When We Believed in Mermaids

by Barbara O'Neal

A girl without a mother who protects her is a girl at the mercy of the world.

I’m fine until the plane lifts off and circles, and I see the city spread out in yellow lights and carved bays below me, and it feels like my ribs are breaking, as if I grew long roots there in that place, like one of the Moreton Bay fig trees, and now I’m ripping them violently out, all at once. Why am I leaving?