Bathe her in Bon Nuit. Deliver her to the apple-guard. She once was a mermaid; today, she’s the hourly chimes of the bell tower.

She loves to imagine touring real estate: her last excursion was to a little 1898 with no hallways, only one bedroom – a blushing orange-red brick house on a corner with a kitchen, a study, no garage, and something called a mudroom. Open on a Sunday morning, a peevish real estate agent harried the kitchen, making his sales pitch to a muddy-eyed man trying to reclaim his youth by buying a pile of bricks – like his childhood home – a pretty place to imagine trapping foul the bride he never won fair.

Let the man claim his proxy bride, the mermaid had thought about it. But who was she – that missing bride – what was she, which color blouses did she prefer? Trees line the streets of the docile town, shrugging songs on the breeze. The town’s named for its mountain forts that once forced an order, a luxury of dry stacked stones, and it keeps its arrangement monastically, dutifully sweet: schools stack one after another along its streets, heading closer and closer to its rivers, but always, eventually, farther away.

The mermaid wants to be anointed with the apple blossom fragrance she named Bon Nuit. She wants no true real estate, except for the town’s bell tower with its industriously tilting bells. If the tower were underwater, she could swim up its bricks; in two and a half swishes of her tail, she’d be at the top, at last, looking down through the half-shining, half-tarnished bronze of its bells.

Let me be tended by the apple-guard, she thinks. His responsibility is to explain the importance of the sacrosanct apple in their literature, in their pies. The importance of their sun. His narrow guardhouse beside the bell tower, his tall fur hat, shy eyes, leather cross-straps, dull tin bayonet just for show – these all do, in fact, impress her.

He asks if she knows of the levers and gears concealed behind the clock’s placid face. No, she says. As the clock strikes nine and strides into its chimes, all she sees is sound, a sound that claims her, makes her his, their marriage of dryness and sound, her life as mermaid ended, over – though her life on dry land will only ignite as a spirit in the bell tower, keening the same chimes.