‘A Collection of Secrets’ by Rhea Rose

When I turned twelve, in 1967, I ordered sea monkeys from a comic book. I kept the critters in an old green Jell-O mould I’d found stuffed with cleaning rags under the kitchen sink. I’d filled it with rusty-coloured tap water, water the city warned us not to drink before boiling. 

The creatures soon grew from thimble-sized to the length of my thumb — too many, too fast. By the time I moved the mould from the kitchen to my room, they’d chewed a tiny hole through the thin plastic and it had begun to leak. 

I moved them quickly to a glass bowl on the dresser in the room I shared with my little sister, Taryn. Over time, the sea monkeys, each a different colour of the rainbow, escaped. But they didn’t get far. 

A few leapt free and landed smack on top of the dresser, where their long purple locks caught in my hairbrush and they dried out. Some dangled like golden strings of unravelled yarn, twisting around a dresser-drawer handle. Others lay draped and dehydrated, orange and limp like carrot peels, over a tube of lipstick. 

An old aquarium with no fish, but all set up with plenty of aquatic plants, rocks, a bubbling treasure chest — all of it costing a total of twenty-five cents at a garage sale — solved the plastic-eating problem for a while. 

Still, they escaped. 

I’d find one or two of them hard and crispy in my old flip-flops, the toeholds chewed away. Two curled up behind my sunglasses, but, before they dried up, had bit perfectly round baby-finger-sized holes through the middle of each lens. Some chewed a hole through my tube of Coppertone suntan cream and drowned in the lotion. Turns out the sea monkeys I’d ordered from my Prince Valiant comic book weren’t sea monkeys at all. The dehydrated dust-sized creatures I’d sprinkled into the water had grown into tiny lemon-yellow, lime-green, raspberry-red, orangey-orange, and blueberry-blue … mermaids.