By Rachel Schmidt
Our fifteenth birthdays have all been marked by the first trip to the surface. Donning braids woven with sea glass and bearing barnacles arranged to mark our lineage, we emerge to look upon what lays beyond and content ourselves with how much better we have it. There is no contest. The water cradles, smoothing all stones to a dolphin skin’s shine, where their earth dwelling cousin-rocks lay rough amongst jagged peaks.
The littlest of us should have taken warning.
With her eyes lined in squid ink, her hairline and collarbone accentuated by Turret Snails, she rises from our wet haven. Her eyes fall upon the boy—his many limbs as freakish as a half-eaten crab, dropped by a gull to the sea which finishes what the bird could not. She signals to the waves to drive her closer, closer, too close. Ships bring nothing but trouble and this one is blind to the black clouds that make the water’s surface as dark as the depths. Soon there will be men in our realm. And weapons. We have none of that here, we have no need. The beasts that must cut have the teeth to do so.
Once the winds capsize the vessel, we beg our sister to leave him to the mercy of the growing tempest above. Let the storm do what it will, his bones to become an accessory for us like so many of his kind. Just as the rest of the ocean’s creatures though, the little mermaid pays us no mind, we, the other daughters of the King.
She saves the drowning boy who styles himself a prince but is limited to such little space to strut. Our world dominates this planet, and she should not risk it for him. She finds him despite our protests and pulls him upward and to shore.
Her task complete, we pull her back down to save her from drying out. She claws at us with fingers like the awful lionfish’s spikes, demanding we let him see her face.
We resist.
Now it falls to us to distract her. She pines for his flaking flesh when she could have the unbroken continuity of our tessellating scales. We dance and sing—yet still she looks upwards. We remain unseen, we remain unheard. Our pleading does nothing to dissuade her.
When the nighttime water around her stills, the fish remain static in wait of her light and its guiding movement, unwilling to be oscillated by our cajoling to school round, ensnaring her like one of the traps dropped for them. “It is for her own safety,” we implore.
The seaweed takes little convincing to drift closer to our sister and we use it to bind her to the coral. It’s always been an easily swayed specimen though, and as the little mermaid awakes, immediately beckoning the current, the green tendrils part like the curtains of water the man Moses once forced apart. Many of us were lost to that highway and we fear she wasn’t old enough then to remember what comes of men.
We flex our tails, whipping where we should be fanning to catch up to her as she escapes. She’s too fast—a rip current emerging to carry her to a place where none of us belong. We five elders, we have always listened.
We know what waits in that cave.
Broken into a starfish of a mermaid, she’s ejected from the witch’s lair. The sorceress cares not if our beloved survives. We each take one of her five points, swallowing our disgust at the fragility, and push her upwards for air. We watch for the boy and thrust her into the flexing tide once he approaches the water’s edge. Naked and unconscious, she arrives at his feet. We watch him rouse her—his hand on her impermanent skin a smacking, raspy sound like the flopping of a fish aboard one of his boats.
We know the sound of death.
He appreciates her dancing despite her muteness. We do our best to create a beat for her to follow, smacking the hull to a rhythm she can feel; lending our voices to a song that might entice him. In the mornings, we place fresh shells for her hair on the deck. Anything to fulfill the contract for her voice that obligates her to him.
He chooses a human.
For our sister, we will choose not to listen. There are no finite resolutions for us like there are with people. Our stories are longer, more fluid. Yet she has opted to mute her tale where we were simply dealt that blow, and the unfairness of this quiet cycle forces us into action. Back into the depths we swim, past the coral, and the realm of color, into the murky gloom. The answer to our sister’s salvation is paid with our hair to the witch. Either the boy dies, or our sister will.
Our voices rise to finally direct the narrative, ourselves. “The boy must die.”
We let our blood loose in the depths, calling to the sharks, to those of us with weapons. It is as if we have always been the ones with power. Two arrive, black eyes tunneled on the red rivers becoming deltas that grow from each of our offered arms. The animals do not recognize us yet; our father is nothing to their instinctual bloodlust. We give four arms between us in the fight for the largest tooth and must form a chain to arrive at the boat together. We are weakening.
With our remaining, shaking arms, we offer the dagger sharp tooth. “Kill him now or die yourself.” The little mermaid may yet be saved if she gives him up to the deep for his betrayal.
She takes the tooth, and we rejoice. We rise out of the water and watch in mass what we can accomplish. No human shall conquer us, not when we have given so much. Our sister looks to the edge of the weapon and then to her lover’s back, leaning against the opposite deck rail. “Now,” we urge. Out of water, our voices are undulating like the waves, blending in with the splashing against the boat. The boy’s voice drowns ours as he commands our sister to dance in celebration of his new wife. The little mermaid’s edges begin to recede.
We sisters had forgotten ourselves. We are the unheard.
Rachel Schmidt is a registered nurse and military spouse. She holds an MA in Writing from Johns Hopkins University and has been featured or is forthcoming in Bath Flash Fiction, Collateral, Winged Penny Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, DarkWinter Literary Magazine, and Eclectica.
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