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BREATHING UNDER WATER By Catherine Doty Florida's just a thumb on a jigsaw puzzle, but under water the Weeki Watchee Mermaids pour their tea, cook, exercise, iron clothes, guzzle with muscular skill their Grapette soda, with only occasional surreptitious sucks on an air hose hidden in shell-studded scenery. They grin, open eyes afloat in their blue-lit skulls. Holding my breath was a skill I practiced, too, like when I was ten years old and woke to a body lowering onto my body, and a breath that put me in mind of a rotten leg, a thing I'd seen in a book once and which scared me, but not as much as this body on top of my body, these jabbing fingers. I was wildly aware that the room I was in was a pigsty, and I was a pig to be sleeping in my clothes, and I wanted to blame it on someone, which would have meant speaking, which I could not do--- it would have been too real---and I was too old to blame anyone anyway. I closed my eyes to make the black world blacker. The lamp was within my reach, and a railroad spike I could easily have lifted, and also a bowling ball I'd found on the tracks, but all I could think of was being ashamed and dirty, and grateful the whole thing was happening in black and white, like those mermaids on TV, their lips and nails a black I knew was red, their long white legs safely fused in their glistening tails.