Art, She Promised ............................................Tylor Mehringer ’22

She Promised , Tylor Mehringer ’22, acrylic and pen, 14” x 11”

of my feet, afraid to move for fear they might tighten their grip. My father stands further out, bleary eyes peering into the surf.

“Right there!”

He motions for me to join him, anticipation overflowing from his gap-toothed grin. I scream in excitement, disregarding the crabs to accompany him on his sandbar lookout. This is the first time he has paid attention to me since I can remember. He hoists me onto his shoulders with a grunt, hands covered in the sweet smell of sweat and alcohol. I watch him point to a blip on the distant horizon.

“If you look close enough you can see her tail.”

I squint, trying to trace the line of his finger to any detectable sign of life. Nothing.

“It just looks like a dot to me, Dad.”

“Well it’s only a dot if you believe it’s a dot!” he chides, sounding incredulous.

“I know you’re tryna trick me! Mermaids probably aren’t even real!” “Sometimes you’ve got to believe, kid; trust in things you can’t see.”

He pauses, pulls an empty bottle of gin from his pocket, a note wrapped in twine safely tucked inside. Holding it up to the sun, he examines its contents, then throws it into the water, watching it disappear under the foamy seaspray. I stare quizzically down at him from my perch atop his shoulders.

“What was that?”

“A wish for the mermaid.”

“Why do you need to make a wish?”

He stares out at the sea, face filled with emotion.

“Sometimes a wish is all we’ve got.”

I wondered for hours after why he had been so paternal towards me. Why he had chosen that day, out of the seven years of my life, to start being a father. Three days later he broke the news.

November 12, 1972

He dubbed them wishing bottles, guising his alcoholism under the premise of bettering our relationship through a contrived game. Together we manifested his recovery through letters sent out to the mysterious mermaid, always tied with twine and encased in a bottle I knew he had downed in one sitting. It was all for me, he promised, my way of helping to assure his survival, but there was desperate pain in his voice whenever the subject came up, as if he, too, was hedging his bets on a hope he knew to be false.

Two months passed, and I tried all too hard to fortify the bond that had remained vacant for so long—too long. The once innocent wishing bottles tripled in number, piling up faster than I could send them into the ocean. He rarely joined me at the shoreline anymore, too busy preparing more bottles to be

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