A short-ish story-ish

It was torture.

Cruel and unusual.

Captured. Confined.

She gingerly placed her open right hand against the glass. Her heart ached as she watched the gathered crowd on the other side of her painfully small aquarium. The wealthy and well to do.

They stared and they gawked at her. This...oddity. This animal. This...mermaid.

She was one of the last of her kind. A giant koi-maid.

Once she roamed the seas off of Okinawa. Once she was royalty. A warrior among her people...

...now she was a slave. The whole underwater world was open to her. Now she was restricted by the glass walls of a tank that could barely hold her...