Just Keep Swimming...
You decide to keep going. You're not going to turn around just because of an extra limb or two. Your estimation of the river's depth turns out to be correct, though, and you soon find yourself swimming against the current. The water drenches you from your head to your rapidly dwindling feet. <spanFullTF>By the time you're halfway across, your skin is gray and white all over. Your legs continue to shrink; eventually, kicking what's left of your feet accomplishes nothing, and you start swimming with powerful strokes of your tail instead. Your hair gradually falls out and drifts away on the current. Webbing grows between your fingers. Your ears flatten and become holes in the sides of your head, which widens into a broad, triangular shape. Your nose swells into a pointed snout. You can feel your teeth getting sharper.
When you finally reach the opposite bank, you're no longer what anyone would call human. You have to drag yourself out of the water with your arms. Your legs have become little more than unusually long fins on the sides of your tail, which sweeps in a smooth gray curve from your tailfin to your shoulders. Even your chest has flattened out, more fish than mammal now.
You lay there on your stomach. You'd rather sit, but you have nothing left to sit on, and rolling over would crush the dorsal fin you can feel on your back. The breeze is cold as the water dries on your skin. It's uncomfortable, especially on your neck, where it feels as if the air is blowing under your skin. You investigate with a hand and find the reason: open flaps of skin on both sides of your neck. You have gills now. Fortunately, they don't seem to affect your ability to breathe air.
You can't see your reflection in the rippling water, but you don't really need it. It's easy to tell what you look like: a shark with arms. If you're a merman<span class="female">id, you're a carnivorous one.
Well. You may have crossed the river, but it doesn't look like you can go any farther. There's no way you can walk anymore. You could crawl, but even the sand of the riverbank feels harsh against your belly. You don't want to think about dragging yourself over sticks and rocks. You could always go back to the river, of course - it has to go somewhere - but the changes only stopped when you left the water, and there's no telling how much farther they'll go if you get back into it. You're reluctant to lose your arms and lungs.
On the other hand, maybe you're finished now. You're still a mix of shark and human, but an elegant one; what you can see of yourself is sleek and graceful, a blend of fish and mammal that looks perfectly complete. There's no way to be sure what the water will do until you go back in it.
Wait a minute. You seem to remember seeing a beach nearby. That gives you a third option. The river water might be magical, or something, but the ocean certainly isn't; you've gone swimming in it plenty of times, and you never turned into a shark. Maybe the ocean dilutes the water too much, or maybe it's something about the salt - either way, if you could make it to the beach, you could go back to swimming without worrying about further changes. Getting there might be painful, but you know it can't be all that far. You barely walked for five minutes to get here.
Whatever you decide, you'd better do it quickly. Your skin is still drying out, and it's starting to get uncomfortable, especially around your sensitive gills. You'd rather not be out of the water for much longer.
Written by Chrysalis on 13 June 2009
The end (for now)