Chapter Text
Once upon a time and
deep beneath the surface
of a sea no man could sound,
there lived a mermaid fair
of neither fin nor feature, keen
to breach the waves and light
upon a stone, a shore, a place where light
would prove sailors more than shadows and
air would carry, clearer still than water, the keen
that each ship sang strange along the surface.
The mermaid’s ear for tongues was passing fair,
and she swam fast and reckless toward the sound
of words whose rhythms she repeated, the sound
a tide that tugged toward meaning and left her light
of head--the law forbid her swim so close to the fair
sun or to ships whose songs drew her siren-near--and
yet the mermaid, longing fierce to know, would surface
where sailors cast their nets or whet their daggers keen.
Each time the mermaid’s journeys were discovered, the keen
her mother made would send her seeking shelter from the sound;
her father would swear that she would never see the surface,
not again, not if she lived a mollusk’s age or if the light
above the water were found to cure some ill. The mermaid wept and
stormed and pleaded that, only child though she was, it wasn’t fair
to trap her so, to keep her from the songs she found so fair
and the sailors she found so--whose tongues she was so keen
to learn. Her parents held fast, barnacles to a hull, and
recited again and again the litany whose unchanging sound
the mermaid came to loathe: her sight, over distance, was poor in any light;
her appendix, long since burst, had left across the surface
of her skin a scar--a scar!--and she must take care lest the surface,
having been so long troubled, omen a graver wound beneath; her fair
skin was like to burn even in the least direct of light;
her ideals were the feeble stuff of youth, and she was far too keen
to judge an act or to start a fight; her morals were, as yet, less than sound,
and sailors were known to take… advantage, should a mermaid show herself, and--.
The mermaid’s gaze never left the surface, returning always to the light.
In her every inch of skin and in her every scale, she longed for above, for the fair things that dwelled just beyond her reach:
the keen blades, the sound ships, the nets that once thrown could not be uncast.