One must examine the root causes, she says,
as I scrub the underside of her bathtub,
arms aching softly from the toil.
Change requires examination of the initial errors,
of the circumstances from   then
that led to the injustice   of now.

How naïve, I say.
Her tail slaps against the water she’s lived in
since I hauled her from the ocean last month.
That implies that roots
can be altered.

In the ocean, she says,
while I scrape   the algae
off the claw-feet of the tub,
kelp patches do little to repair
a torn scale when, every morning,
you swim past the jagged outcropping
that snares it daily.

And on land, I say,
as she squirms against the narrow confines,
and massages the dark sores where my net snagged her tail,
there is more money to be acquired by displaying mermaids
than performing undersea maintenance.
People have come to expect an attraction,
something they can’t see anywhere else—
if I can’t give them that,
how am I meant to survive?

So you claim money is the root, she says,
and I’ve stopped scrubbing now,
my last-ditch effort to make this mermaid more presentable
for my upcoming show of peculiar beings,
because a debate of ethics with a sea creature
is a novelty worth savoring.
But are there not other ways to make money?
Ones that don’t include caging thinking creatures
in metal tubs with lukewarm water?

So,   I say, setting down the sponge,
you want me to let you out of   the bathtub.

Her giant eyes fixate on my soap-spattered shirt.
The bathtub is a leaf, she says.
The root

is you.

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this poem was made possible by a donation from Aimee Ogden during our annual Kickstarter.]