We returned to the estuary, where we found Triton swimming under the strong sun, back and forth along the surface, standing on his tail, a strong indicator of distress. We hauled him in with little effort. Alto, no longer bleeding but sluggish from the fight, had also lingered within sighting distance. He dove deeper whenever we tried to approach. But he never strayed too far. He wouldn’t leave Triton, and we had finally begun to understand why.
Rodney, who had the license and the aim, shot Alto in the back with a tranquilizer. Back at our facility, we measured Alto’s length. The growth was astounding. He stretched 11.5 feet long. His colors had settled into a turquoise flecked with bright yellow. He’d transitioned into a splendid alpha male.
Triton watched Alto from an adjacent sea pen. He hissed whenever we drew close. His own transformation was palpable. The sea pen was shallow enough to expose his scales, fading from crimson to orange-yellow. As we would later discover, the collagen in his scales had already softened from the ridged ctenoid scales of males into the smooth cycloid scales of females.
An external event had triggered Triton’s hermaphroditic transition and we feared the cause.15 Perhaps Triton sensed this. He rammed against the walls of the sea pen, not purposefully but as if he were disoriented with loss.
A few days later the A pod was spotted near Beom Isle, but Astra was still nowhere to be found. “She’s strong,” Marla said, jaw tense.16 At her suggestion, we played a merrow song on speakerphone every night. We listened to Astra sing as a merling when she used to cry for her mother, who was killed in the 2001 September drive hunt. We waited on the dock until dawn. We wanted to believe in her smile, no matter how illusory it was.
Fabio eventually returned to the sea. The $20 million Free Fabio Project rehabilitated him in a makeshift pen by Klettsvik Bay. He was taught how to swim, how to hunt. A month after his release into Icelandic waters, Fabio was found near a Norwegian village, flirting with the fishermen, playing with the children. Tourists often spotted him preening his long golden hair, singing Christmas jingles like “Jingle Bell Rock.”
Sometimes he sang in a lost language, echoing clicks and guttural groans, as if he wanted to stretch his vocal cords, his ability to reach out to his own kind, no matter how far away they were.
He died a year after his release. They found his body in Taknes Bay, a calm pocket of coastal water, deep enough that it wouldn’t freeze in the winter.
There is only one recorded instance of Fabio’s attempt to establish contact with a wild merrow pod. He was once seen bobbing in the periphery of the pod, at least five hundred feet away, facing the closest merrow, as they passed by.
After thirty-five days of incubation, the fetus in Astra’s egg resembled a human baby, curled up in a spiral, with a misshapen large head, five webbed little fingers on each hand, and small hind protrusions, which would shrink and meld into a merrow tail, just as the tail would shrink and meld into a human spine.
The tests proved Triton wasn’t the father. On top of his low sperm count, we suspected he was infertile. The surviving merrows of the T pod who had reintegrated into other clans never yielded any fertilized eggs. We’d hoped it wouldn’t be the case for Triton, who was a merling at the time. The virus had not only decimated his family but killed his fragile reproductive capabilities. Even as an alpha female, the chance that Triton would bear children was frighteningly low.
If Triton wasn’t the father, then that left Alto. He floated in his tank, listless and belly-up, his merrow smile now a sutured gash across his face. He was always so passive, drifting aimlessly in his tank. Was it this same passivity that had angered Astra? Had she taken his refusal to protect the egg as a betrayal? Perhaps Alto had always known he was the father and still he’d relinquished his offspring to us.
We debated the reasons for Alto’s lack of paternal enthusiasm until someone proposed a theory: Alto and Triton had bonded when they were merlings. They used to be kissing pals. Perhaps Alto had always wanted Triton as a mate until Astra, an established alpha female, claimed Triton as her own.
To test this theory, we lifted the door separating his sea pen from Triton’s. Triton, who had almost fully transitioned into a female, rubbed against Alto for comfort. But Alto shuddered. He swerved sharply. He continued to dodge Triton’s attempts to communicate.
“He’s a deviant,”17 Rodney said. “He won’t mate with females.”
That evening we released Triton and Alto into the ocean. Alto dove under the waves without a backward look. Eddie snapped a blurred picture, Grade 3 in quality, a final glimpse of Alto’s scarred shoulders, crimson in the setting sun. We’d counted more than thirty bites around his neck and shoulders. The majority of his scars were puckered white and old. Astra had been sinking her teeth into him for years.
Rodney gave a despairing laugh. “An infertile alpha and a homosexual beta—Astra truly picked the best!”
Astra must have inflicted injuries on Alto with an increasing desperation every time he tried to refuse her. But why hadn’t she simply abandoned her mates?18 Why would she try to mate with Alto to the point of inflicting bites that went beyond mouthing behaviors?
This is where we split into factions. Some of us believe Astra had known all along. After four years of failure, she must have realized Triton was infertile, she must have sensed Alto’s covert desire for Triton. The rest of the pod would have chased them out for their deficiencies. And yet Astra had laughed and accepted them with a helpless fondness.
The other faction has accused us of projecting human qualities onto Astra. We were trying to make her into something that she wasn’t. Had we not done this already? We’d always told Astra she was meant to be a mother. We’d called her so many things. Our star, our queen. We’d promised she’d be the grandmother of the ocean, we’d caged her with promises she had to uphold, and still she’d tried to embrace us, her poor, unfortunate fools.
COMPLETE RESULTS REPORT
Case#: 15-1831
MMSC-15-117
Species: Merrow
Verified by: Dr. Laura Ravasi
Breed: Eastern Black
Verified on: 12/10/11
Sex: Female
Date Administered: 12/10/11
Date Reported: 02/22/12
Test: Gross Pathology
Specimen Collected on: 12/08/11
Animal ID
Test
Specimen
Result
MMSC-15-117
postmortem
whole body dead
gross pathology
Comments: A necropsy is performed on December 10, 2011. The body is that of an 82kg adult female merrow (Nereida niger) found stranded on Shiretoko Beach in Japan. The body length measures 285cm and has severely depleted adipose deposits in postmortem condition. All organs not described are within normal limits.
GROSS DIAGNOSES
Body as a whole: Emaciated, severe.
Lung: Pneumonia, granulomatous, chronic, multifocal, mild.
Thorax and abdomen: Effusion, serous to serosanguineous, mild.
Stomach: Ulceration, chronic, multifocal, mild, forestomach (nonglandular gastric compartment) full of marine garbage such as garbage bags, sacks of raffia, ropes, pieces of nets and plastic bottles, etc.
The manner of death is undetermined.
Theodore McCombs
Six Hangings in the Land of Unkillable Women
from Nightmare Magazine
1899, Jan 20th.
Sidney Lewis MILL, 36 (Vengeance)
Mill—a charmer and a rake of no respectable talent whatever—insinuated himself into the home of the widow Annie Holcomb and her seventeen-year-old daughter, Alice. But Mrs. Holcomb turned him out once she realized he’d been gallanting Alice as much as her. Mill spent the next four nights chanting obscene tirades under her window and left a dead rat in the mail slot on the fifth. Night patrols chased him off park benches; friends robbed him. Sleepless and humiliated, he broke into the house and strangled Mrs. Holcom
b with her tin necklace and, when it snapped, with a pajama cord—and when that failed, he dragged a kitchen knife over her throat—and when the knife chipped and the shard cut Mill’s eye, Mrs. Holcomb ran into the street calling for help, towing her bewildered daughter by the wrist.
Mill pled guilty. Alice Holcomb wept profligately through his sentencing. On the scaffold, Mill’s last words were, “Finally—finally.”
It was a muggy, yellowed May morning on Willow Street, Boston, the light tawny and thick with heat and soot. Edith Smylie’s husband, Gerald Smylie, superintendent of the Police Department’s Bureau of Homicides and Homicide Attempts, having finished breakfast, sat bothered at the window, watching two blackbirds harass and chase a hawk over the rooftops. Edith cleared the plates and ran a crumb catcher over the tablecloth, thoughtlessly at first, and then, when she saw how it irritated him, with a perverse little violence, scraping at the fabric so that it sent a thin, linen whistle needling into his ear.
“Look, do you mind!” Gerry snapped, and Edith stopped at once.
She was a lean, dry woman of stiff and careful movements, auburn-bunned, tending to gauntness, and in her high-collared brown wool dress , she looked like a telegraph pole. “It’s the Barrow girl bothering you, isn’t it?” Edith said.
Edith came round and settled by her husband. He sat with his shoulders pushed forward in his sack coat, the way he did, Edith had observed before, when he felt the world had skipped off its rails. She knew which case had kept him sleepless so many nights . She knew, and resented that he hadn’t asked for her advice.
It had been all over the papers, inevitably: Liza Barrow, of North End, having reared alone her five-year-old son, that winter had starved the boy to death, keeping him tied to his bed with nautical rope. It was an outrage; it was a hanging offense. The jury would have rioted had the judge ordered any lesser sentence. What the papers didn’t know—what Edith had suspected, and what Gerald now confirmed to her—was that Miss Barrow refused to hang.
The rope broke, the first time. The second time, the noose wouldn’t even tie , but squirmed and shrank from the frantic hangman like a centipede wriggling out of a child’s clumsy fingers. They’d tried a firing squad , and the bullets never turned up, not in Miss Barrow nor in the wall behind her. They’d tried the chair, and she’d sat patiently in a blue halo of St. Elmo’s fire, grinning like a perfect demon, teeth crackling. Since the emergence of the Protection, there had been some small number of women killers like Miss Barrow, and discreet committees of lawyers and churchmen had convened to litigate the metaphysics of an execution. If the crime were very bad, surely. If she were immured in a tomb with no air, surely. They never found an exception, and Massachusetts’s prisons hadn’t either. Gerry had sworn his officers to secrecy, but sooner or later, he admitted, the public would realize, like Miss Barrow had realized, that her sentence couldn’t be carried out.
Edith listened carefully while her husband unburdened himself. Her sickle nose traveled slowly up as she deliberated.
“The solution is unfortunate,” Edith said at last, but with a certain pride of achievement. “Liza Barrow,” she said, “must hang by a woman’s hand.”
Gerry startled.
It had never occurred to those discreet committees that women might enjoy a power denied to men. It had occurred to Edith, however. There had been reports in other cities, all confused, all unverified, of women having managed, with difficulty, to murder their husbands’ mistresses or to poison their mothers. Edith had kept careful account; had pondered them in her heart well before this morning. And women still did manage to kill themselves, after all.
“Obviously, she must wear a hood,” Edith said simply. Gerry raked his fingers through his hair. An uneasy smell of potatoes in oil lingered in the room. “And there’s no need to flounce around in petticoats for a hanging. No one need ever know.”
Gerry stood, and his shoulders pushed to his ears. “I shouldn’t like,” he said, “I shouldn’t like the woman who’d willingly undertake that duty.”
Edith shot him a look: he should know better than to make such declarations. She gazed into her gathered hands. For one sour moment she wondered if she shouldn’t have said anything. “It is a duty,” Edith reflected. “And I am prepared to satisfy it, if no one else will.”
1899, Mar 1st.
Samuel HEWITT, 24 (Jealousy, Drink)
Hewitt lost his job as a toolmaker and was reduced to asking Mary Rowledge’s father for work; he and Mary had just become engaged. Bedeviled by shame into resentment, Hewitt grew suspicious of Mary’s friendship with her family’s boarder, a Mr. Robert “Black Robby” Freedman. Hewitt, morbidly drunk, accused Mary of an affair, then declared he’d not gone to work at all at Mr. Rowledge’s shop that week, and that he would hang before he did. After more words in the same line, he bashed in Mary’s head with a hammer and wrote “I OWN YOU” over her forehead. When Mary woke the next morning, Hewitt had fled, but police found him blacked out in a brothel only blocks away.
Mary testified with an ink smear still visible on her rubbled brow. Hewitt protested his innocence to the very moment of his execution.
Edith visited her daughter Caroline in the afternoon for tea, though Caroline took none herself, as Peter, her husband, had forbidden stimulants of any kind. Caroline was pregnant with her first child, and she sat petting her belly with a look of satisfaction and preening as if she’d eaten a whole pie.
“I wish you’d let me open the curtains,” Edith said, glancing at the muffled bays, then the hissing gaslight sconces. “It’s an extravagance—it’s a vice, in this sun.”
“Peter doesn’t want the city air to get in,” Caroline said serenely. “It’s unhealthy for the baby.” She drew out the last word, bay-bee, as if teaching it to Edith.
“Nonsense,” Edith announced.
“Oh, Mother.”
Somewhere behind her, Peter was lurking; in the hall, in another room. Peter was a wealthy husband—worm’s wealth, Edith added a little savagely. He imported silks, and that ethos of vulgar display traveled through the house like a burnt smell. For instance, the andirons flanking the fireplace: brass nudes in the shape of long-suffering caryatids, their breasts more expressive than their smiles. Edith hoped in a few years she could persuade Caroline to have them hammered into napkin rings.
“Mother,” Caroline repeated, and now the word sounded very different, “Peter told me about your—your intention—” She frowned, baffled. “I wouldn’t like it. It’s out of the question, really.”
Ah, Edith thought. Ah; that was why she’d been summoned to tea, and why Caroline had begged her to wear her black frock, despite the late spring heat. She’d actually sent that with the messenger boy: I beg you. For Peter’s sake. Peter definitely wouldn’t like his mother-in-law’s hangmanning, and so Caroline must dislike it too, and persuade her out of it. The list of things this child had arranged to dislike about her mother, in twenty-one years, was extraordinary. She didn’t like Edith’s hands: red and muscular, farmgirl’s hands. Caroline, twelve, had once asked Edith to cover them, even in the house. But Edith liked her hands. They looked like her grandmother’s hands twisting chicken necks with a sharp, musical pop.
The week before, Gerry had had the police commissioner and the governor’s lawyer over for brandies. After some stiff pleasantries, Edith had disappeared around a blind corner in the hall and listened.
“It’s out of the question,” the governor’s lawyer had said. “You know how scandal has its way of getting out—how long do you trust your men not to tell that one over drinks?” He wiped the rim of his snifter with a silk pocket square after each sip. “The hang-woman. No. A week? A month?”
“Why would Edith even want to, is what I don’t understand.” The police commissioner sounded unsettled. “Why on earth, Smylie? Is she a cruel woman? Is she unnatural?”
“But she’s right,” Gerry said. “You know Edith, sir. When she’s right—well.”
“Well, w
hat then?” the commissioner said. “It’s not so damned obvious!”
“I think of it as a mercy on her part,” Gerry said coolly. “Look at our alternatives. Bury Liza in concrete? Like they did in Minnesota? We don’t want to be the next Minnesota, do we? We aren’t monsters.”
“Just fry a body on the chair and tell the papers it’s the Barrow woman’s,” drawled the governor’s lawyer.
A dreadful silence.
“Gentlemen. I was being facetious.”
Edith had smiled to herself, then had frowned, severely, at her own smile.
In Caroline’s sitting room, Edith sensed Peter behind her again. She didn’t hear him, for the rugs in Caroline’s home were shagged so thick, one’s shoes sank into them like mud. But he came in and out like a draft over her shoulder; nervous, irritable, smoky. Edith felt herself sit a little more stiffly upright.
Caroline did not, of course, persuade her mother to give up the duty she’d solemnly taken upon herself to satisfy. How had Peter found out, anyway? Edith wondered; then she recalled the governor’s lawyer was some sort of cousin of his. A silky conspiracy—it was almost flattering. Edith thought, as Caroline pleaded and seethed, I will go to the gallows this week. Just to see it. Just to make sure I’m prepared.
1899 Mar 21st.
David Archibald Michael CHAPEL, 18 (Sadistic Pleasure)
Chapel, a lonely, half-lamed youth from Back Bay, styled himself as a radical poet and concocted a fantasy of “the perfect murder.” At a music hall he approached Mary Tatosky, or Totoski, and Chapel, having offered a false name, flattered her rather pathetically until she agreed to meet him the next day. He took her to a secluded orchard, raped her, and smothered her with her coat, but fled when little red new mouths opened down the lengths of both her arms, sputtering and gasping for breath.
Mary never reported the crime, and Chapel grew impatient for it to be publicized. He telephoned the Globe to describe a vile murder he’d witnessed, but the press desk grew suspicious when he claimed the victim had been a woman. They traced the call, then reported Chapel to the police. In fact, Chapel’s perfect crime had miscarried from the start: he’d left fibers from his clothes at the orchard. The jury convicted him in under half an hour. He made a tearful statement while the noose was being fitted around his neck, but due to a hitch in the gallows occupying the hangman’s attention, whatever he’d wanted to say must go unrecorded.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 Page 9