Driving through suburban Orlando with the kids in back, windows of the unairconditioned Pontiac rolled down, all Dusty could think was “depressing.” But it wasn’t the heat that made her depressed. It was the cloudlessness. There would be no afternoon summer rain, no napping children, no early cocktail hour. Today was all murderous blue. She was in the drive-thru at the ice cream shop. Later, she would merge back onto the four-lane road to go home. At least she could punch the engine and speed to the red light. So reliable and powerful, her Firebird, her big purple beast. It had been a gift from her grandfather, willed to her and painted in her favorite color. Her grandparents had told her mother her name should be “Dusty” for Dusty Springfield. “The Windmills of Your Mind” was her granny’s favorite song, and she would sing it in a wavering voice as she shuffled around the kitchen. Dusty’s grandparents had raised her, though her mother had made appearances.
            The summer of contagion and death had Dusty on the tiniest, invisible edge, like something pressing on her brain but not yet fully manifested—a tumor, a clot, a stroke. Every day, she trained herself to think of doing just one small thing with her children, then she could feel better about herself. Today, she was ramping them up for National Ice Cream Month and a trip to an ice cream shop offering treats decorated like mythical creatures.
            The night before their foray, the children decided what treats they would order. Citrine would order the mermaid. Darby the cyclops.
            In the bath, Citrine reminded Dusty she was a mermaid. She dipped under the bubbles. When she emerged, she said, “I can breathe underwater.”
            Dusty vacillated between indulging the habits of cutesy popular girl culture and discouraging the child’s nonsense imaginings. When she was depressed and irritated, it was hard to tolerate the cutesy.
            She reached for her highball glass on the bathroom floor, but it slipped from her grasp and shattered.
            Dusty mused that when the little mermaid was given legs so she could be a human, she walked as if on glass and her feet bled. Well, at least in the unDisneyfied version her Granny read to her when her mama was out with her men. And the little mermaid’s desire to be with the prince came with the price of making her mute. “Can relate,” thought Dusty, fetching the broom.
            She dressed them for bed, turned on the box fan in the living room, and put ‘The Little Mermaid” into the VHS player. The two of them sat transfixed as if under the spell of the sea witch herself.
            Dusty slipped outside to the back porch with a glass and a bottle of Jack. She sat like she always did, propped back in her chair, feet up. She sat until the darkness settled her. Then she saw things, heard things. There was the moon silvering the lake, a snake easing itself from the base of the house onto the earth, ridges of an alligator spine in the water. She drank while her children watched their movie. The day’s tensions somehow justified the numbing.
            The next day saw her hungover in the drive-thru line at the ice cream shop not far from the road where young women sold their bodies, not far from where Dusty and her kids lived in her Granny’s old house. She put her elbow on the burning metal of the car’s window frame and pressed down. It felt good to burn her flesh, burn it hard.
            Once she ordered, she set her kids at a table next to the parking lot to eat their cups of melting ice cream; Citrine her mermaid, Darby his cyclops.
            “This is not a real mermaid,” said Citrine, looking disapprovingly at the candy-colored liquid with a soggy cookie fish tail swimming in it. She was only ten years younger than Dusty was when her mother told her not to come back to the house until she’d made money to buy groceries. Narrow hips, walking on glass, losing her voice down the road where girls sold themselves, Dusty learned a certain kind of commerce in a city that peddled princess dreams.
            “Why don’t you like your mermaid ice cream, honey?” asked Dusty, trying for sweetness, choking back the temptation to lose it. The older she became, the more Dusty sympathized with the sea witch.
            “Mermaids aren’t pink, Mommy.”
            But that’s cotton candy ice cream, like the drive-thru lady said. The kind that goes with Ariel.”
            “I don’t like it.”
            Dusty picked up the ice cream cup and threw it in the outdoor trashcan. A small, irrational thrill ran through her.
            “That was mean, Mommy.” Citrine glowered at her, crossing her arms like a schoolmarm.
            Dusty felt the eyes of the drive-thru customers on her. She and Citrine agreed upon the unicorn as a replacement for Ariel. Citrine chose the birthday cake ice cream, white being the right color for a unicorn. The young woman behind the counter handed Dusty a waffle cone to give to Darby since he had finished his cyclops.
            Naptime was good that afternoon. Something had broken in the air, and she would try again with them when they were awake, when she was watching them splash in the plastic pool out back.
            Dylan wouldn’t be back to see her for a while. He had said kids turned him off. Why did she still love him? At least he sent them checks, if only to appease his guilt. She’d take it.
            When the cicadas came out at twilight, there was a bath of sound. Like the humid air, it surrounded her, and she was suspended as if in a sea. She has never broken from this sea, nor had her mother or her mother’s mother. Even with the sound of the Amtrak in the distance, Dusty sat on her porch, her mother’s porch, her grandmother’s porch, night after night, mute, her feet bleeding.

Margaret Sefton’s fiction, memoir, and reviews have appeared in various literary journals. She received her MFA from Seattle Pacific University and lives in Central Florida. She posts on her WordPress blog “Within a Forest Dark.”