The Mermaid

by Christina Henry

  There were no lights in the cottage, and the mermaid was certain the fisherman was inside and asleep and would not look out and see her there. Even if he did, she reasoned, he would only see a shadow moving against another shadow—the light of the moon did not reach this place.

  The mermaid swam to the shore, until she could feel the wet sand dragging beneath her fin and she could no longer kick up and down for there wasn’t enough water. She reached for the dry land just beyond the lapping waves—reached, and then paused.

  What if it did not work? What if those stories, those always-whispered stories, were not true? What if her heart longed always for the land and for the man with the lonely dark eyes and she was to never, ever have what she wished for?

  For some the possibility of failure would be a check, would make them turn back to the familiar. Not the mermaid. She had to know, and the only way to know was to reach out, to touch the shore.

  Her fingers brushed the dry sand, and she reveled in the wonder of it, of the feel of each grain as it passed through her hands free and unencumbered by water. It made her laugh out loud, to touch this thing she’d never touched before.

  And then she felt a horrible wrench deep in her gut, and a tearing in her fin, and she tried to cry out but it was caught in her throat. This was terrible, terrible, there was no wonder here at all—only pain and then cold, the most profound cold she had ever known. The waves lapped against her bare legs, and she could feel the chill of the ocean. She had never felt the ocean’s cold before. It seemed to sink into her blood and marrow and freeze her from her muscles and bones out to the delicate skin that covered her instead of scales.

  How do humans live with this cold? she thought. Every part of her felt fragile, as if she would burst into pieces if someone put a fingertip on her. The sand, so wonderful only a moment before, scraped her raw wherever it touched, and her shoulders shook with cold.

  Her teeth clattered together in her mouth, and she reached up with sandy fingers to touch them because they felt different, somehow flatter. They were flatter, not pointed as they had been before, and more like a human’s teeth.

  Her scales were gone and her teeth were gone and in return she had these things, these legs, which felt not free and light like her fin but like heavy bonding weights pulling her into the earth.

  Had she thought it would be marvelous to be a human? Had she thought she would have all the world before her? The world was not open to her. Her legs were like a net, a net that caught her and kept her from swimming free.

  She almost let go then, to push back into the water and let her scales cover her body and swim back, all the way back to the deep, deep ocean where her family would be waiting for her.

  Then she shook her head hard, though she trembled all over with cold and fear. She would not return in shame so they could shake their heads and say she never should have left in the first place.

  She wanted to know what it was like to be a human. Humans walked on their legs. So she must stand.

  But how? Nothing about her body seemed familiar. She did not know how things connected, how to push and pull all these alien parts to get what and where she wanted.

  The first thing, she felt, was to get clear of the ocean. Her human form was not meant for this place. The mermaid put her arms in the sand and pulled the rest of her body out of the water—slowly, so slowly, gritting her teeth as the sand scraped against her.

  Once she was out of the water she discovered the night air was nearly as cold and that it blew into the cove and swirled in eddies around her. It made the water that clung to her freeze, and her delicate human skin rose in bumps.

  This is why humans put the skin of other creatures on their bodies, she thought. She’d seen them wrapped in furs, or in sealskin boots, and thought them barbaric. But now she realized that they must have these coverings, or else they would die. She felt, at that moment, like she might die from the cold.

  Cold. She was so cold.

  She craned upward to see the fisherman’s cottage. Inside there it would not be cold. He would cover her with a fur and dry the water away and she would be warm, warm, warm. And then he would smile because she had come to him from out of the sea so he would not be lonely anymore.

  The fisherman. She must reach him. To reach him she must walk. To walk she must stand, and it didn’t matter that she didn’t know how.

  Her legs had a bend in the middle. She could feel it, feel the place where the leg separated into two connected parts like her arms.

  She pushed up to the palms of her hands and bent her legs until her knees were in the sand, and she huffed out her breath in the cold air because everything seemed so much harder than she expected. How did humans simply stand up on these stiff fins at the ends of their legs and walk?

  The mermaid rolled her ankles experimentally, curled up her toes, and by slow and careful practice found herself standing (wobbling) on her new feet. She did not feel very certain about what to do next.

  She’d seen humans walking on their ships and knew that each foot took turns leaving the ground while the other stayed. This seemed almost impossible as she stood there trembling all over and feeling that at any moment she might find her face in the sand.

  But the fisherman was at the top of the stairs. And so she must climb.

  The mermaid lifted one of her feet, and the wonder of being able to do it at all struck her then. She stared down at her legs, at the foot stuck in the sand and the other lifted in the air, and laughed out loud.

  And then she did fall forward, landing on her elbows and knees, and had to start it all over again.

  She struggled to stand. Once there, she shuffled one foot forward very carefully and then the other—one after another, scritch-scratch across the sand. All the while she clutched her body with her arms—they seemed so thin and frail, so incapable of protecting her from the frozen air that bit through her skin and into her blood.

  Then she reached the stairs and looked up, and had the horrible realization that she would not be able to shuffle here. Each step was high and made of wood, and there was nothing to hold except the rock face.

  The mermaid felt very tired then and wanted to do anything but climb the steps. But climb them she did, and later she had no notion of how she’d done this, except that it took a very long time.

  When she reached the top, the moon had almost disappeared beneath the horizon of the sea. Her hands and legs were bloodied and covered with splinters from where she fell on the stairs, and her teeth chattered with such force that she felt they might break.

  The mermaid stumbled to the door of the cottage and reached for the handle, as she had seen the fisherman do when she watched him from the water.

  The door swung open, and she clung to the frame. Inside the cottage there were many things that were strange to her—things the fisherman would teach her the names for, things like a kettle and a pan and flour in a jar and tea in a wooden box and a table and a chair (soon he would need two chairs, one for each of them).

  Beyond the room full of strange things there was another doorway, this one without a door in it, and she heard the sleeping-breathing noise that humans made and knew the fisherman must be there.

  The doorway seemed a long way from the one she was in, and the rough wood of the floor would hurt if she tried to slide across it as she had done the sand—this she knew from climbing the stairs, where unpredictable splinters had jabbed into her tender new skin.

  It took a long while for her to cross to his room. When she reached it, she saw him asleep in bed, the blankets pulled up tight past his chin. He lay on his side, and only the lids of his eyes and the black tufts of his hair were visible.

  The room seemed warmer than the others, heated by his sleeping breath, and she wanted so much to be where it was warm. She knelt beside his bed, stroked her fingers into his hair, and watched as his dark eyes opened. Sh
e saw the recognition in them, and she never wondered how he knew it was her, the same mermaid he’d caught in his net.

  A long time later he told her that it was her eyes, that her eyes were the same no matter what form she took, and when he saw them, he knew she’d returned to him.

  He lifted the blanket, and she saw that underneath was his man’s body with no coverings on it as humans usually wore. She went to him then, and his warmth covered her, and his love filled her heart and made her want to stay.

  He taught her how to speak his human-speak and told her his name was Jack. Her name was not something they could say in human, so he told her many names for many days until he said the one she liked, and so she was called Amelia.

  Amelia loved Jack, but she could not leave the sea altogether, and at night she practiced transforming from a mermaid to a woman, until she could pass easily between one and the other without the pain that had struck her down the first time.

  So she stayed with him, and loved him, and lived as a woman on land and a mermaid in the sea for many years. At night, when there were no other fishermen about and her husband lay sleeping in their bed, she would go out to the rocks and leave her human dress there and dive into the black water, and there she would stay, at least until her heart remembered the eyes of the man she loved and she would return to him.

  She loved him almost as much as she loved the sea, and so they were well matched, for he loved the sea almost as much as he loved her. He’d never thought any person could draw him more than the ocean, but the crashing waves were there in her eyes and the salt of the spray was in her skin and there, too, was something in her that the sea could never give. The ocean could never love him back, but Amelia did.

  Many years passed, and they were happy and content, but there were no children. Neither of them spoke of their secret hopes or their secret sorrows, but sometimes they would sit upon their deck and watch the water churning below the rocks and he would take her hand and she would know he was thinking of the children that never became.

  They lived near a village—close enough to supply them with what they could not provide themselves but not so close as to force them to be neighborly when they had no wish to be. Jack loved Amelia and the sea, and Amelia loved the sea and Jack, but they did not love the questions that too-keen neighbors asked, questions about where Amelia had come from and where were her people and when had they gotten married and oh this was so sudden, wasn’t it?

  Still, they grew accustomed to Amelia after a time, as folk will. They were a good people, but suspicious, and the mermaid’s eyes were always too direct, too beautiful, to make them comfortable. And where there is discomfort there is sometimes jealousy, and sometimes curiosity, and the two mingled on their gossiping tongues until the villagers were accustomed to the taste.

  “That wife of old Jack’s, they say she goes out in the moonlight and dances with the devil and that’s how she stays so young and lovely.”

  “That’s foolishness, Martha. Where would she go to dance up there? Their house is perched on the rocks just so. A good nor’easter would push it into the sea, I expect, and there are no forest clearings for dancing to be seen,” her companion replied, with more than a touch of New England asperity.

  There was more than a touch of New England superstition lingering, though, enough that some folk believed the tales of moonlight and demon-dancing. Many treated Amelia just the same when she came into the village, but there were those who never would.

  The years passed, as years will. Jack grew old, though Amelia did not, and after a time the people of the village began to remark on this—even the ones who were inclined not to believe the worst of her in the first place.

  They had not known, Jack and Amelia, that when she crawled out of the ocean to be at his side, they would not grow old together. Mermaids, it happened, lived a very long time, though they did not reckon time in the same manner as men. Amelia watched her young, strong husband grow brittle, his face as grey and weather-beaten as the prow of a ship.

  Still she loved him, and loved him more for she knew his heart, and after many, many years she found she loved him even more than the sea.

  And so the sea, who can be bitter and jealous herself, took Jack away—perhaps in hopes that Amelia would love her best again.

  It was an ordinary day, mostly grey but with peeks of sun, and the wind was light and fine. Jack kissed her good-bye as he always did and made his way—slowly now, so slowly—down the many steps to the cove.

  Amelia watched from the door of the cottage as he rowed out of the cove. He waved to her when he saw her standing there, and she waved back. She had a feeling then that this would be the last time he would wave to her, that this was their final good-bye.

  This feeling clutched her heart so strongly that she believed it was truth, and she ran from the cottage down the steps to the cove to call him back.

  It was too late then, far too late, for the wind was blowing into the cove and it took her voice and threw it against the rocks instead of carrying it out to the ears of her beloved.

  She watched him row farther out, farther away from her, and join all the other boats out to draw their trade from the sea.

  For one wild moment, she thought of changing into a mermaid to follow him, to bring him back home. But the presence of all the other boats stopped her.

  There were nets there, and hooks and lines. The one time she’d been caught in a net it had led her to Jack, but she had no desire to be caught again. What if the fisherman who caught her didn’t believe that she was Amelia, that she was Jack’s wife? What if he carved her up with his knife to sell at the market?

  This fear made her slightly ashamed, for she’d always been brave, but it was easier to be brave when you had nothing to lose. And she did have something to lose now—her home, her life, her happiness.

  After all, what if this feeling was only that—a feeling? Would she put her—their—secret at risk for nothing? And what could harm Jack on that sort of day? It was a fine day with no signs of storm.

  She was only worrying because he looked so frail lately, she reasoned. But when he came home that night she would tell him in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t to go so far out to sea alone any longer.

  All day she tried to go about her chores as usual. She found that she was constantly at the window, looking and hoping, but the sun went on its usual journey and the fisherman did not reappear at the horizon.

  As night fell, she went out to the rocks and waited. The cold air bit into her bones as it had done the first night she’d walked as a human, so long ago. Amelia didn’t go back inside, to wait by the fire or to put on a coat. She stared at the ocean as if the intensity of that stare would make her Jack appear there, tired and careworn but safe—Above all things let him be safe.

  But she could not make him appear, no matter how hard she wished it, so when night fell and all the other fishermen had tied up their boats until the morrow, she went down to the cove and took off her dress and touched the water of the ocean.

  In a silver flash she was in the water and swimming faster than any human ever could. Amelia followed the line she thought Jack had taken, out to the open water where he could cast his net.

  She swam and swam. It was dark and the land slowly disappeared behind her, but still she swam. She swam, surfacing to look for his boat, always sure that when she came up, she would see his dear face looking sheepish and saying he’d lost track of the time.

  Finally she broke the water and saw it—his boat, the one with her name carved in the side so she knew it was his. It sat still and empty, the ocean lapping against its sides, and no sign of Jack anywhere.

  Amelia swam to the boat and heaved herself over the side, her fin trailing in the water, sure that he was only asleep in the bottom. But there was no Jack, or nets, or fish that he might have caught. There was only the empty boat, oars tucked neatly in
side.

  She cried out then and plunged back into the water and down to the deep. Mermaids can see through the dark of the ocean.

  Amelia was sure, absolutely certain, that if only she looked far enough she would find he’d fallen in the water and was trying to swim back to the surface. She knew he was trying to swim back to her. He would never leave her. Not her Jack.

  She would find him soon. Very soon. She was sure of it. He was just out of sight, but his hand was reaching up for her and she would find him and she would save him and they would go home, home where they belonged, home on the cliff by the sea where they could see the ocean they both loved.

  But she didn’t find him, though she looked and looked. After a long time, she went back to the surface and found his boat again. She searched all over it for any clue, any sign of what might have happened to her Jack.

  There was nothing, only the empty boat and the folded oars and no sign that Jack had ever been there at all.

  Amelia knew then that the ocean had swallowed him, torn him away from her, and a great bitterness filled her heart. She hated the ocean, hated the vast and heartless expanse that had taken Jack from her.

  She wanted only to be out of the water then, away from the lapping waves and the boat that had borne her love away from her and delivered him into the cruel depths.

  Mermaids do not cry, but Amelia had spent too long as a human, and so as she swam back to shore the tears streamed over the scales on her face and mixed with the brine of the sea.

  When she touched the sand of the cove, she put on her human dress again and climbed the stairs back to the empty cottage. There she sat by the cold ashes in the fire and wept bitter tears until she felt wrung dry.

  Jack’s boat never came back to the cove, and some of the other fishermen noticed the empty pier, and they told their neighbors that they saw Jack’s strange wife standing on the rocks every day, staring out at the sea.