by Anthology
“They’re fish!” I snarl. “What the hell is Sunan doing? This is all kinds of wrong. They’re not even people, they’re just goddamn fish!”
“It happens on ships sometimes,” Dad says, and I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “It doesn’t hurt the meat.” He looks straight at me, those serene dark eyes unfamiliar for the first time in my life. “I didn’t want you to know until you were older, but I suppose you were bound to find out sooner or later.”
“You knew?” I whisper. “Does everyone on this ship know?”
My father sighs. “Go upstairs and don’t think about it.”
I have this horrible epiphany. Dad used to have his own boat too, long ago. Mermaids are common enough; even the big ones could fit in a bathtub. He could have kept them alive, feeding them, fucking them—is his story about Mom just that, a story? Or is it true that he kept a fish for himself, hurting it—raping it—until it gave him three daughters? Or was there more than one fish? I think of the dumb, mud-mouthed catfish mermaids that drift into our nets behind the house sometimes, and my stomach turns.
“Have you been fucking them, too?” The words spill out before I can stop them.
“Lily, go upstairs.” His voice has gone cold and dangerous.
“This is really sick, Dad,” I manage.
“I’m not going to tell you again,” he says, and when he looks at me, I wish he hadn’t.
I go.
***
My mother was not a fish. My mother was a warm, human woman. I am certain of this, even if I cannot remember her at all.
There was a story I heard once about a man who got his dick bitten off by a catfish. He was peeing in the water and the catfish followed the stream of urine straight to his dick, crunched it right off.
This was our second-favorite story growing up, after the story about our mom, and now that Iris is an almost-biologist, she likes to tell us smugly that it’s the ammonia in pee that attracts fish, something about tracking prey through the ammonia leaking from their gills. I don’t know if this is true. But I’ve felt the crushing power of a catfish’s jaws, the bony plates on my arm while I wrestled them down to the hold. The catfish in the Mekong are huge, bigger than me. I am learning, as I get older, that many things are bigger than me.
In her second year of high school, Iris shut down. She stopped going to school, staying curled up in bed all day, and at night she would cry in her sleep. She wouldn’t talk about what had happened, but I found out from May, who knew some of Iris’s friends, that one of the boys at her school had followed Iris into a broom closet when they were cleaning up the classroom together. He was a close friend, a big, heavyset guy with short hair and glasses, but Iris would flinch whenever someone mentioned his name.
As I lie in my hammock, I think about catfish. I think about crushing mouths, crushing holds. All the while, the brown mermaid’s scent and voice sing in my blood, pulling it, tugging and setting it aflame.
I swing my legs over the side of my hammock and slip out of the sleeping quarters, taking the lantern with me.
Ahbe is making his way up the stairs as I descend, and he stops me with a laugh and a hand out against the wall. “What are you doing up so late, Lily?”
I look at him, that fire a cold burn in my chest. His shirt is hastily buttoned, his knees damp with seawater. “I’m going to check on the fish,” I say. The words feel flat in the wet, stifling air.
“I just did that,” Ahbe says. “They’re fine. Nothing’s spoiled; we should be able to get them to the market by tomorrow.”
“No. I want to see the mermaids,” I tell him, deliberately, and his face changes.
“I didn’t know you knew about that,” he says. “You’re too young to go down to the hold by yourself.”
“I’m fifteen,” I say. I think about the way my dad talks, the rich, strong core of his voice, and I channel that as I add, “I’m old enough to decide what I want. And I want a mermaid.”
Ahbe stares at me in the lantern light, and I can see his resolve wavering. “I guess it’s all right,” he mutters. “I was fifteen too the first time I had a mermaid. Just be careful—they bite.” He sucks in his cheek. “I didn’t take you for a tom, though.”
I knock his arm out of my way and he laughs. “Go to bed, Ahbe,” I snap. “You’re stupid. I’ll lock up the hold when I’m done.”
He tosses me the keys before he vanishes up the stairs, and I’m left alone in front of the heavy metal door to the hold.
It’s impossible to be a fish’s daughter. It’s almost as impossible as believing that your father is a monster.
I open the door and walk inside. Another set of stairs descends from the doorway, disappearing underwater after the third step. The mermaids appear to have calmed down a little, the surface of the water no longer choppy with tails. Only the slowly moving tethers stretching from the wall mark their presence beneath the waves.
I raise the lantern slowly across the room, searching for the brown mermaid. There: I catch a glimpse of her white eyes peeking just above the water. She is bound tight against the wall, tighter than any of the other fish. To get to her, I will need to wade across the hold.
I take a deep breath and shuck off my clothes before descending into the water. It’s freezing cold; the shock, the new weightlessness of my body, shoot thrills of adrenaline and terror through me. The mermaids dart away from my legs, smooth contact of scales against skin as they brush by. I walk faster, purposefully. I remember the fins and teeth on some of the tigerfish mermaids we caught earlier today. Maybe if I’m confident, they’ll think I’m a predator and stay away.
By the time I reach the brown mermaid, I’m shivering and my body is pebbled with goosebumps. The lantern wobbles in my hand, casting an orange glimmer over the rippling waves.
The mermaid surfaces, her chin just brushing the water. I can see her spines, the pods and fronds, and the rest of her soft, blobby body floating with the motion of the ship.
A sound hisses through her teeth, and it’s a moment before I can understand what she’s saying. “The girl-child.”
“I’m not a child,” I find myself saying through chattering teeth.
She smiles, blind eyes glowing silver in the darkness. “No, no child. What is your name, luk?”
In all of those European myths we had to read in school, they made it clear that you should never give your name to a faerie. But this is just a fish.
“Lily,” I say. I wish I had pockets to put my hands in. “Why do you keep calling me luk?” Why can you talk? I want to ask, but the breath is sucked back into my lungs. I am afraid of the answer.
Her arms are stick-thin, tipped with delicate toddler-hands and bound above her head. “Let me go and I’ll tell you.”
“Fat chance,” I say. “I didn’t come down here to get eaten by a fish.”
She clicks her jaws. “It is the other way around, no? You eat the fish.”
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”
The mermaid laughs at me. “And are you content with the way things are supposed to be, luk?” Perhaps she smells my hesitation, hears my grip tighten on the lantern, because she softens her voice to a deep hum. “I will not hurt you. Let me go and I will tell you everything you want to know.”
Maybe it’s because I want to believe her so badly, maybe it’s the fire singing deep in my body, maybe it’s the image of Sunan in the water on top of a mermaid; before I really know what I’m doing, my fingers are picking out the knots attaching her tethers to the ring above her head.
As soon as the last knot slips undone, her hand snaps out, lightning quick, snagging my chin. The twine tethers still attached to her wrists lash against my bare chest. The lantern bumps against her head as she draws close and licks my face, her tongue cold, alien, and rubbery. Her teeth are inches from my eyes.
“Are you really my mother?” I whisper.
The mermaid’s tongue sweeps across my forehead, down my nose, and across my
mouth before retracting. “Ah,” she sighs. “Not my broodling. No, I would remember one like you.” That childlike hand is nightmarishly strong. “But you are ours nonetheless. You taste like the ocean, not like the stinking land above.” She lets go of my chin, but I don’t back away. “I would grant you a boon, luk, in place of your mother. But I must have a bite of your flesh to make it true.”
Dad used to tell us an old tale about a magic fish that granted wishes if you caught it and released it back into the sea. I don’t remember this part of the story.
Her baby-fingers trickle across my shoulder. “Right here. It will not hurt much.”
A hysterical laugh bubbles up inside me. I am standing naked in the hold surrounded by mermaids, talking to a magic fish. What am I afraid of? I have had worse injuries; I can handle a single bite. I am an adult now.
I open my mouth to ask her for enough money to get off this stinking boat, enough gold to drown a sailor in, to drown all of the sailors in. I open it to ask about my mother, if she knows her or can find her or bring her back. If my mother is alive or dead. Whether she was human or fish, truly.
But then I think of my sisters: Iris, shaking beneath her blankets and clutching the biology textbook like a magic charm, and May, who had given me hers to protect me at sea. I remember that there are more important things. I think about the people who hurt my sisters, who could hurt them, about the boy in the broom closet and Sunan in the hold. About my father on landing, his eyes bitter cold.
I tell the mermaid my real wish.
She grants it.
***
There are many versions of this story, each with a different ending.
In one, I swim away with the brown mermaid. The sun wavers in a jagged disk overhead, glinting in strange scintillations. The water is cold, the pressure enormous. It pushes in on my billowy body, still tender, pressing it into a tighter, sleeker shape. Our tiny, delicate hands are locked tight as we dive deeper into the ocean.
In another, a large storm scuttles Pakpao, along with all the other fishing boats in the area, on the reefs by Teluk Siam. The hold cracks, allowing the mermaids to escape. Everyone survives and is discovered days later. The rest of the story is fairly uneventful, equally implausible, and made up by people who care more for happy endings than truth.
But here is what really happens. The brown mermaid disappears and Pakpao makes it safely home with a hold full of live mermaids. If the crew looks a bit dazed and disoriented, if they are not quite themselves and walk as if they are not used to having two legs, it is just the result of sunstroke. If the mermaids in the hold swim in frantic circles, their eyes rolling wildly in their heads and their wails ricocheting through the hold, it is just what fish do. After all, mermaids are fish, not people. The Japanese traders find the catch acceptable and the mermaids are transported by tank to restaurants across Hokkaido. We make a huge profit.
With the exception of yours truly, every member of Pakpao’s crew drowns within a week of returning home. Though I live, our family does not escape this tragedy unscathed; my father’s body is found floating in the nets behind the house. A joint funeral is held. Sunan’s widow speaks tearfully about how her late husband stopped talking after his last fishing trip and had spent the days before his death trying to walk into the river, a story that resonates with the families of the recently deceased.
My sisters weep, their futures secure. I weep, too, licking the salt from my tears. There is a bandage on my shoulder and a bite beneath that will not heal.
Santos de Sampaguitas(Short story)
by Alyssa Wong
Santos de Sampaguitas was first published in October 2014 in Strange Horizons.
The dead god descends on me as I sleep, the way it did my mother the night before my conception, and my grandmother before that. Even with my dream-eyes shut, I know it’s there; the weight of folded limbs on my body threatens to crush my ribs, and I can smell the wreaths of sweet sampaguita hanging from its neck.
“Go away po,” I tell it, adding the honorific since Nanay always taught me not to be rude to gods. “I’m having a good dream for once.” I usually have nightmares during bangungot, trapped halfway between sleep and waking, unable to push my way fully to either side. The pressure on my chest, the terrible prescience that something very bad is about to happen, and the sound of distant screaming, like a boiling saucepan of human voices, are too familiar to me. But tonight there is only a pleasant floating sensation, fresh from a dream of flying over the oceans cresting Manila.
Cool, smooth fingers push my eyelids open. Just as my mother told me, the dead god dresses like a saint, all in chipped white paint and dried offerings, braided together on cheap twine. It is man-shaped, though it is neither a man nor a woman. Even though it has no skin or flesh, the stench of rotting lechon assaults my nostrils.
Magandang gabi, my child, it whispers. Blessed evening, Maria, my heir.
“You have the wrong Reyes sister,” I tell the dead god. “If you’re talking blessings and inheritance, find Silvia po. She’s two years older.”
It lowers its bone-pale head, and kisses my hand. The waking dream ripples around me, and my beautiful, healthy dream-arm evaporates, shriveling and twisting into a withered claw. My real arm. I do not make mistakes, says the dead god. You wear my mark, like your nanay and your lola and many others before you. It cradles my mangled hand gently, lacing its fingers through mine. I chose you, just as I chose them. Therefore you are mine, Christina Maria Reyes, are you not?
I fight the sleep paralysis enough to snatch my hand out of the dead god’s grasp, but when I try to cradle it to my chest, my limb flops against me like a useless wing.
“Why are you here?” I shout. The shrill boiling sound has started up again, a high wail in the distance. “Nanay promised you wouldn’t show yourself to me until I was grown. I’ve still got years! Besides, Nanay is your disciple right now, not me.”
No, says the god. It has no eyes in its empty, hollow face, but somehow it manages to look away. Not any more. Your mother is dead.
The waking dream shatters. I bolt upright in my bed, drenched in cold sweat. The dead god is gone. My sister sleeps quietly, tucked next to me in our small, wooden bed; none of the other maids in the room are awake, either.
It takes me almost a minute to realize that the teakettles I’ve been hearing are my own high-pitched, muffled whine, and that my lap is damp with tears.
***
My sister is draped in piña, in the middle of the Calderones’ living room, trying to avoid the dressmaker’s pins and the American ma’ams’ glares. The thin piña cloth shimmers over her dark hair like a halo, and she reminds me of the fresco of The Holy Mother, on the wall of Saint Peter of Makati’s chapel, only rounder and shorter. But she has the Holy Mother’s same expression of inner contentment and peace. All of the bladed comments and piña in the world would not be enough to hide Silvia’s inner glow.
“I don’t know why we’re paying for this wedding,” says Ma’am Chitti. She is sprawled out on the couch, neck beading with sweat, vying for a spot in front of the electric fan. Her voice rings loud over the dressmaker’s muttered measurements, uncaring of who hears. We maids, standing in the corners of the room, are all but invisible. “I don’t know why there’s going to be a wedding at all.”
“It’s because he got her pregnant, the idiot.” Ma’am Margarita flaps a newspaper in front of her face to create a fake breeze, and snaps her fingers at me. “Water,” she orders without looking. “With ice.” To her sister, she says, “If he was going to be fucking the maids, especially the under-aged ones, he should have at least used protection.”
“It’s harder to get, here,” says Ma’am Chitti. “Kasi Catholic.”
I dip out of the room with a soft, “Yes, Ma’am Margarita,” and pad to the kitchen. My withered right arm is tucked beneath my apron, so as not to offend any onlookers’ sight.
“Mom should just send her back to the province where she came from. G
et rid of her, and let her have the baby there.” Ma’am Margarita’s voice chases me down the hall, and I bite my bottom lip so hard that my teeth threaten to break the skin.
I have not told Silvia about our mother. I will keep it buried deep inside myself, a dark, jagged hole. Maybe I will tell her after the wedding. Maybe I won’t at all. After all, with no cell phone service back home, and a postal service that takes ages and loses more letters than it delivers to the provinces, how could I know such a thing?
Stepping into the kitchen at midday is like wading through a cloud of steam. Even the ceiling fan on its highest setting can’t cut through the oppressive heat trapped in the room. Two of the other maids, Jene and Vicky, glance up from the stove, where they’re making sinigang. “How’s it going in there, Tintin?” Jene asks me.
“It’s fine,” I mumble. I keep my body angled away from them, as I slip my right arm out of my apron, and use my wrist to open the cupboard where we keep the glassware. My hand works just fine, even if I can’t use my fingers to grip things. I know my arm scares other people, though, and even the other maids still stare, when they think I’m not looking. I’m always looking. “Silvia’s getting fitted for her wedding dress, and the ma’ams are making a big deal out of it.”
“It is a big deal!” chirps Vicky. Before I know it, she’s dropped the ice bucket on the counter next to me, the top already propped open. “You only get married once. And especially a maid, getting married to Sir Carlos—”
“It’s no wonder they’re pissed,” says Jene. “Your sister’s a nice girl, Tintin, but she’s a probinsyana like us. They want a high-class bride for their brother.”
“You don’t have to remind me.” I slam down a glass a little too hard, and the others flinch. Sometimes I wonder if they are scared of me, even though I am five years younger than Vicky, and two younger than Silvia. My mother, small and dark-skinned, has the same effect on people.