On summer nights, when the air has gone cool and the water cooler still, I settle my aching limbs down at the docks. The dropping temperature goads the fishes to the shallows where I wait, makeshift fishing pole in hand and tackle box in my lap.
A siren stalks me from below, as she has done for countless seasons now. I do not need to see her to know that she rests just under the sluggish waves and jumbled pools of moonlight. She rolls together a melody of clicks and whistles and hums. Her song fills the night, carving out my chest and turning it into a hollow home for her ilk: the crabs, gobies, and urchins. It turns my stomach, as if sea-salt stalagmites were clustered on my ribs, dripping from the pearl-white bone.
When she eventually breaks the still surface of the water, the waves are lulled into silence. Moonlight catches on her nacreous skin, illuminating and drawing the tides around her. The sea swaddles her waist, lifts her to the pier, and adorns her body with sparkling seadrops. Then, it recedes toward the tarry mud below.
She is left standing only a breath away from me. At her oyster-mangled feet, minnows flounder and flop, slim slivers of silver that reflect splintered shards of the moon. Under different circumstances, I’d scoop them up to use as bait, but tonight I stare down at them and will them to slip through the slats of the dock. It is all I can do to avoid meeting her gaze.
In my girlhood, when I first spotted the siren, she lurked so far beneath the waves that I could only make out her lidless eyes and sharp, multi-toothed grin. Her visage was muddled, and she was silent. It was easy to treat her as a figment of my imagination.
But she is bolder now. Here, I can behold her form in its entirety: her dulse-like hair, slick skin, and the crude gills gashed into her bony sides. She is close enough that her scent lingers between us: salty and marshy, rotten and sulfuric. It’s nauseating, but I cannot slow my panicked breathing enough to stifle the smell. It settles like muck in my lungs.
“Come,” she croaks, voice scraping and raw. My own throat burns as the word leaves her cracked lips.
I shake my head. I want to step back, to distance myself from both her and the water’s edge, but fear roots me in place. “Not yet,” I manage. “Another night. Please.”
But the siren is no longer a blurry creature of the deep: she is real, she is here, and she is now. As she stands before me, I wish that I had been braver in my prime, that I‘d slain her when my bones weren’t so brittle and my muscles hadn’t yet worn thin—though I have to wonder if she can be killed at all: my fishing knife has sliced through cartilage and scale alike but would be useless in trying to pierce the tough, shell-like material of her flesh; a shuck may be able to crack into the seams of her joints but would not withstand the blubber underneath; I could entrap her in a cast net and leave her to bake in tomorrow’s searing sun, but I doubt that I would be able to restrain her slippery, writhing body long enough to do so.
There is a drawn-out silence between the two of us, and I am held hostage under her expectant gaze. I say again, in only a whisper, “Another night.”
There is a distinct saltiness that permeates the humid air. It rusts the hook on my line and leaves a briny taste in my mouth. The siren’s smile—silent, gnashing, speckled with chum—widens. The resulting expression is uncanny: her empty, bulging eyes do not narrow to compensate for the grin, and her cheeks remain sunken and stiff. She outstretches a hand to me, her webbed fingers flaring. Ink and ocean water drip onto the planks below.
I do not reach out to accept her gesture. “Please,” I try again. The whisper is weak. I know this is futile.
She takes a sopping step forward. Though we’re in the open air, the space feels small. Night folds in on us, pulled in like a current as her slimy hands find mine. They slip up my shaking arms and around to my back. For a moment, her brackish embrace is all there is.
Then, images of the marsh flood my mind: shores swallowed by breaking waves; cordgrass tangled in the sea breeze, periwinkle snails suctioned to their stalks; dunes dotted by the vibrant reds and greens of pickleweed; shark teeth from millennia past washed up in tidal pools; blooms of jellyfish lacing the shallows.
There are more visions than there are grains of sand, and they come all at once. The sour smell of rot permeates each of them, but it’s not unpleasant; the scent has followed me through a lifetime. It emanates from the pluff mud that painted my skin as a child and crusts into the wrinkles of my skin now. It serves both as the marsh’s mother and its reaper, its birthplace and its resting grounds—my birthplace and my resting grounds.
In the siren’s firm hold, my reluctance corrodes into resignation, then into crestfallen acceptance. The dock creaks beneath me as I breathe out a sigh, leaning the rest of my weight into her.
When the tide finally goes out, I allow her to take me with it.
Sarina is an author most known for her editorial and copywriting work at Activision Blizzard, where she writes bits and bobs of content for games like World of Warcraft, Diablo, and Overwatch. Holding an M.A. in English from Arizona State University and a B.A. in English and psychology from the University of South Carolina, she is a writer both at hand and at heart.
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