by Ellen Datlow
You seem to have found yourself in a pickle, it continued. There was amusement there, yes, and a strange, cold delight, like my predicament was a gift that only came around once in a hundred years. Would my little mermaid like to live?
The thought of my own survival seemed ridiculous, unachievable … and I had never wanted anything more. I had no breath. I couldn’t speak. So I nodded as hard as I could, my chin touching the top of the eel’s head, and waited for the moment when it would bite down, or—more likely—when the hallucinations would be too much for my oxygen-starved brain to maintain.
They always want to live, purred the voice, as three more eels slithered out of the deep darkness and began to circle me. I couldn’t see the source of the voice, the one who was speaking so sweetly, from so far away. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Any voice that could speak to me with such calm unconcern while the water pulled me deeper down probably didn’t belong to anything I wanted to look in the eye.
You will owe me, it said. You will be mine forever, but you will live. Do we have an accord?
I thought of Maya laughing as she drove herself home. Maya slipping into her bed, stretching her legs beneath her sheets, and relaxing into her new, perfect life as the only child she had always wanted to be. She wouldn’t be on the outside, not anymore. Dad would grieve, and she would grieve with him, and if her grieving was false, well … it wouldn’t be like anyone would know.
I nodded harder this time, hard enough that the eel at my throat bit down a little, teeth breaking the skin with a short, sharp pain. Blood billowed up in front of my eyes, somehow still red despite the blackness of the sea.
Good girl, whispered the voice, and the eels attacked.
They moved so fast that my eyes couldn’t follow them, and my one, disconnected thought was of the squirrels that sometimes came to raid Dad’s bird feeders. They always looked fat and furry and slow, but when something surprised them, they could be out of the yard and up a tree in an instant.
The eel at my throat bit down while the other three swirled around me, kicking up a froth born of bubbles and blood. I screamed soundlessly, in shock and pain and terror, and kept screaming as the first eel forced itself into my mouth, squirming wildly. Its sides were slick with mucus, but its fins were sharp as razors, slicing my tongue and the inside of my cheeks. My body still refused to respond to my commands, and so I couldn’t even thrash as the eel squirmed down and deeper, leaving my mouth empty and bleeding. I felt its long, alien body moving inside me, coming to rest in one side of my chest, heavy and immutable.
Before I could close my mouth, the next eel was there, forcing itself down, following the first. Then came the third, and finally, the eel at my throat let go and rose to hover, bloody-toothed and terrible, in front of my eyes.
It is done, said the voice.
I blacked out before the fourth eel dove into my mouth. Of everything that had happened since I’d woken up in the tide pool, that felt like the first and only mercy.
I woke when the tide flowed out, leaving me sitting in water to my waist, the remains of the gauze Maya had used to tie my wrists and ankles fluttering around me like a mummy’s wrappings. It had been a good choice on her part: since I hadn’t been able to struggle, it hadn’t left any marks to show that I’d been tied up, and it would have dissolved or been washed away if I had been swept out to sea as she’d been intending.
My body felt like it had been wrapped in a thousand layers of that gauze, rendered heavy and slow and strange by my night in the water. I sat up, working my hands free of their wrappings before raising them to my face, feeling it unsteadily.
There was a cut on my lip. It burned when I touched it, filled with salt, filled with poison.
So: I was in the water, in the tide pools, bound, my body still recovering from the drugs I had never voluntarily taken.
So: there was no possible way I had survived, not with the ocean closing over my head for so many hours. The inside of my mouth burned like my lip, and I knew that if I tried to speak, I would only be able to whisper the language of scar and scab. My tongue was a battlefield, my throat a graveyard, and there were eels curled in the space where my lungs belonged. I was not a dead girl. I was not a drowned girl. But I was of their kin and kind, and whatever had seen me through to morning was unlikely to let me keep their gifts for free.
I leaned forward, picking at the gauze on my ankles until my numb fingers caught its edge and I was able to peel it away layer by layer, involuntary mermaid regaining the use of her legs. Still numb and shaky I stood, bracing my hands on the tide pool wall, not caring when the rocks cut into my skin. I was drenched but I wasn’t drowned; my fingers weren’t pruney, my skin wasn’t loose. Except for the cuts on my lip and the cold that seemed to run all the way to my bones, there was nothing to indicate that I had spent my night submerged. But I knew. Oh, I knew.
Inch by inch, I pulled myself out of the tide pool, water running off my hair, my skin, my ruined nightgown. Inch by inch, I shuffled barefoot toward the parking lot, barely noticing and not caring at all when I stepped on the bits of glass and broken shell that littered the pathway. It was early enough that there were no cars, and so I continued onward, not hurrying. There didn’t seem to be anything left in the world that was worth hurrying for.
I made it as far as the freeway, making my slow, waterlogged way along the shoulder, before someone saw me and called the police. Everything started moving very quickly after that, although none of it was my doing. First there were sirens, and then there were ambulances, and men in uniforms, and my father, pushing his way through the crowd, shouting my name over and over again, rushing to take me into his arms and hold me close, my cheek against his shoulder, my eyes searching the faces of the gathered onlookers.
Maya was there. She watched from behind the front rank of the crowd, her eyes burning with hatred and with something stranger, rarer, at least from her. It took me a moment to identify it for what it was: fear. She knew that I could end her with a word, or thought I could. The cuts in my mouth burned and stung, making speech impossible.
Maybe this was the secret at the center of the story, the secret Hans Christian Andersen heard and spun into a fairy tale, sugar and morality and seafoam. There was no mermaid, only a girl afraid of drowning who made a bargain with something deeper and older and wilder than herself. A girl with a ribcage full of eels and a tongue sliced to ribbons, who walked out of the surf and couldn’t tell anyone what had happened to her or where she’d gone.
I hoped that girl got to marry her prince and be happy. Watching my sister do her best to blend with the crowd, I didn’t think it was very likely.
“Honey, can you look at me?”
I turned obediently toward the sound of my father’s voice. He was flanked by police officers, their expressions schooled into calm, non-threatening inquisitiveness. They thought I had been traumatized. They were trying not to frighten me before they knew what had really happened.
They were never going to know what really happened.
My father, familiar face drawn in anxious lines, touched my cheek and asked, “Who did this to you?”
I shook my head.
“Honey, if you don’t—”
There was no way around it. I closed my eyes and opened my mouth, refusing to witness the moment when he saw the raw meat of my cheeks and tongue. I heard his sharply indrawn breath. I knew him too well to spare myself completely. Even without seeing the horror I had become reflected back at me, I knew what it would look like, and it burned, like salt on a sliced lip. Oh, how it burned.
“Can we get an EMT over here?” shouted an unfamiliar voice—one of the police officers speaking briskly, quickly, getting me away before I became more of a curiosity than I was already damned to be.
My father kissed me on the forehead before they loaded me into the ambulance. The sound of sirens carried me away from the sea.
Eighty-seven stitches inside my mouth before they let me go; eighty-seven stitches
and what felt like almost as many shots, as they fought to lock me up like an abandoned house, slamming all my doors against the possibility of infection. Eighty-seven stitches and whispers behind their hands as they questioned whether I was ever going to speak again, whether my tongue would heal into the shape it had always had or become something new, a lump of dead meat and scar tissue filling my mouth and stopping my voice.
They didn’t mean for me to hear, but when you can’t speak, it’s difficult to stop listening. It was something to distract from the soft sound of slithering within my ribs, as the eels shifted their positions. I didn’t know how they were breathing. I didn’t know how the hospital, with its gleaming machines and its well-trained doctors, could miss them. I didn’t know a lot of things, but I knew something the doctors didn’t:
I knew I was never going to speak again, not unless the woman in the water willed it. It was a strange, sad thing to know, but it helped to keep me from flinching away when they looked at the inside of my mouth, when they whispered things they didn’t think I’d hear. They were discussing the inevitable. That was easier to live with than a “maybe” would have been. At least I was alive to hear it.
When they let me leave, my father was waiting with warm clothes taken from my room at home, ready to push my insurance-mandated wheelchair to the door and lead me to the car. Maya wasn’t with him. That, too, was no real surprise. Maya didn’t know how I had survived, or what her carefully hoarded drugs would have allowed me to remember. She would be making plans and setting up contingencies. She would be getting ready for a fight.
The eels in my chest throbbed as I pulled my seatbelt across them. I rubbed my sternum with one hand, trying to quiet them back to sleep, and smiled at my father when he looked at me with concern.
Maya was going to get a fight. It just wasn’t the fight that she expected.
We pulled out of the parking lot, my father sneaking anxious glances at me as he drove. Finally, he asked, “You really don’t remember anything about what happened?”
I shook my head, putting on my best regretful expression. Let him think I was still lost at sea. Let him think I had no memory of pain. It might be kinder, given what I thought was coming.
When drowned girls come out of the water, they go back. Usually sooner rather than later. It didn’t matter that I’d never believed in fairy tales before I found myself bound and drugged and dropped into the lap of one; I had spent enough of my life absorbing them to know that this wasn’t the ending. Someone was going to have to pay. Maya was going to have to pay. When she did …
The night before, I would have given anything not to die. That’s the sort of bargain that shouldn’t even be thought aloud. Not unless you want to pay for every breath.
“It’s okay, baby.” Dad patted my knee, as much to reassure himself as to comfort me. “We’ll get through this. Your sister’s waiting for us at home.”
I nodded, forcing a smile through my stitched and aching lips. We had so much to catch up on, Maya and I. Silent as I was, I thought I still might have a lot to say to her.
Everything I could, before the tide came in.
The house was lit up like Christmas. The day had come and gone while I was at the hospital, and now every window blazed from within, like Maya had decided I was some kind of ghost to be kept at bay with twinkling lights. Dad shook his head as he pulled into the garage, but he didn’t say anything. She was supposedly traumatized too, shaken to the core by the news that her beloved big sister had been found wandering and wounded by the highway. Lectures about the electric bill could wait until later.
Then the garage door closed behind us, and we were home. Really home, like I hadn’t quite believed I would ever be again. Dad helped me out of the car, into the house, and to the stairs. Maya was nowhere to be seen.
“Do you want dinner?” he asked.
I shook my head, miming folding my hands and tucking them against my pillow. He nodded.
“Sleep makes sense,” he said. “Rest well, sweetheart. The police are going to find the person who did this to you. You’ll see. Everything’s going to be all right.”
I forced a smile. He deserved so much more. He deserved decades with his adoring daughters, a family as bright and perfect as the light shining through the windows, as nostalgic as a pink princess fantasy. But he’d lost his wife to illness, and now he was going to lose us both to the sea, and there was nothing I could do to change that. The tide goes out, leaving things like me lying stranded on the beach. It always comes back to collect us.
“I love you,” he said, and I mouthed the words back to him, and that was it: that was all there was left for either one of us to say.
I drifted up the stairs as in a dream, feeling the eels in my chest writhe and resettle themselves. They stilled as I walked along the hall to my bedroom and let myself silently inside. The police had been here while I was at the hospital: maybe that explained the long delays while I waited to see another specialist, to receive another round of shots. Out of kindness to the traumatized girl, they had kept me away until my room could be analyzed and recorded, written down on little pieces of paper like they meant anything. They were looking for a culprit, a kidnapper, someone it was safe to accuse of hurting a sweet, innocent girl like me. They weren’t looking for someone even sweeter, even more innocent.
They could look forever, and they’d never find Maya. Not unless I accused her, and I wasn’t going to do that. This was a fairy tale now. Prison was both more and less than she deserved.
I walked to the bed, the perfect, pink bed, and sat on the edge, looking at the gauzy curtains around it and thinking about my mother, who had been the best of us. Out of everyone in this house, she had been the best of us. I didn’t think she would be proud of me now, or of what I felt I had to do … but maybe I was wrong. If anyone could have understood what it was to rail against death as their air ran out, it would have been her. We’re all mermaids in the end. We all die when we stop breathing.
The eels stirred under my breastbone. I put a hand to my chest, quieting them, calming them. Soon, I thought, and that seemed to soothe them a bit. The night was young. All we had to do was wait. So we waited, and I looked at the bedroom that had been mine for as long as I remembered, and I hated my sister for taking it away from me. This was my last night here. No matter how this ended, this was my last night here.
Seconds became minutes; minutes became hours. I heard my father’s heavy footsteps in the hall, weary with the weight of everything he’d been through. Funny, I thought, I’m the one who drowned, and was immediately sorry. Just because he hadn’t gone into the water with me didn’t mean I wouldn’t be taking him with me when I went back to the sea.
All around me, the house settled into sleep as I waited, the eels in my chest slithering in silent anticipation. Finally, just as the tide outside the house was beginning to roll in, my door opened, and Maya slipped into the room. The look she gave me was fear mingled with undisguised hatred.
“How?” she asked.
My tongue was shredded meat and useless tissue, but I had other tongues now, other voices. I opened my mouth as the eels hissed, in ragged harmony, “I found another way.”
Maya took a step toward me. Run, fool, I thought, and closed my mouth before the eels could echo it. She had given up her right to a warning when she had drugged me and dragged me from my bed.
“This is impossible,” she said. “You can’t be here. You’re not real.” She stomped her foot. In that moment, that movement, I saw the petulant toddler she had been, the little girl who had wanted nothing more than her mother’s arms around her.
“I’ll show you,” the eels said, with my mouth, and I spread my lips wide, and they boiled forth, all teeth and slick, cartilaginous bodies and slicing fins, and when they struck Maya in the throat, she had no time to scream. One of them bit her nose away. Another pulled off that pretty, pouting mouth, while the last two ripped her throat open like a flower. My pink princess fantasy becam
e red in an instant, painted by the blood jetting from my sister’s flesh.
The air turned to ashes in my mouth. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t breathe. I dropped to my knees amidst the blood that should have been inside my sister, clutching at my throat and gasping. Something touched my hand. I turned, vision going gray, and beheld one of the eels, wrapping itself loosely around my wrist.
“Please,” I wheezed, the word shaped more of silence than of sound.
The eel seemed to nod. This time, when it dove for my mouth, I opened my lips to welcome it inside. This time, there was no pain. There was only the feeling of inevitability; of coming home.
The other three eels were still tearing at Maya’s body. She wasn’t dead yet; one eye was open, watching me with horror and, oddly, hope. She was hoping I was going to kill her, I realized. She was hoping I would let her go.
“Let’s go for a drive, okay?” I said, and smiled.
If she had still possessed a mouth, I think she would have screamed.
There was no one at the beach when I parked the car and made my way down to the tide pools, eels curled in my lungs and the still-twitching body of my sister cradled in my arms. She should have been dead by now. One more gift, I supposed, from a sea that had proven to be surprisingly full of them.
Gingerly, I walked to the tide pool where she had left me to die and lowered her into the water. She made a soft gurgling sound.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’ll all be over soon.”
Maya looked at me imploringly. It was good that the eels had left her eyes. She should be able to see the waves rolling in before they carried her away.
Little mermaid, whispered a voice. Little mermaid, come home.
I turned to look at the rippling black sheet of the sea. It was a far cry from my pink princess fantasy. But it sounded, all the same, like home; like a mother’s voice, not prisoned in a hazel tree, but set free to ripple, shore to shore, forever.