Into the Drowning Deep

"Bi," said Tory. "Some boyfriends, some girlfriends, one friend in high school who didn`t like either gender for themself, but liked girls enough to get with me." She paused before asking. "Is that a problem?" The question, as always, came with a vague wave of disappointment. She and Olivia weren`t dating -- sex and relationships did not always go hand-in hand, nor did she believe they should -- but she was having a nice time, and had been hoping to keep the option open to do it again. Sadly, way too many girls who liked girls (and boys who liked boys, although that wasn`t a dynamic she`d ever been a part of) had issues with girls who liked both. She wasn`t a slut or a fence-sitter, or any of the other terrible things she`d been called since she was sixteen and started figuring out her sexuality. She just was pickier about personalities than she was about genders.

ASL has its own grammar, which does not match English grammar. Hearing professors started getting angry when Deaf students who were native speakers of ASL didn`t follow English rules in their writing, and started pushing more and more for something called SEE -- Signing Exact Language -- which forced Deaf students to learn a whole new grammar in order to make things easier on their hearing instructors. The whole world is set up to be easy on hearing people, but that wasn`t good enough for us. We had to find the one corner that wasn`t designed to cater to our needs and take it over, and fuck the people who already lived there, who had a perfectly reasonable way of talking to each other, who didn`t need us to 'fix' them.

"You keep forgetting -- all of us keep forgetting -- that we`re talking about creatures that have appeared in folklore and mythology all over the world. There was a time when these things were everywhere. Something drove them from the shallows. Fine. I have theories about that, but since most of them involve industrial revolution and pollution, they`re not going to do us any good right now. They retreated and retreated and retreated, maybe because it was easier than fighting us for territory, or maybe because there was a time when we were too much trouble to eat en masse. Ships kept on disappearing. Since the start of man`s relationship with the sea, ships kept on disappearing. So assume that mermaids have never forgotten about us. We wrote them off as legends as soon as they were no longer knocking on our front door."
Dr. Toth looked around the small group. Her eyes were burning; her hands were clenched. "We forgot about them, but they never forgot about us. They always knew that somewhere out there they had competition, strange and soft and walking on two legs and defenseless in the water. Most of all, they never forgot that we were delicious."