seems to be. She laughs as she tastes Lirea's blood on the water. She can feel Lirea's hunger.

Lirea comes trailing little threads of blood spreading through the water. Her hair is tangled and matted down her waist. Hey eyes are clouded with salt and jealousy.

"I know you can do it," she says.

"Do what?" Purana replies innocently.

"Give me legs."

Purana is all business. "You must give me your voice in return."

Lirea halts, the webs of bones clattering still around them.

"Take it," she says.

Lirea begins to gag as Purana's fingers fly through the air. Air bubbles escape and float gently toward the surface. They contrast tragic against the violence of the spell. Finally Purana is left holding a necklace of diamonds silver pearls. She hangs it around her neck and turns away from Lirea, who is left, speechless.

Purana turns back around and says, "When you walk, it will be as though you were walking through a garden of shards of glass. Humans are different from us, they have immortal souls but they live only a sixth of our lives. We live three hundred years and then we turn to sea foam. They go on to their god after death. Unless you can find a human to love you, to marry you, then you will die with legs and turn into sea foam. If you fall in love, but your love marries someone else, then you will die the morning after as the sun touches you. This knife, when plunged into your heart will give you legs. Swim to the beach and do it there."

But of course, should you wish, I can always give the necklace back, and you can forget your Prince, and have your three hundred years."

Lirea snatches the knife and swims frantically away, the bones chattering after her. Purana does not chuckle, but wipes a tear from the corner of her eye. It dilutes the salt water. She turns back to her scrying glass and watches Lirea swimming toward the surface.

The transformation is excruciatingly beautiful tragic twisting desperation. Her scales shift and twist under her skin until she is left with legs long as a mermaid's life, paler than the sand. Lirea is left gasping against the air the waves curling around under over her toes. She wiggles them, pulls her legs under herself, running her fingers over her skin. Hesitantly she rolls to her knees, her long hair weighing down on her. She lifts herself to her feet and then she can feel it.

The pain is exactly as Purana said it would be, a garden of shattered glass under her feet. Her hair drapes down ropes curling across her breasts and over her hips. Her firsts steps are shaky barely leaving footprints in the sand. Her breath comes fast and delicate.

The Prince is leaving for his morning horseback ride when he sees a woman walking across the beach, her hair tangled across her exquisite body. He is caught in the storm of her eyes, pure and beautiful. He pulls her up behind him on his horse and feels her collapse against him. He can feel the cage of her chest rising and falling against his back as he rides toward the palace.

He has his servants wrap her in silks twine jewels in her long hair as she reclines on cushions. He feeds her grapes and oranges and fine bread and lets her sip from his glass. Every night he falls into her eyes, always open. She stays awake and watches the moon.

Lirea is in love. She caresses his chest with her eyes as he walks his legs and the way the muscles move underneath the skin. She sits and listens to him speak of books and oceans and paintings. He does not remember what he said afterwards. He wonders why she does not speak back. But it is enough for him just to be near her.

Every year the Prince holds a ball. The entire palace is gilded in silver and gold leave, painted over with pomegranate colored paints in twisting designs. Metal stars hang from the vaulted ceilings and food is served on platters in the shapes of bodies lying down. Lirea is dressed in a sari the color of the ocean many miles deep, embroidered with silver thread, moons and stars. The entire Court is in attendance, just to see her.

They speak softly behind gloved hands as the Prince offers his arm to Lirea in the first dance. They whisper across the dance floor, the two of them one pair of legs and feet joined from the hips down. The Court is awed, paralyzed with the electricity of the moment. The Prince spins Lirea out and steps back, melding with the crowd and she continues to spin across the empty floor. The stars twinkle above as she rises on her toes to spin even faster. Her legs are on fire, burning with desire and pain. In her mind the Prince has become her salt water. Her air. Her feet are life when all you want is death, a life of crucifixion, pain beyond pain beyond pain. She keeps dancing beyond the music until her dance is pain, treacherous. The Court and Prince stand transfixed in her web; caught in her velvet pain.

That night the Prince tends to her bleeding feet and watched her fall asleep. And so with her blood on his hands, he wanders the palace, thinking of a haunting pair of blue eyes. He turns a corner to go into a bathroom, following the sound of a singing voice, and his eyes meet that of a startled Courtier. She is tall with tan dark skin and startling blue eyes. Her white dress is splashed and see-through. His mouth drops open as he moves toward her, captured by her grace.

"You, you saved me," he mumbles against her mouth, "that day on the beach."

"Yes, your highness," her voice slides back.

Lirea is a jumbled fog on the boat, covered in flowers cutting through the water. Her fingers twist a paper flower into a little ball. She can see the Prince and the Courtier with their arms and hearts twined around each other. Her eyes have not cried, matched with the Courtier's full of happiness hers are heavy with pain. She has danced for nothing. The ceremony took place beneath the setting sun, and now it is almost totally black. A reveler hoists his mug of beer and calls to the Prince, "Your marriage bed's waiting milord!" and then hiccups.

The Prince sweeps the giggling Courtier into his arms and marches past Lirea. She is disappeared into the woodwork and the sky, caught in the knots and clouds. The yelling and dancing does not continue long. Lirea is left alone at the bow of the boat piercing the sea. Suddenly five heads emerge from the water, their hair short as a boy's. They are Lirea's sisters.

"Come back to us," they say, "We sold our hair to Purana and she gave us this knife. Dip this into the Prince's heart before the sun rises and you will grow back your tail and join us again." They hand her up a knife the twin of the one she plunged into her own heart to create legs.

Lirea takes the knife and goes into the room where the Prince and Courtier are lying tangled in each other's arms. The Courtier's hair curls across the Prince's chest. Lirea's hand tightens around the handle of the knife, and she runs from the room. The Prince's eyes flutter. The first rays of sun streak across the sky. Her breath comes heavy caught in the air. She stands heaving on the deck and then flings the knife out into the sea. The water twists and turns red. The sailors rub their eyes and look a little more closely.

Lirea starts to cry, great wrenching sobs she feels like she is going to throw up under the sun rising up up up up upup. So she steps onto the rail the wind pulling at her robes blowing them back across her skin around her legs. She does not fall and she does not jump, instead she is disintegrating into the water. Becoming sea foam she thinks.

But instead of floating across the water like oil, she is rising into the air, surrounded by voices whispering.

"We are spirits of the air," the voices say. The world is out of focus through their speech. "We spread breezes through the jungles, the scent of flowers through whore-houses, warm drafts through the north. You are one of us now."

The Prince and Courtier are awake now, standing on the deck looking for something, or perhaps someone. Lirea can barely make out their faces.

"Come with us."

So Lirea sweeps down and kisses the Prince full on his mouth and then soars away from the sea, carrying the salty freshness with her. She laughs through the air like bells.

She is free.