The Bathtub Mermaid

Imagine, if you will, a deep-sea Easter. Bioluminescent eggs drifting gently in the current. Tiny fish hiding them in coral reefs. Eels judging you silently from a distance because you are doing it wrong.

"The ocean started apologizing on a Wednesday. I was halfway through reheating yesterday's chowder when the first buoy pinged."

Jean—called Grandma Love by strangers more often than family—felt that familiar tilt in the air. The almost-midnight tilt. Midnight wasn’t a time so much as a mood, a soft doorway between one thing and the next. She’d always been good with doorways.

She set the sled down. Ran her glove over the wooden slats. Felt her heartbeat double-tap behind her ribs. Then she climbed on. The world tipped. Not dangerously. Not wrong. Just… sideways enough.

It was finished. Actually finished. She and Trisha had built it with their own four hands, two questionable YouTube tutorials, and one bottle of wine.

Across the Coalition of Aligned Worlds, she could imagine this same carol rising in a hundred places at once: sung in English, Centauran Creole, SolCommon, Vulhari, SynthCant. Sung in domed colonies, hydroponic farm chapels, mining outpost rec halls, starship sanctuaries. Sung by people who had never stepped on Earth, yet carried its stories like inherited starlight.

No one there was particularly observant. A few weren’t Jewish at all. But Hanukkah had a way of widening the doorway. Light was light, after all, and the station nights were long.

She snorted. “‘Cause of death: holiday décor.’” “‘Victim was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but was at least festively themed.’”

“Daniel,” Jenna said, voice dangerously calm, “we live in Florida.” He looked at the wreath again. “…Right. So it might’ve been sand.”

That was his favorite part of the holidays—the way people found the book they needed by accident. Not the one they came in asking for, but the one that met them halfway.