The ancestors of mermaids that came to land in human form can never go back to the sea. If they do, they become foam— but we yearn for the water, we that are stranded here, a biological impulse in us to join with our sisters again.
We still choose to live by the ocean, unable to abandon ourselves to the built-up prison land of cities, or the safety of desert terrain where it would be most sensible to make our settlements. To be out of its sight we cannot bear, and so we spend our lives resisting the killing call of the sea.
My mother infamously did not. When I was just a child she took me to the beach that we had often looked at from our windows and abstained from, holding my hand in hers like a hot little stone as we traipsed across the sand. Her face was tired, worn down from decades of resistance, but she looked beautiful then, the girl she had been brought back to her by what she was to do.
“Mum,” I said. “Mum, we can’t go in the water. It’s not safe. You told me.”
She smiled like someone dreaming, and kissed the top of my head through my hair.
“It’s where we’re meant to be,” she said. “Where we should have been all this time.”
Had I been older I would have noticed her losing her grip on things, bit by bit, would have felt the heaviness of it on me like a stone. I would have gone to my aunt and asked her to speak to my mother and anchor her to the earth as she had before when her want of the sea had grown too much.
But I didn’t understand what was happening, and here she was, lost to the compulsion all of us had in us and had forced ourselves to renounce.
“Mum,” I said again. “You’re scaring me.”
She was still drawing me onwards by the hand, ignoring the way I stumbled in my effort to pull back towards the shore.
There was no one else on the beach with us, the hour so early that the morning could scarcely be said to have begun; there was no one, therefore, to intervene, though I kept glancing back over my shoulder at the distant houses in the hope that someone would come out and so break my mother’s enchantment.
I wondered if she thought she would be different, if in entering the water the tail with which our long dead relatives had been born would grow in many scales over her, if she’d find herself able to breathe under the waves. It bewildered me, for all my life she’d told me of family and friends she’d lost to the sea, how it had hurt to find herself more and more alone.
I did not comprehend how she’d eroded over time, how her melancholy had torn her up into pieces like a love letter thrown into the wind. I thought she’d get better, defeat her nature, but there she was, stripping her clothes and shoes off until she strode naked to the underbite of those first waves.
I let go of her hand and stood in terror of the misty joy that had her already away in her mind.
“Come with me,” my mother said. “Let’s swim together. It’ll be alright.”
She believed it, I realised, truly believed with a zealot’s passion that we would be different, that unlike her own mother she’d watched die we’d transform and be perfect again. But under it I saw she knew that what she went to meet was death. That she had resigned to whatever it meant to give herself up to the sea.
In desperation I began to cry, hoping that my mother would come back to comfort me, but instead she scooped me up into her arms and carried me on her hip down the slope of sand towards the water.
I saw her left foot taken to the ankle in a spit of foam, and quickly through it the hiss of blood as her skin came away and began to change. In a panic I bit my mother’s arm so deeply that my teeth reached the muscle, pushed back against her body with my feet until I fell into the sand with a thud.
She didn’t try to take me with her again, only turned away towards the scorch mark of the sun, her eyes burning with its light, her hair rolling on the wind like ink in water.
It must have hurt my mother very badly to continue on into the sea, but her craving of it numbed her, blinded her against the peeling away of her flesh into the foam as she trod further and further towards the deep. Scrambling back from the water I screamed and screamed for her, the skin of my face burning from the kiss of salt water in the breeze, but I don’t think she heard me.
Her ears were full of the toll of the waves against the nearby cliffs, the mutter of it on the beach, and the birds that in their funeral choir sung to her as she sank down. My mother walked until her legs had dissolved and then she crawled, all foam and blood until a great wave went over her head and swallowed what was left of her body.
The silence then was so profound that the world may well have ended with her, rapture come soundless upon us all. But then life began around me, the distant barking of the first dogs being walked and the snarl of vehicles along the village roads. I stood like the resurrected dead, dumbly swaying, watching the pendulum of waves come to and away.
Then I walked back along the beach up to the house of my aunt, where she lived with my two younger cousins, and knocked on the door. Upon answering my aunt knew at once what had happened; she saw the blood on my cheeks, the bone white flecks of foam there.
Her face opened to me, then closed at once, pale and still.
“You’ll be living with us, then,” she said bluntly.
That was that.
She wasn’t a cold woman, Aunt Myra; she was only pragmatic. Many of us had died, and more still would yet. Grieving was what so often sent us out to the sea, and so she wouldn’t allow any of us to mourn in excess.
She kept us children busy with schoolwork or at play with the earthy girls in the village who did not know what we were. Their parents called us foreigners, having the small-minded notion that our strangeness could only be explained by our having come from another land.
We understood that we were to maintain a certain secrecy about our origins, although we quickly learned that you could let virtually anything slip and none of our peers would believe it.
“We’re mermaids too,” they’d say, and throw themselves into the sea, laughing, while we hung back, pinching ourselves so that we wouldn’t be tempted to go in with them.
We had our excuses as to why we couldn’t set foot in the water: we were allergic to it, or we couldn’t swim, or we simply weren’t allowed to— the word of a guardian was the strongest and most easily believed of our many reasons, such an order being of a biblical finality to any child.
Yet as we got older it became more and more difficult to deny the ocean and its whisper in our ears. We understood the many deaths in our community, the spell of sorrow and the ancient memory of what we’d been before our foolish ancestors had chosen mortality over our own country.
“Why didn’t you go with your Mum, in the end?” asked my cousin Syla one summer afternoon as we sat swinging our legs from the pier. “Why didn’t the sea get to you like it got her? They say it’s catching. When one person gives in the ones with them do, as well. There were ten girls, ages ago, that all went in together holding hands. Why didn’t you?”
I clutched the planks under me, comforted that their wood had grown roots, once, that the trees they had come from had been very far away from the ocean.
“I saw what happened to her,” I said. “And then that was all I could see. Anyway, I felt it, too. On my face, the way it hurt.”
Here I touched a hand to my cheek where the flecks of water in that morning wind had left pale shining marks.
“But Mum,” I said. “It was like the pain didn’t matter to her. Like she didn’t know what was happening. Or didn’t care. I don’t know why anyone could go to the sea knowing we just melt away like that. That we can’t be mermaids again. What’s the point?”
Syla considered this, unmoved.
“Maybe we’re something else, afterwards,” she said. “My friend Tamela told me that we turn into spirits of the air instead.”
I laughed at her, a hard adult sound that cut her like a slap.
“Tamela doesn’t know anything,” I said. “She’s never seen it happen. She still has a mum. People die, that’s all. They die and they don’t come back. There’s nothing left after. So don’t you think of going. I won’t let you.”
For I’d seen that expression come over the faces of Syla and Aysin, the one I knew from the morning my mother had gone to kill herself. I saw how they flirted with the sea, how they let it singe their fingertips for the thrill of it, kept jars of salt water in their bedrooms so that it was with them always.
Some years later I went to my aunt when my cousins were out and begged her to move us away.
“We should go to the city,” I said. “Somewhere so far off that we can’t hear the sea anymore. There are others like us out there. They’ve lived there years and years.”
Myra shuddered, appalled that I could suggest such a thing.
“This is where we’re meant to be, Kyria,” she said. “There’s no point in running off like children. Denying what we are. This is our place, even if it’s hard for us to bear, at times. Be honest with yourself— could you stand to live anywhere else?”
I thought of my mother burning away into foam and said that I could, and my words were shrugged away, unwanted.
One night I woke to the sound of the windows in my cousin’s rooms being opened, the surreptitious scuffle of the two sisters scaling the back of the house. Sick from having come from heavy sleep I slapped myself awake and lurched up to stop them, but by the time I hung my head out of one of the open windows to shout I could see the girls peeling away towards the beach, giddy as prisoners turned loose from their cells.
I ran downstairs to fetch my aunt, tugging at her and shouting at her ear until she understood my babbling enough to inherit my urgency. She began to sob as she put on her shoes and followed me out of the house, wails she hadn’t had for her dead sister, as I recalled.
“I told you,” I said roughly. “I told you this would happen.”
Myra shoved past me on the road, cursing her human legs for their sluggishness, that neither of us could swim through the air. By the time our soles struck the beach my cousins were like peg dolls in the distance, dancing with a maenad fury, hand in hand.
How like my mother they looked with their black hair down and their white skin ripped free of clothes. In a moment I was a child again, helpless and trembling.
“Don’t go!” cried Myra. “Don’t do it!”
Her voice was terrible, a roar twisted up through her from some place as old and ancestral as the past. My cousins turned to look at her, but their eyes were an emptiness filled only by the sea.
Naked they walked together into the first wave; the water was mad that night, whipped up by a storm not yet come so that like the arm of a sapphire giant it extended above their heads.
I imagined that the sea knew what it did as it brought my cousins down into itself, their slim bodies contracting in a spume of blood.
Myra screamed, and as she poured across the sand after them I took hold of her from behind, heaving with all my might to prevent her from going any further on. She wrenched and fought like a net-caught shark, her teeth in my neck, her nails almost in my eyes.
The grief made her carnivorous. She would have killed me had I kept my grip.
As it was she turned her lower half into the shallows and crawled back into it, burrowing into wet sand and savage water. Then I saw pain open in her black eyes like some entity from another world, and her upper body sagged in my arms.
The reeking contents of her entrails were made lovely by their transformation into that marble foam. I could not help but look, transfixed by the ease with which her flesh went back to the water.
Blood ejected from Myra’s lips as she spoke, begging death of me like a coin.
“Let me go,” she said. “Let me go with my sister. My daughters. All the others before.”
She would have died slowly and in agony had I dragged her away across the beach into some ambulance, would have died bitter, delirious, and alone. There was no sense in denying her what she asked of me, or at least none that was not pitiless and cruel.
So as though she were some vast fish I’d caught I stood up with her half body in my arms and threw her from me in an underhand swing, a swimmer in a sea of darkness. Then she struck the ocean and her form burst into foam, come apart in the night tide that would suck her away in its hunger.
I stood there and wept, wept as my aunt had not allowed me to when my mother died, as I’d been afraid to lest the sadness forced me down to my white grave as well. Yet as I did it I felt a stone roll off me and away. I cried until the tears passed and I only breathed deep and jagged, the air I took in salty sweet.
My palms had been skinned by the sea; I tore fabric from the hem of my nightdress and wrapped them with it, knowing that, like all my wounds, they would heal but for the fairest scar.
Afterwards I went back to Myra’s house, packed my bags and by morning walked to the train station in the village, and from there into the tundra of bricks and tarmac beyond. The longer I lived there the more the draw of the sea loosened its vice.
It will always be in me, as the dead are in the living, as the past is even in those that forget. But I’m more of earth, now, of my own choice, like the mermaids that crossed before me, and the ocean is quiet and so far away.
The Morgue 