Atlantis 1989

A story by Amalia Litsa
Written September 21, 2022

November 13, 1989 was a full moon. I was 6 years old. Disney’s The Little Mermaid would come out in theaters that day. I didn’t expect to see it or any movie until it was out on video or in the dollar theater, but I was wearing the shirt. It had three mermaids on it. My best friend Diana was Ariel, and my other best friend Trivia was the blonde one.

On November 13th, I had been wearing my Little Mermaid shirt for 13 days. My dad noticed about a week in, but I wouldn’t let him make me take it off. I didn’t know how to explain to him that it was the only place where Trivia, Diana, and I were still together.

On November 13th, I was sitting alone in the carport, staring at dry spaghetti sticks fanned around a small bowl of warm sink water. I was thinking about Diana, who told me that if you leave noodles in water long enough, they turn into spaghetti. So far, nothing was happening.

I could hear my dad’s Chevy Vega pull into the driveway. I didn’t look up; I figured he’d just walk inside, like always. Instead, he stopped in front of me. 

“Do you know a girl named Corey?” he asked.

I met his gaze, like I was supposed to, and I shook my head yes. Of course I did. She was in Kindergarten Class A, like me.

“Have you seen her?” he asked.

I shook my head no. She wasn’t in class this morning. I hadn’t played with anyone after school since Trivia and Diana went away.

“Okay, well let me or your teacher know if you see her,” he said. He opened the screen door, then added, “Be careful walking home from school. Don’t talk to strangers.”

She went away, I thought. 

— — —

On October 30th, 13 days earlier, Trivia, Diana, and I were on our purple and pink Huffy bikes, riding around in my backyard. We were “popping wheelies” which really just meant tugging on our handle bars a little and shouting “Popped a wheelie!” Diana had a twin sized bed sheet draped over her shoulders like a cape. 

It was a Monday, the day before Halloween. 

“Popped a wheelie!” Diana yelled shrilly. Then she stopped her bike and turned to us. The end of her cape was looped back over her shoulder so she wouldn’t run over it. “Hey you guys!” she called. “You wanna ride to the cemetery?”

“No!” I yelled back, and finished the circle I was making around some cedar elm that planted itself in my backyard.

“It’s Halloweeeeen!” Diana protested. And then, “Come on!”

She rode out into the street. We’re going to get in so much trouble, I thought, but I followed her. Trivia too.

The cemetery was just a few blocks away, right across from our elementary school. We rode down the broken sidewalk, over the long weeds, to the cemetery entrance. Kindergarten Class A ended around noon, but school was still in session for all the big kids. I kept looking over my shoulder, afraid someone would see us.

Diana could tell I was apprehensive. “Come on!” she said impatiently. I hurried after her.

We followed Diana past clusters of headstones. They all looked very old.

“I bet I can find the oldest one!” Diana challenged. Of course, she had already found it when she said so.

Diana threw her bike down and climbed over a fence that bordered a large plot with one crumpling tombstone and two humble grave markers. She pulled her cape in after her, and read the inscriptions. Or tried to. The grave markers were too eroded. The tombstone’s insignia was a wheel with only three spokes and a six-pointed hub. Below it, the date “1837.”

“Hey, it’s your mermaid garden,” Trivia said. Diana laughed at that approvingly, and  twirled with outstretched arms. She would have sung “Part of your world” if she knew the lyrics. Instead, she hummed the fragment of melody that was in the commercial.

“I’m Flounder!” Trivia announced, ready to join in the game.

“You’re not supposed to step on graves. It’s disrespectful.” I chided softly—close to her ear, the way my mom used to do. It made me think of how you weren’t supposed to step on sidewalk cracks either. I wondered whose easily offended ghost lived in the cracks of sidewalks? The rules were made to keep us safe, she would have said.

Trivia gave me a defeated look, then watched Diana quietly from where we stood.

Diana wrapped the sheet around her waist and laid down. The white fabric around her tiny frame twisted into a tail.

Trivia’s imagination took hold again. “You’re a mermaid!” she squealed. “A dead mermaid!” She laughed at her own joke.

Diana shot her a knowing smile and crossed her arms over her chest.  I’m not sure where any of us had learned that from. “Now I lay me down to sleep…” She whispered loudly. Then she sat up and threw her hands into the air. “Yaaaaaa!” she screamed.

Trivia and I screamed too. Diana laughed devilishly, and Trivia and I hugged each other like we saw Scooby and Shaggy do. 

Satisfied, Diana sat up and looked around. “Hey, look!” Diana said, and pointed. We looked. There was a trailhead in the far corner of the cemetery. It led into the woods.

I plinkoed my way through the maze of graves, careful not to ride over any of them, as I followed my friends to the far end of the cemetery.

The trail was overgrown, but unmistakable. Diana leaned her bike against the hedge. Trivia followed her lead. I considered the possibility it would get stolen, but finally decided to do the same. I parted a veil of crisscrossed vines, and followed them into the brush.

We crouched and crawled and bushwacked forward until the path split. A small clearing in a half circle of trees was walled off by plywood, tarp, and old bicycles. 

“The Sea Witch’s grotto!” Trivia whispered loudly. I hoped the inhabitant of the tarp shelter hadn’t heard her. I felt like we were tromping through someone else’s living room. Uninvited. I made a quick sweep of my hand that meant, keep going. Diana and Trivia continued on, and I followed behind them. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing on end.

We were released into a clearing. I took several long strides away from the mouth of the thicket and created distance between myself and whatever lived in there. We stood below the canopy of an enormous Live Oak, and the ground was dust all around us. I leaned back and looked up.  There was wicker furniture up in the branches: a loveseat, a couple chairs. They were arranged around the tree, facing each other. A faint late day moon hung at the center. A fabric rope spiraled up the base of the tree. Other rags, woven together, connected branches, forming makeshift railing.

“The pirate ship!” Trivia gasped. The massive oak tree looked like a beached shipwreck, with rags hanging from the upper branches like seaweed.

“I bet you’re too scared to climb up there,” Diana said to me.

“You do it,” I countered.

“I can do it,” Trivia offered.

I watched as she weightlessly picked her way up the tree, using the rungs formed by the spiral of rangs as a ladder. “Yo ho heave ho” she sang. She held the fabric railings lightly, mostly using her own balance as she crept across a fat branch toward the loveseat. The hardest part was lifting her leg over the armrest while balancing on the other.

Once she was in, we all relaxed. She swiveled around to face us.

“Come on in! The water’s fine!” she called down. She swiped at the air with her imaginary dagger. “Avast ye maties!” she added.

“I’m The Lady of the Ship,” Diana decided. The figurehead, she would have said, if she knew the word back then. The base of the old tree was broad, but she managed to wrap the sheet around it. Then she backed against the tree and bound herself to it. Trivia looked down at Diana from above, with one arm dangling idly from her perch.The crescent moon had lowered on the horizon, and appeared to be just inches from Trivia’s lowered fingertips.

“The moon,” I observed. 

“The pirate’s booty!” Diana corrected.

Trivia, the girl pirate, understood and accepted this challenge. “Okay,” she said resolutely, and swiveled around such that she was sitting on her knees in the wicker loveseat. She folded her body forward, and reached down to grasp at our silver treasure.

Just as Trivia’s fingers grazed the moon in a momentary caress, the moon dislodged itself from the sky and fell! The warmth of the day, the chorus of cicadas—everything came crashing down, and the world was black and silent for seconds or maybe even minutes. I suppose time fell too.

Diana crumpled to the ground when the brilliant light fell upon her. To my amazement, she clutched the moon to her chest, supported its weight with her bent legs, as she sat in a semi circle of bedsheets at the base of the tree. Her wild, tangled hair fell around her face, which was shrouded in darkness even though it should have been illuminated. I could not see her expression, but the sound of her breath was loud in my ears.

Remembering myself, I looked around. The sky was dark and starless. We were encircled by skeletal elms, illuminated blue white in Diana’s moonglow.

A sense of loneliness sunk deep into the pit of my heart. I thought of my bed, and longed to be tucked under its familiar blanket, safe. “We should put it back,” I pleaded.

I stumbled back a few steps, then turned to flee. With no other escape, I plunged myself back into the thicket, and pushed through the brambles and switches. The woods were charged with magic, and the brush formed into a tunnel around me. My vision was limited to a small radius of soft blue light. The plants around me were combed forward, and bits of cloth snagged on thorns fluttered in an unseen current. Beyond the light, in the depths of the tunnel, I could see only foreboding darkness. Yet somehow, the darkness I ran to felt less scary than the darkness that chased me. So I pressed on.

I recognized what should have been the witch’s grotto: the semi-circle of trees, the tarp shelter, and the pile of rusting bicycles. Instead, this space was plugged with a massive tangle of rags. My shoes no longer crunched on broken twigs, but padded softly and unevenly on fabric mounds. The vines and switches were consumed in knots and braids. The tunnel narrowed. The rags pressed in. The crunch of foliage underfoot muffled, and I was drowning in the sound of my own heartbeat. I was hot. I was suffocating.

And then I was on the other side. Cool twilight. The cemetery. The street. The elementary school. My bike.

Where were Diana and Trivia’s bikes? Where were Diana and Trivia?

Not knowing what to do, I mounted my bike and rode as fast as I could down the little road that cut through the center of the cemetery. I shuddered as I passed the fenced-in plot. I didn’t look, but my spine tingled with the feeling that someone was behind me. In their mermaid garden, I thought.

I really hoped to see my dad’s car park in the driveway, but no one was home. I stumbled through the screen door and ran up the stairs. I grabbed a new bedsheet from the hall closet, closed the bedroom door behind me, and threw myself onto my bed.

I pulled the sheet all the way up to my chin, and stared at the popcorn ceiling until adrenaline gave way to exhaustion, then relief, and finally sleep.

– – –

Exactly 13 days later, on November 13th, 1989 I was still wearing my Little Mermaid shirt. I was sitting in the carport, alone, failing at spaghetti magic.

Corey was gone too.

I thought of the tunnel I had escaped through, and the moonglow that illuminated my way. A sense of certainty washed over me. Yes. I knew where Corey was, and I could guide her back.

I ran upstairs and pulled the bedsheet off my bed. I draped it over my shoulders and looped it back over so it would get caught up in my bike. Then I ran back down to grab my purple and pink Huffy. I checked the afternoon sky. The moon was pale, but full. This would be easy.

THE END