The Summer I Saw A Mermaid
"I'd always told my older brother that it was girly to be obsessed with mermaids. He'd strongly disagree, insisting that it was cool to be on the pursuit of such a beautiful mythical creature. When he was eighteen and I was sixteen, he dragged me to some godforsaken beach on the coast of a small town- the type too insignificant to be on the map. The beach's name and how Ethan discovered it are lost in my memory. However, the crazed locals screaming ramblings and warnings made a deep impression on my young mind. They explicitly said not to roam the beach at night. We had dollar-store flashlights and the full moon to guide us, and not much else. Ethan wanted to scour the southwest end of the beach, insisting the breeze was more appealing to mermaids there. I took the western area, and within minutes, I couldn't make out Ethan's flashlight beam at all. As a natural skeptic and general pessimist, I was having an awful time out in the cold damp air, not aided when t...