Singing With All My Skin and Bone

by Sunny Moraine

  There is one thing. And against all possibility, the corners of her mouth twitch.

  *

  Life and strength flow back into the mermaid both together, a great rush like a wave crashing on the shore of her heart.

  Her body wrenches itself upward, a great heave, her chest twisting in on itself with the lungs she no longer has. Her legs are bound and blended, her feet splay and stretch into fins. She opens her mouth wide in a scream with no voice to make it heard.

  The witch watches her in silence. She was pale before; now her skin is almost translucent. She is exactly the color of the shrimp that infest her hair. She looks as if she’s trying to smile but can’t, as if she’s taken a little of the mermaid’s death into herself, because of course she has.

  Death always has to go somewhere.

  But that leaves the rest of it. The death the mermaid has promised.

  The witch places the silver blade into the mermaid’s hand. Two seconds later its point is buried in the witch’s breast.

  This was not part of the deal, not the promised death in trade. But the witch doesn’t look particularly shocked as she dies.

  The little mermaid sits in the center of the black-gauze witch’s blood. It flows into her gills. She opens her mouth and tastes its old metal and rotten wood. What she promised the witch, what she’s offered in exchange—she’s done offering. Done exchanging.

  This is all for her.

  *

  She can hear the music of the prince’s ship as she nears the surface.

  It’s music to dance to, and for a moment she stops just beneath the surface, head cocked, listening. She danced once, danced on the blades of knives and never bled, never screamed, and it had not just been that she had no voice. Love silenced her, terrible love, and she only had eyes for him as he laid his hands on her and spun her across the floor. Alone she had danced for his delight, her eyes beseeching him. She had believed he saw and answered her in the same kind. She had believed that he had entered the cloak of silence that covered her. That when his lips touched hers he had shared in it all.

  Now she listens, cold as the water around her.

  She breaks the surface. The knife is very heavy in her hand.

  The ship is strung with fairylights, bathed in starlight. On the deck she can see bodies turning, turning. She can’t see the prince or his precious princess, but she can feel him there. Whether or not he meant to, he did share himself with her—if, as she now knows, not his better part. Not the part he’s given now.

  She stabs the blade into the wood of the ship’s side and begins to climb.

  *

  She knows they won’t see her, not at first. They had never seen her, not even him, and now will be no different, though she’s a thing of legend, of fairytale, as much as the prince and his princess. She’s not a thing of this fairytale, has no place here, and so will be unseen. She is supposed to be dead. To them, she is.

  She can make use of this.

  She pulls herself onto the deck behind a table laden with food. Her gills should make this difficult but some part of her remembers, some part of her unable to shed that form just as she can’t yet shed all of her death, so the air she pulls into her is harsh, sharp, a little like the knives that used to torment her. Her tail is strong and she uses it to push herself across the deck, behind the guests, behind the men in their fine suits of clothing and the ladies in their rich gowns. Behind the musicians with their strings and pipes and delicate drums.

  And there, in the center of the gathering, him and her.

  The mermaid closes her hand on the edge of the shear’s blade and bleeds. Because what’s a little more blood?

  The prince and his princess turn around each other, spinning and laughing, voices high and clear over the music. The mermaid, in spite of herself, briefly loses herself in watching them. They are so lovely in light that dances as they do, fire and stars, and for an instant—a traitorous instant—she wants this again. Wishes. Dreams. Because it might, it might, have been worth the pain.

  She lets out a sharp hiss.

  All at once, the prince and his princess stop, standing in the center of the circle, gaze to gaze, hand in hand, breathless and flushed and so clearly happy.

  This is the last scene of the fairytale, the point at which it ends, the book closes, the light goes out and all the good little children snuggle into their covers and drift to sleep on waves of sea foam.

  The little mermaid slaps her tail against the deck and leaps.

  There’s silence. She can hear it. The world itself gone frozen and still, and all eyes on her. Her hands hit the prince squarely in the chest, one hand over his heart, and the shock on his face gives her pleasure as keen as any blade that has ever touched her.

  From somewhere in the crowd, a scream. The prince himself is opening his mouth to do the same. The little mermaid opens her own in mimicry of him, and before he can utter a sound she plunges her head down and sinks her teeth into his throat.

  He convulses under her. His choked-off scream comes out as a gurgle as her teeth dig in and in; hot blood floods her mouth, flesh giving under the force of her bite, and the prince twists, trying to get away, and this is all the help she needs as she whips her head to the side and tears out his throat, meat and voice sweet together on her tongue.

  She swallows. The prince lies there, twitching, drowning in his own blood.

  Voiceless.

  Now the screams, a chorus of them, women and men alike, and the sweetest scream of his princess, but the little mermaid barely hears any of this over the sound of her own laughter, hard and high and like all the songs she used to sing to him unheard beneath the waves. She eats his scream, the blood running down her chin, and as her death flows into the gaping hole in him, his life burns hot in her belly.

  Why, he’s mouthing. Silent and already half dead. Why.

  She lowers herself against him and kisses him once, painting his mouth with his own blood, smiling against him, and now understanding that this is a kind of joy he would have never given her willingly. Now there are running feet on the deck, the pounding of fleeing and panicked people, the shouts of the few guards he’s brought with him on what should have been a voyage to celebrate life and love. Over the din of all of these things she opens her mouth and speaks to him for the first time.

  “Fair’s fair,” she crows. “Fair is so very fair, and I’ll spare you the knives you’d dance on, my love, my love.”

  She’s singing as she begins to cut off his legs with the blade. It is very sharp. The witch gave it magic. He can’t scream, of course, as his blood pools on the deck and drips through the slats, but she can feel his cries echoing in her own throat and she turns them into music. To this music, she thinks, she’d dance on knives.

  She’d dance and she’d laugh, her teeth glistening like rubies in her mouth.

  *

  No one touches her. No one comes near her. She takes the prince’s legs in each hand and leaves the knife buried in his heart. She moves to the railing, and before she leaps into the dark she glances back at his princess, still standing at the edge of the crowd, pale as the witch with tears streaming down her face.

  Her story has not ended well.

  The little mermaid regards her dispassionately, though really, she bears her no malice—the princess has, of course, been allowed to live. In another story the little mermaid knows that it might have been herself. It might have been anyone.

  She gives her chin an imperious tilt. The one thing she would never have cared about being was royalty.

  “Make your own deals,” she says. And lets herself fall.

  She slices into the water, a limb in each hand. She lifts the legs to her mouth and kisses each, on the sole of the foot, where the knives had always hurt her most.

  And she lets them go.

  As she plunges down into the fathoms below, she doesn’t look back. The prince’s legs float to the surface and bubble, dissolve into sea foam on the waves, and are
soon lost and nothing at all.

  She allows herself a second to float, light above her and deepest darkness below.

  This is a crossroads, a turning-away-forever. But there isn’t any going back; that was the deal she made, and she can make her own deals and her own truths, make them solid and real as her flesh will now always be.

  Tell Me How All This (and Love too) Will Ruin Us

  You were screaming when I pulled you from the boat.

  You hadn’t fallen into a bout of it since we left the mainland. I’d bound your legs to broken steel poles, kept you as still as I could, doused you in whiskey. For a time you were quiet while the sea roared around us. I thought we might die then; I thought you might die in a kind of peace, and this comforted me when not much else did. But I made myself ready for my own death the moment I laid you in the bottom of the boat, and when we pulled ashore on the long strand, having successfully avoided the worst of the rocks, I knew it had only been postponed.

  Now it’s past sunset. I can tell only by the dying light; we sailed in clear skies but we sailed through storms to reach the island, and now I think that the storms must always be here, circling the place, keeping it from the rest of the world. So the clouds hang heavy here, and it seems appropriate. Looking up the cliffs, the dark slate, the sparse grass clinging to the ledges and the hillsides, I can’t imagine this place under the clarity of full sun This is a place of darkness and twilight, and in what light dawn allows us, I’ll pull you, no doubt screaming, up the hillside.

  I have made a fire from pieces of driftwood. It smells like salt and wet sand, and it smokes badly. You lie wrapped in the blankets I bought. With the aid of more whiskey, you sleep. I sit in the cold, unprotected, and I think of you and what might come after. How much of this will you remember? Enough to be grateful? Enough to know that I loved you? That for a while, maybe, you loved me?

  I will show you, in the most vicious way that anyone can. You may be lucid. This is another thing I’ve given up caring about, because there’s only so much I can afford now.

  *

  I remember when you took me.

  We all do, those given to the rest of you to be your handmaidens, to be kept by you. The rest of you who keep the world turning, who bring up the sun and the moon and who, as in the stories of the elder days, bring us the rich harvest. All that power, closed up inside you. We’re never told why you begin too weak to free it on your own, why you need us to do it for you. But anyway: You were singing as you stepped up to me and I handed you my sprig of blackthorn and meadowsweet. You were singing as you kissed me and I knew I would never leave you until you needed me to.

  You’ll sing to me now. Sing me up the terraces, over the abandoned pastures. Sing the slip and slide of gravel under my feet but don’t let me fall. Sing me through the strings of barbed wire, play on it with the wind like a cello. I’m in pain but it’s nothing to yours, I’m terrified but it must be nothing to your terror, but you have the power in this equation; only lend me a little. Just enough.

  I was never a witch. So sing the magic into me. Soon I’ll sing it back to you. We’ll make a duet of flesh and blood and bone.

  *

  It’s not as though you did magic, not that I remember. We’re taught from a young age that the magic is inside of you, locked into a chrysalis, waiting to emerge. We are the kept ones. We are the knife that cuts through and sets it free. We don’t understand how, or when. We’re ready, every minute of every day. Of course this isn’t true. Of course, at the precise moment for which we’ve always prepared, there is mad panic.

  I have a knife. It’s stuffed into the side of my boot. I can feel it against me like a brace, like a smaller version of what’s holding you together now that I can’t anymore. I have a knife, which is not yours but which was instead given to me by the old woman in the shack by the sea, the one I found, wandering away from the rocks and screaming your name for lack of anything else to do. When I was sure you were dying. When I knew you were. I found her by her fire and she told me what to do.

  She gave us the broken steel. She said it had been split by lightning. We bound your shattered bones in ruin. She summoned me, and you did through her. Perhaps she was waiting, and perhaps she was the first tentative emergence, called into being by you for this specific purpose.

  I’m not like you. This doesn’t belong to me. But I promise to try.

  *

  You never liked me to come into the bathroom when you were there, but on that rainy Sunday I did anyway, drawn by your voice and the splash of the water. I sat on the toilet and looked at you as you covered yourself in bubbles, laughed at me. Your slick thighs. Your nipples just visible under the water, brown and relaxed in the heat. The tile beaded with condensation. You hadn’t called me, you were reading poetry aloud to yourself. I asked you to read to me. I only had to push a little, and you went through all the lines. You read me more than I ever asked for. In the end: you, head tipped back in the water and your hair glossy black like a seal, crying. Your tears dissolved in the tub and I thought of you making a tiny ocean through will alone.

  I could read poetry to you now. I didn’t bring any books, but I remember your favorites, I can read them from the book of us that lives under my skin. Your head is in my lap, and I can give thanks for this much: you’re warm. You will stay warm. I’ll keep you that way. I’ll love you and keep you, which I promised to do, and in the end I forgive you. For the choice I made when there were no alternatives.

  *

  We could go anywhere, I said. You picked the place. I knew you for ten years before you fell, and you were always running away from something. Never me, at least I don’t think so, and I base this last of my few remaining convictions on the fact that when you made that final lunge for a world without anyone else, that world included me. We called it a vacation. You were happy. Maybe some part of me knew then. We parked the car on the edge of one of the cliffs, a barely-paved road winding like a lost ribbon against the top, and you looked out at the ocean and yelled and threw your arms around my neck, tangled your fingers in my hair, kissed me and kissed me.

  It was sunny that day. I remember. Other things have faded into insignificance, even my early memories of you, but I do remember that. The last happiness before the step, the slip—was it a slip? Did you fall?

  Did you jump?

  The last of you is a litany of screaming. It’s how you mark your time. Strength to scream and then strength gone and gathered to scream again. At first I thought about smashing your head in with a rock to stop your agony. I’m ashamed of it now. But seeing you dead felt preferable to seeing you in pain that way, broken on the rocks, regardless of the choice that put you there.

  Your white bones, splintered and stabbed through your skin. Your blood. Your mangled flesh. The way you went pale. I saw you begin to fade out of the world. I held you against me and you just kept screaming.

  My pants and hands are painted with your blood. At the darkest point of the night I lift my fingers to my mouth, copper and grit, and lick them clean.

  *

  Dawn. I haven’t slept. You have, though I don’t know if the thing you’ve done could be properly called sleep. But you’re awake as I get to my feet, as I look down at you you’re looking back up at me, and for the first time since you fell your eyes are clear.

  I wait for you to speak, but of course, you don’t.

  I have to do this, I say. I have to. You know that, you did this. You don’t nod. You don’t give me any indication that you understand me but I know you do and for a horrible moment I’m angry at you, because this is so hard on me already and you’re doing nothing to make it any easier.

  As soon as there was light I made a sledge for you out of more driftwood and rope from the boat. It may not hold together but then again it might, and there’s nothing else. I’m gritting my teeth as I try to lift you just enough to get you onto it; you’re a dead weight, not helping me but not fighting, which I suppose I can be grateful for, and a
lso, that you aren’t screaming. Maybe you’ve moved into a place beyond pain.

  I have to hurry.

  I take the ropes of the thing, loop them around my arms, and start to plod up toward the least steep incline of the hill. It’s still steep, sliding rock and loose grass, and if I fall too, there won’t be anything left, but like I told you: Choices. That I make, when all others are removed. That you put me in the position of making. I don’t know that any of you really trust us when we’re given to you. We’re given these horrible options, we’re pushed by you into jumping.

  *

  There was no stone shack. There was no fire, no bent old woman in a fog bank. There was no wind chime of rib bones, there was no blood, no cold spells. There was a boat and there is an island but we would have come to those things by other ways, other means. Or we wouldn’t have, and it would have been you on the rocks and me beating myself into the surf, but anyway: there was no shack, no woman, no magic. Not absent you.

  It was the first emergence, light through the veins. You tore a hole in time and placed yourself on the other end of the rip. You were ancient in that hut and maybe you didn’t expect me to recognize you, but I did.

  She walked with a limp.

  *

  The island proceeds upward in stages, terraces, things that looked carved with intent. My back is aching as we continue, my arms, and it begins to feel as though, while your bones were broken at once in a terrible series of seconds, mine are breaking slowly over long hours. I pull you and I pull you, dead weight behind me, pausing every hour to make sure that you aren’t, in fact, dead. I have a watch, solar powered, and it still works in spite of the lack of sun. Without the sound of your agony I mark the time that way.