Gift of the Merrow

AUHTOR’S NOTE:I edited to make it easier to read.


GIFT OF THE MERROW

One…two…three…

Plop…plop…plop…

Lorelei wrapped up three sea bass filets…not old enough to spoil, but old enough that the attractive flesh and sheen has long since worn off. And they smelt unbelievably fishy too…Lorelei was forced to hold her nose as she folded the final sheet of salmon colored paper over the fish. The only lights on in the fish store was the single light at the counter right at the scale, and the light at the door entrance, both pathetically pale and homely compared the other lights of the store, compared to other lights around town. Just orange embers…an ode to when the town was once coal, whale oil, and wood lit…where the lights. Lorelei flicked the light off at the counter. The entire back of the fish store was dark, only for the occasional glint of metal and fish scales and blocks of ice…like silver and gemstones. Lorelei sighed and placed two of her last three coppers onto the table. She had one copper left, and two weeks until her next pay. She could not asked Mr. Filster for an early pay, since the cannery factory moved in there, business was slow at the little market. As well, Lorelei was too embarrassed to ask, too proud, too nervous.

Mr. Filster, the elderly owner of the store, her employer, was waiting at the store entrance.

“Ready Lori?” he asked.

Lorelei held her fishy bundle close to her chest, to the old, hand me down pea coat and hurried to the door, out of the darkness. “Yep.”

He held the door open for Lorelei and shutting off the little ember of light. The little bell on the door handle jingled, then was silent, retiring for the night as Mr. Filster and the rest of the village was to or already has. After a long day working in the fish market, Lorelei seemed very awake, very eager, her expression bearing not the eagerness for a cold dinner and a warm bed, but action. Mr. Filster read her face as they walked through the darkness. He knew the mousey haired girl the entire twenty-one years of her life. The last time he saw a wide eyed eager look on her face was…well…damn…when she barely came to his knees. Mr. Filster escorted Lorelei and her fishy package down Main Street.

They came to the cross section, lit by black iron street lights, round like amber pearls, Mr. Filster thought. He turned to head to his house, wrapping the scarf around his neck and burying his chin into it.

“Night Lori,” he said. She did not answer; he could not even hear her footsteps on the cobbled streets. Lorelei was standing on the sidewalk, looking out into the ocean. Years ago, you could not see the ocean, but with the lights now you could just lightly see the silky crests of the dark oceans, just faintly. At night, with the amber-pearl lights, you would never think that those silky crests were a vast ocean, never. They were so passive and quiet, unassuming. When there were no lights, you would not even think that there was an ocean there at all, it seemed like nothing more than a black space. He spoke louder, “Night Lori.”

“Huh?” Lori pricked up. She waved to him, the package threatening to slip out of her arms. “Oh good night!”

“You stay away from the ocean now, girl,” he joked to her, walking away, “the merfolk will steal you away.”

She laughed, bundling the package close. “I don’t think you have to worry about that happening Mr. Filster.”

With fatherly concern, Mr. Filster watched Lorelei walk way, until the light no longer could reach her and she disappeared into the darkness. He could swear, however, he saw her form turn left, towards the beach, not right, to her uncle’s house. But then again, night makes fools of us all.

There was a cave that Lorelei used to play in when she was little…all the village children played in the cave or around in, until the ships for the canning industry came and tore the beach up, it was unsafe to go to the waters and play, it was too dangerous anymore to go down to the beach. The rocks around the cave were slick with kelp and algae, carefully Lorelei navigated the rocks. Just like big cobblestones, big cobblestones covered in muddy snow, slick like clay slip.

“Sam? Sam?” Lorelei spoke into the cave. She stepped down onto the sandy cave floor…warm, dry, clean. “Sam? Whoops!”

Lorelei slipped, falling backwards, the package landing with a mushy thud beside her.

“I’m sorry,” Sam hushly answered from the back of the cave. He spoke so softly, as if his voice was on the verge of disappearing…softly and patiently, slowly as if meditating over thoughts. His voice did not speak of mental slowness, or deep thought…but it spoke more of a monarch induced politeness…the youngest, shy prince of a royal family, used to being ignored, but taught to speak perfectly, but rarely given a chance to speak, to use the language, leaving it soft, hush, somewhat hoarse from disuse. He spoke as if his eyes were focused on the ground, but they were very much focused on her. The darkness darted away as Sam slowly approached her. The gentle light of his orbs chased away the darkness and cold grip of the village. He offered a soft-lead grey hand and pulled her off the sandy ground. “I did not mean to leave those there. I was tired after my swimming the ocean.”

Pearls, many different pearls, different colors and shaped littered the ground like marbles. Lorelei feared she may have cracked a few when she fell. Sam slowly pulled away, gently waving his finned hand, drawing the pearls away, to the corners of the cave. His shark tail scraped through the sand.

He picked up the salmon colored packaged, stroking the paper gently. He had never felt paper most his life; it was odd sensation to him. Lorelei had never felt silk, used to feeling of wool and flax, occasionally cotton, and she supposed she too would stroke it at any chance she would get.

“You are feeling much better then Sam?” she asked. Only a glint of white, like a crescent moon, white and marbled like scrimshaw, on his shoulder spoke of the run-in with the blade of one of the canning ships. Nothing, except for a shallowness of his green eyes, pale like grass under a stone, eyes spoke of the sickness that overtook him.

“I have felt quite well for a few days,” Sam answered. He offered her the package back.

“No, no,” she said. “It’s yours. It’s your dinner; I hope you do not mind sea bass.”

“I have eaten Lorelei,” Sam stated, he gestured to the back of the cave, where he had woven his home from kelp, sand, shells, and the magic of sea fae, “quite well actually.”

Lorelei observed upon a torn up net lying in a neat pile on the floor. “This looks like a net from a canning ship.”

“Perhaps it was,” Sam answered, looking over his shoulder at her. “Does it bother you I have done such?”

Lorelei, holding the package, chewed on her thumbnail. She answered straightly, knowing the answer, but mulling over her own morality at the choice. “No.”

The merman…the merrow…the sharkman…did not answer, did not react. He stood with his back to her, one hand on the wall.

“Are you well enough to travel back home?” Lorelei swallowed and asked.

“I suppose I am,” he stated, “but I am not content to leave.”

“Content?” Lorelei asked.

“I do not feel ready to leave yet,” Sam answered and turned. “Does it bother you, Lorelei?”

“No,” she answered, wasting no time to mull.

“That is all I wanted to hear,” Sam responded turning back around and slowly taking steps away from her. He seemed uneasy tonight. Perhaps it was the canning ships that bothered him. One left him near death over four months ago, and most those four months he has scarcely left the premise of the cave system. This was his first night in open water; he normally spent his time in the great underwater expanse of the cave. A horn sounded from the cannery. Sam immediately turned his head. Lorelei was used to the sound by now. She wondered if he was too frightened to enter his kingdom anymore. “The sound of the cannery makes me uneasy. How can you sleep with the sounds of the gears echoing through earth and sea?”

“After a while you’ll get used to it,” Lorelei answered. Sam sat down on a ledge. His fingers lightly stroked the scar on his shoulder. It was getting smaller, and soon it would be nothing. Not even a scar would be left on his flesh. Merfolk heal differently that mortal folk he told her. It was hard to believe he was nearly torn asunder only months ago.

Four months ago…four months…two weeks…two days…she did not keep count, Sam did; the lines were scraped above his bed, sorted and counted….Lorelei walked along the shoreline near dusk, dragging a wagon behind her with an axe in it, and a lantern in her other had. She was gathering and splitting driftwood for her uncle’s house. There was no more wood left to burn, the house grew cold, and would grow colder throughout the night, so Lorelei risked the cold so not to deal with a cold room later that night. She left the wagon at the top of the rocky beach.

She walked along the rocky shore, picking up worn tree branches, the broken boards of ships, any thing wood like. She’d toss it into a pile, to be collected later. Anything that was too large, she would set her lantern down and chop the wood up, terrified each time she would cut off her toe or finger.

I hate doing this…Lorelei thought which piece of wood she collected, which each stone that she banged her foot on, with each splinter, each chop of wood…I hate this life.

Down at the shoreline where the rocky beach changed into about six feet of somewhat pebble riddled sand. There was a large form, black and shining in the night, Lorelei thought it was one of the beautiful harbor porpoises from the bay…another one of the harbor porpoises, struck by the blade of a cannery ship. Upon approaching it, Lorelei could see the tendrils of darkness…blood…curling in the water, there was a wide, jagged cut on its back. But it was too large to be that…then she realized…it had legs…then it turned its head towards her. Lorelei dropped her lantern, with a hiss like an egg on a frying pan, it went out.

A member of the merfolk…

He was on his stomach in the water, both arms stretched forward. He just looked at her, with two very human eyes, lacking the blankness of a fish’s stare, the ferocity of a shark. He looked at the axe in her hands.

“Slit my throat human with the axe, turn me into the foams of ocean,” he whispered. “Give me my peace, do not leave me lie here.”

Lorelei dropped the axe and began to step back into the surf, the merman, just looked at her, his eyes were pained, his expression was pained. He was pleading with her.

“Please don’t leave me here,” he whispered. Lorelei slowly approached the merman. She realized he had fainted and lay motionlessly in the water. The gills, almost hidden behind his jaw, fluttered as waves were pushed and pulled into and from them. Nostrils on the end of his snout opened and closed. She touched the gash, the blood was thick, and the wound was horrid, as if he himself was attached by a shark, just shredded.

But it was not that bad…it did not appear that bad…

Lorelei looked at the blood on her hand, then at the unconscious sharkman. She did not like the feel of the thickened blood on her hand…she did not want to have anymore on her hands.

Somehow, someway, she managed to move the merman into the cave yards away. He felt lighter than air. She did not understand then why, but she understood now why. Magic. Sam breathed it, it coursed through his veins. For a fae, magic was as natural as the sweat on the brow of a human.

She laid him in the cave and left him there. She brought what wood she could collect up to the house. Both her uncle and aunt were fast asleep. She wanted to wake them to tell about her discovery. She rubbed her fingers together as she reached for the doorknob. Blood, thick as honey, made her hand itch. She pulled her hand away. Instead she tossed her miserable find of firewood on the dying fire and poured some fish broth into a chipped earthenware bowl and left the house.

Down in the cave the sharkman laid sprawled out, blood slowly dripped onto the stone floor, pooling up underneath his back. Lorelei, unsure, set the bowl at the edge of the blood pool and left. The next night, when she stepped into the cave, there was no blood upon the stone floor, no stone floor at all; just sand…soft, warm, and fine sand, like nothing Lorelei had ever felt or seen before. At the back of the cave, the sharkman looked at her as if he had never seen anything like her before either.

Currently, Sam scratched his gill slits. “Are you happy in a land such as this?”

“Yes,” Lorelei answered, kicking her feet through the sand.

“I want you to come with me to my kingdom,” he repeated to her again.

“I can’t,” she responded…again. It was the awkward dance again. Sam asked it every night for the past two months. Their conversations began with this, and never ended with a goodbye. Every time he seemed just as saddened as the first time she turned down his offer. He stopped asking why weeks ago, but he never stopped asking her.

Sam turned his attention away from her to the pile of treasures he had gathered over his months confined in the cave. He told her he created them because he could, memories of his kingdom. To keep his heart from becoming sick, he made them to keep him feeling at home. He told this the first night she sat down in front of the piles of treasures…beautiful shells, conchs, oysters, cowry, many of weird forms and beautiful designs, all in which she has never seen before; shells, that did not exist in this waters, stones of varying smoothness, form, color, and clarity, beautiful sea plants, bits of colorful coral even more beautiful than glass art, pearls the hues of the rainbow, silvery driftwood ribboned with shades of lavender, as smooth as glass. He made them, he found them. But he did not seem happy with these treasures. Everyday there would be new ones, but more often than not, the older treasures would simply disappear. Sam offered no explanations where they went.

The first time she examined his treasures, she held up a piece of coral, as red as blood, as delicate as an ice coated branch. “What is your kingdom like?”

“It is beautiful,” he answered, chin resting on his knees, arms wrapped around his shins. “It is from far away where the ocean waters are blue and clear, not brown and green, where the sand is full of shells, not stones, where the fish are colorful as the coral and waters.”

“Are you king there?” she asked.

“No,” he answered. “I am the youngest son of King Achelous.”

“Really?” Lorelei asked, picking up a beautiful conch shell, its pattern reminiscent of cherry blossoms.

“Yes,” he said. “Will you come to my kingdom with me?”

“No.”

And so it began; the clumsy dance. It was a dance, it could be nothing else. Sam would make his move, his gestures, his opening act, and Lorelei would gracefully avoid his moves, his offering with her own very much different dance, but all ending on the same step. Sam never acted angry or upset with Lorelei’s dismissals; he treated her no differently after the words were said.

Sam sorted through his gifts. Lorelei sat down in front him, her pea coat folded on her lap. The pile was much smaller than it was most other days; perhaps it was because Sam was growing jaded with sitting in the caves perfecting his arts. Today it was just corals and pearls he had formed…memories…Lorelei presumed…of his kingdom. After all, he must be getting bored stuck in this drab little village, with waters of grey, beaches of grey, houses of grey, skies of grey, soils of grey…people of grey…growing greyer and greyer everyday with the sooty smoke from the cannery. Sam rolled sand between his palms, like dough, the dried sand become rounder and rounder, until it was a perfect circle.

“Where do you get your ideas?” Lorelei asked, holding up a branchlike piece of coral the color of a bay leaf.

“From my travels,” Sam answered, setting down the ball of sand. There was a small pile of sand balls at his feet. He picked up another pinch of sand and continued to roll it.

“Where did you go?” she asked.

“Many places,” he said. “I went to places where there is no land, only ice, as blue as sapphires, I went to places were there were no beaches, only cliffs on which millions of birds nest, I went to places where vast caverns dot the land and the fish have no eyes and everything is white…many many places.”

“And you ended up here,” Lorelei said dryly. Sam paused in his craft.

“You speak as if you do not like this place, yet you refuse my offer,” he said, setting the somewhat deformed ball down. He picked up a ball he made earlier and began to roll it between his palms. With his movements it became shinier and shinier.

“We all speak sullenly of our homes, why do you travel from yours?” she answered. Sam paused.

“Because I have to,” he answered and continued rolling. He set a pearl in front of her, a soft shade of amber, and the size of a shooter marble.

“It’s beautiful,” she stated.

“It is yours, I made it for you,” he said. She paused.

“I can’t,” she said.

“You must,” he told her. Her stomach answered for her. She sighed and picked the gem up and put it in the pocket of her worn pea coat.

“I must being going, or my aunt and uncle will wonder where I am,” she said. “I have a job I need to work at.”

“I understand,” Sam said. Lorelei pulled the coat over her heavy, beige sweater and struggled out the cave. Sam stood up and dove into the water at the back of the cave. He left his treasures and a pile and unfinished pearls. On her way home Lorelei nervously rubbed the massive pearl, still warm from Sam’s hands. Did it burn with magic or his warmth? The next morning she reached into her coat pocket, the pearl was heavy and cold.

After a breakfast of porridge and silence with her aunt and uncle, Lorelei walked down to the fish market. She was started to find it locked and the lights off. In fact, peering in through the smoky windows, there were no fish upon the ice blocks, no knives upon the counter.

“It’s closed, Lori,” Mr. Filster said softly coming from the side of shop.

“For the day?” Lorelei asked sadly.

“Forever,” Mr. Filster stated. “Business hasn’t been good; I’ve been forced to close. I haven’t been able to tell you, but I’ve been ready to close for weeks.”

He reached into his pocket and handed her a small change purse. “It’s all I have. You have been a good worker and I owe you more than this.”

He handed her the change purse and walked away from the abandoned store. Lorelei stood there, holding the change purse. “WAIT! Mr. Filster!”

Lorelei rushed up to the elderly man. She rummaged through her coat pockets. “Here, I found this.”

She handed him the pearl. “What?”

“Please, take it,” she said. “I have to go.”

Lorelei quickly hurried away. For most of the day, she wandered the town, before finally, her wandering led her to the doors of the cannery. It took all of her coins to pay for the aprons, and the knives to work there. She dreamed of money, of happiness, of a better future.

“Do mermaids dream when they sleep?” Lorelei asked Sam. They were lying in the sand of the cave, staring up at the ceiling. She came into the cave to see him like that, arms behind his head, staring at the roof of the ceiling like a child gazing up at the clouds. With glowing algae he had formed the heavens. Lorelei knew no astronomy, but she did know the Big Dipper.

“Most don’t, but I do,” he answered softly.

“When I found you on the beach, did you wish to die?” she asked in equal softness.

“Yes,” he answered.

“Are you answering me truthfully,” she asked, “that you really wanted to die and become foam?”

“Yes, we fae cannot lie,” Sam stated. “It is the way God made us.”

“Why?” she asked rolling on stomach and turning to him.

“They when God made the fae, the men, the beasts, the angels, the demons, he gave us choices. Beasts chose to be free, to be simple minded, yet pure, always allowed in heaven. God gave man short lives but a free mind and a pure soul, he chooses to do as he wished, he can keep or lose his soul, it is his to corrupt. Angels are always in heaven, but they are under his control, they are powerful. Demons are powerful, but not allowed in heaven,” Sam answered.

“And the fae?” she asked.

“We chose to live long lives, to have great power, but we gave up our souls. We do not go to heaven when we die, the fae of glade turns to ferns, the fae of wind turns to dust, the fae of forest to trees, and the fae of the water to foam. We have the power of angels but deepest desires of men…powerful but caged,” Sam answered. “A soul can be pure, a soul can corrupt, since we do not have our own, we cannot lie, we live only by our desires.”

“Do you, your people, love?” Lorelei asked.

Sam paused. “To fall in love, one must acquire soul.”

“Can a member of a fae family fall in love?”

“Yes.”

“And what if he falls in love?”

“He gains a soul.”

“What about families? Does a fae love his family?” Lorelei asked.

“No,” Sam answered. “A fae marries for sex and women, marries women for beauty and soft flesh, sex for pleasure and children, and children for labor or into marrying for money and power, and money power for validation of themselves. The care of others is only for the care of oneself. To truly love in the fae world is to gain a soul; it is a powerful thing to happen.”

“What happens to a fae who gains a soul?” she asked.

“He is confused,” Sam answered, “but he content, yet not content, he grows worried about other things, treasure still captivates but it has only a thousandths of the control it once had over him. In a way he is weak, but in a way, he is happy, and certain treasures can calm his hunger, and he, for once in his life, has the ability to become satisfied.”

“Can he lose his soul?” she asked.

“If he grows selfish, what can be regained can be lost, what can be lost can be regained,” he said. “Humans can lose their souls, and so can we, if we let ourselves become selfish again.”

The cannery alarm sounded, echoing through the cave, shaking away the beautiful little stars.

“Do you wish upon shooting stars?” he asked her.

“No,” she lied.

Lorelei worked in the cannery in the chopping line, where fish came to have their heads, then tails cut off, their torsos would work their way down to another station where they would be skinned (depending on what they were to become) and down to another station where they would be chopped (once again, if they were to be chopped up and the style in which they would be butchered depended on which station they would go to), then to seasoning and canning. She worked six and a half days a week, working the half day Sunday so she could go to church in the morning. She worked 12 hour days with two twenty minute breaks, paid once a month. She earned a copper for every 100 fish she carved. They counted her fish heads at the end of the day and wrote it down on an oil stained tablet. It was always less than what she thought she did. At the end of the day, Lorelei barely managed to walk herself home, and most the time, she could not even manage to get a bath. She came home smelling of fish, she went to work that morning smelling of fish. Fish oils seemed to soak into her skin, into her bones. She was working in the cannery for two months, when on a Saturday night she struggled home. She paused on the road, gazing down on the silent cave. She thought of Sam she worked, she wondered, was he still in the cave? She was too embarrassed to tell him she worked in the cannery, feeling that it was perhaps, too stupid of her to give away the pearl, feeling like an idiot giving away a gift he gave her, but she felt it was right, but she did not feel it was right to tell him. She did not want to face him…still; she did walk down to the cave.

Her feet touched fine sand.

“You smell of death,” said Sam. He was sitting in the back of the cave, observing her. He seemed larger than he did months earlier. His head was proud, his eyes shining green, his skin a pale silver, his stomach white as snow. The scare was a pencil thin line of whiteness across his back. He looked even healthier than he did two months earlier. He had been eating well; there was a pile of cannery fishing nights in the corner of the cave.

He was not lying. She could not lie to him.

“I am working at the cannery now,” she said softly, wrapping her arms around herself, covering her blood stained apron, her blood stained clothing…trying to cover it. She looked off to the side as she spoke, not looking him directly in the eyes.

Sam observed her pea coat was gone. “What happened to the pearl I gave you?”

She paused and looked at him, then looked away. “I gave it away…to someone else…who needed it more than me. My old employer lost his shop.”

“I understand then,” Sam stated. He was not angered, nor upset. His eyes glittered for a moment when she told him that. He looked worried suddenly. “You seem very unhappy Lorelei.”

Lorelei paused. She leaned against the cave wall then slid down to the floor. “I’m just a little tired from this job.”

Sam sat right beside her. He took her hand in his. “I want you to come with me.”

“No Sam, I can’t go,” she said, too tired to argue, too sick of hearing it to take it seriously.

“No,” he said softly, “I don’t mean like that. Just for the night, I want to take you somewhere, some place, just for the night.”

“Where?” she asked tiredly.

“I do not know where, where the waves take us, and I will bring you back,” he answered. “Please take that apron off.”

Lorelei removed. It was so saturated with blood, wet and dried, it soundly plopped and echoed. Sam picked her up off the ground and carried her to the surf. He set her down the surf, holding onto her wrists he gently led her into the waters. The cold waves crashed at Lorelei’s feet, and then she felt nothing it felt as if she was standing on land…during the summer months.

Sam was holding her hand; they both were floating in the ocean…underwater. He pulled her over to him; maneuver so that she was now on his back. She placed her hands onto his shoulders.

And so he swam. He darted passed the cannery ships, laden with fish, passed their hungering nets and motors. He darted through the dark grey green waters of the village bay, to the dark velvet waters of the wide ocean, where glowing invertebrates dotted the darkness like stars in the sky. They swarmed around them the quickly dissipated. He brought to the frozen arctic, where the waters…as blue as sapphires…were dotted with massive icebergs, white as bone on top, as blue as turquoise below, as if the sapphire waters became trapped in a hollow white frame. Through the crevices and crevasses they swam. Slowly, Lorelei grew tired; Sam maneuvered himself rolling onto his back like a sea otter, bringing Lorelei to his chest. His hands touched her hair…brown and smooth as driftwood, light as an anemone’s tentacles. She was sound asleep; her face bore peace, happiness, contentedness. Satisfied he swam backwards carrying his precious treasure back home; the ocean waters washing the fish oils and blood from her skin. Her touch felt like a blanket.

She never approached him the first month he knew her. She stood at the mouth of the cave and spoke to him. Just stood there, in a ragged oversized pea coat, an oversized undyed sweater of wool, and a long skirt, and observed him like he was a tiger in a cage. She brought him food, set it at the mouth of the cave, but never dared to approach him.

“What do you call yourself?”

“Lo—” pause “Lore—” pause “I call myself Lorelei,” she answered.

“It is a name of the ocean,” he answered to her from the shadows.

“What is your name?” she asked.

“Samebito,” he answered.

“Is it okay if I call you ‘Sam’?” she asked.

“Yes,” he answered.

“You can call me Lori if you like,” she responded.

“I prefer to call you Lorelei,” he answered.

“We’re back Lorelei,” he whispered to the slumbering human. Lorelei slowly opened her eyes. It was near daybreak.

“Oh no!” she said. “I’m late for work!”

She pulled herself out of his arms, snatching up the apron floor. She raced out into the sunlight, her feet scarcely making a sound on the stones, but it sounded like thunder to Sam.

That night he dreamed of her brown hair in the ocean floating in aquamarine water, the weight of her body upon his chest, the smooth skin of her gill-less neck, the sound of her feet on stone.

Lorelei was gone for another three and a half months before she came to visit Sam. His marks on the stone—silvery marks—were in a different place now on the walls—there were two other places were he had started and stopped marking. One near his bed, Four months, two weeks and two days, another one on one wall was two months, and this one was about three and half months. He was marking the wall, tracing a finger down, leaving a line as smooth as mother pearl in the rough surface when her feet struck the soft sand.

She was still wearing the undyed sweater, the worn skirt, the bloodied apron was rolled under her arm—dried blood dyed the side of her sweater. She was quiet; she looked at him, in the eyes. He was quiet too. She sat down against the wall; he sat down beside her.

“You seem very unhappy,” he said.

“I’m tired,” she said. “I’m exhausted.”

“This work is not good for you Lorelei,” he said, “it kills not just the waters, the fish; it kills the people as well.”

He dared to touch her hair. “It will kill you.”

“Maybe it will,” she answered softly, rubbing her nicked, sliced up hands together. They were a patchwork quilt of bruises, blisters from the knife handles, nicks from fish fins, gashes from knife blades. They’ll never be smooth again.

“I don’t want to see you die,” he whispered to into her ear. Lorelei leaned onto him.

Months ago he sat too close to her and she scooted away. She came into the cave for the first time, sat down upon a rounded stone shaped like a toadstool. Sam thought incorrectly that he could approach her with fearing her darting away. But the moment he came too close to her, he realized how small she was and wrong he was.

“You’re scared of me,” he said, backing off several feet, “aren’t you?”

“Yes,” she answered softly.

Currently Lorelei’s hand rubbed underneath his jaw. Her finger touched one of his gill slits. She always wanted to touch them. His head jerked back.

“That hurt, didn’t it?” she said.

“Yes,” he answered.

“I’m sorry,” she told him.

“It is all right,” he responded. He touched the skin of her neck, just below her ears, just where he assumed, gills would be, if Lorelei were to develop them. If Sam had ever felt a rose petal in his life, he would compare her throbbing skin to that, but no, he could only describe it as beautifully alien and almost, almost, satisfying. “Your skin is very smooth. Gills would not suit you.”

She chuckled, her skin burning with blood. “Yeah.”

His fingertips remained on her neck. Lorelei sighed softly and gently eased his hand away.

The alarm at the factory sounded again. Lorelei stood up. “I have to get home.”

Sam started a new count on the other side of his bed. He was startled the next day to find Lorelei had returned. He scratched away his mark, returning the stone to its roughness. Lorelei was illuminated by the full moon behind her, it was only one of two times he had seen a full moon.

She was not wearing the bloodied apron; she did not even have it on her person. But she still had the sweater on, and the worn skirt, and he could not imagine her in anything else. She smiled. She walked up to him, slowly, step by step, and then pressed her forehead against his chest. He was not cold like fish, but his body was warm as a man’s…in fact it was much hotter, and growing hotter. His white skin blushed pink, flushing and pulsing like cherry petals.

And for the first time, Lorelei felt Sam a shudder not created from the sounds of the cannery bell.

Months ago…

“Do you find me ugly?” he asked her many nights after she admitting her fear of him.

She paused, wigging her toes in the sand. “Different. Do you find me ugly?”

“No,” he answered.

Her lips pressed against his mouth. Her scarred hands pressed against his chest, and he held onto her wrists, smooth as polished shell.

“Do you find me ugly?” he asked, pulling his mouth away from hers, holding onto her wrist.

“No,” she answered. “Do you find me?”

“No, I never did,” he whispered and pulled her to his bed.

It was a strange moment as he laid her down onto the bed. Lorelei startled the moment his hands wandered under her heavy sweater…it was itchy to him, he wondered how itchy it was to her. She pushed his hands away. His fingers barely touched the mounds of her breasts, goose-bumped, but promising smoothness.

“I can’t,” she said and hurried away, pulling herself from the bed, from Sam’s hands, still half clutched. She rushed out the opening, loudly clamoring over the stones.

Sam rescratched the wall. He put his hands behind his head and gazed up the ceiling. Only one or two glowing specks of algae remained, like fading promises. His mind dwelled on past conversations.

“Do you miss your family?”

“Perhaps, the feeling is strange,” Sam answered her. “I miss something…”

“How big is your family?”

“I have one father and twelve brothers,” he answered. “How big is yours?”

“Only my paternal uncle and his second wife,” she answered.

“You have no siblings?” he asked.

“I remember having a little sister that passed away from scarlet fever,” she answered.

“Do you miss her?”

“I was only four when it happened,” she answered. “But I am sad because I think of what we could have done together. I think of what it would be like to have a little sister, and I miss that affection that could have happened.”

“I believe I understand the feeling,” he said to her.

There was no sand upon the floor when Lorelei stepped down into the cave three weeks later. More nets from the cannery ship have piled up. Along the wall, she found another group of lines. She counted. There were only twenty marks…had Sam left the day before? His bed remained beside the underwater cave system. She touched the snail shells he had decorated it with.

“I am leaving the cave in a week,” Sam spoke up from behind her. Lorelei jumped, and turned to face him. He looked at the ground.

“You…you are?” she said, looking at him.

“I must,” he told her. “I cannot stay here much longer.”

“Oh,” she said as he walked passed her and crawled into his bed, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

There was silence.

“I must go,” Lorelei said.

“Please stay,” Sam spoke up, pulling on the hem of her skirt. “Just for the night.”

“I have work in the morning,” Lorelei said.

“Lorelei, tell me, are you happy with this work? With the job of gutting fish, killing one after the other every moment of the day? As smoke and steam roars?” he said.

“Actually, I cut their heads off,” she said.

“But are you happy with that?” he said.

Lorelei paused before she answered. “No, but I have no choice.”

“Yes you do,” Sam stated.

“If I choose not to spend the night with you, then that is my choice, I choose to go to work in the morning. It is my choice,” Lorelei stated.

“If you choose to go home and go to bed and not go to work in the morning, that is a fine choice, but these choices you make are not choices, they are chains, Lorelei,” he said standing up. He chucked her under the chin. Both his hands pressed into her cheeks and he pulled her face to his. “I cannot stand to see you chained up like this. You are too beautiful for that.”

Lorelei sniffed. “I can’t do this anymore. I hate it; you don’t understand how much I hate this. You’re a fae.”

“I feel it,” he whispered into her face.

“You’re lying,” she said.

“I can’t,” he responded, “I’m a fae.”

They kissed. When Lorelei’s eyes closed, Sam brought her mouth to his.

It was a dam exploding, a tin can rupturing over a fire. Sam pulled Lorelei’s heavy sweater over her head. She held her arms up as he did so. He took a moment to admire her form, with a smile that perhaps…only a hungry shark could manage. He shrunk back when he realized his interest was evident, but Lorelei stroked his shoulders and welcomed him back. He kissed her neck, her shoulders, her elbows, the back of her hands, showering her in kisses. On his knees, he kissed her scarred palms, warming them with his mouth, with his magic. Lorelei felt like she was floating in water…warm tepid water.

He put his arms around her waist, drawing her white stomach towards him. He bombarded her soft skin with kisses as well, kissing his away around, then up her stomach, kissing each individual rib.

“That sweater was heavy and itchy,” he told her, looking up from between her breasts. He stroked her stomach. “How could you deal with it with skin so soft?”

“You learn to deal with things,” she told him, touching the back of his head.

He kissed between her breasts. He kissed over her left breast to her armpit then kissed back over her left breast, in the groove between her breasts, over the right breast. He kissed the center of her chest then brought his lips back to hers. He picked her up off the cold, stony ground and carried to the nest. When he laid her down, Lorelei did not protest to his wandering hands. He spread her brown hair around her head like a halo. His hands undid her skirt and she kicked it off.
Her toes rubbed against the insides of his legs, skin as smooth as shell, flesh as warm as a heated pot. Her knees rubbed his smooth stomach, ribboned with muscles. His member was stiff, hard against her flailing legs. She rubbed her knee up against it, rubbing continually along its side until she felt a spurt of warmth run down it, run down her leg, his preparation for love making. She watched his gills gape open and close with the feeling of her leg. He kissed her forehead.

“You’re beautiful,” he told her.

“You are too,” she answered, touching his cheek.

“I would like to believe you are lying,” Sam stated.

“You can’t lie during lovemaking,” Lorelei responded. “Humans can’t lie during lovemaking.”

“Really?” he asked, grasping her shoulders and rolling onto his back.

“Only whores lie during sex,” she answered with a laugh, sitting on his chest. Her hands pressed against his bed on either side of his head, her hair draped over them, blocking a view of the rest of the nest.

“Are you a whore?” he asked.

She laughed softly. “No, I’m not.”

She kissed him. Lorelei pushed down his chest, until she felt his organ against her back end. She took it in her hand, positioning herself over him. The first few inches entered her, and she exhaled. She pulled herself up a bit, and then lowered herself again, more of him entered her. Her body seized, lungs, heart, muscles, she lowered herself more as she felt herself open up. Her body made room for Sam, with slow step, and shots of fluids, that left her body in shots of heat and pleasure. She pressed a finger against her clitoris, it burned and hungered as she slowly became one with Sam, massaging it as she pushed downward. When she was halfway down, she braced herself on his chest and pushed the rest of herself down onto him. Sam watched with wide eyes.

She exhaled loudly, and all the air was forced out of Sam’s chest as if she was a considerable weight. He breathed in mightily. She pressed her palms into his chest, pressing into his chest as if she was pressing her palms into clay. She lifted and lowered herself in quick bursts on Sam’s penis, each movement becoming more and more pleasurable. His member was no different than that of a human, perhaps he formed it to make it so, but there was something odd about, it felt different than a human’s…a magical touch perhaps again.

Sam’s eyes glowed green, his hands gripped her wrists, holding her hands to his chest. Sam did not make a sound; he focused on her, on her face. Lorelei cried out with every burst of pleasure. Points of her body would just graze his inner things. These gentle, unintentional caresses would make his hips quiver and jerk, Lorelei would cry out. He let go of her wrists and held her thighs in place, keep as much as her body in contact with him as possible; her hands seemed very unwilling to move.

Lorelei pressed down on Sam, grinding eagerly into his flesh…soft and welcoming as a human’s, smooth and hairless unlike a human’s, lacking any sandpaper roughness of a shark, or the scales of fish. Sam’s tail flipped wildly back and fourth, while the rest of his body remained stiff and controlled.

“Do you feel ready explode?” he asked her.

“What?” she panted.

“Is your body ready to crack? Do you feel like you’re bursting? Please tell me.”

“Yes! Yes!” she answered. “Ah…yes…”

Sam pressed into her…hard. His eyes rolled back in his hand, his fingers like Lorelei’s into his flesh, gripped tightly onto her flesh. Lorelei cried out. His climax felt like wave…a storm in the ocean…crashing into her. It was met by her equal vicious climax, a fresh water damn bursting.

The dance was over. The clumsy movements, gestures, gave into an aggressive, exotic tango, and that flashed and died quickly into a moment of trickling. The waves of the ocean lapped at the beach. Lorelei balled her sweater up and put it under her head. Sam spooned around her, one arm above the sweater, the other arm over her. He used his magic to keep the nest warm…just a little bit. There was still a bit of nip in the air…the right kind of nip that demanded an embrace of some sort. She slept soundly, and he, after a few hours, slept soundly too.

When Sam awoke the next morning, Lorelei was gone. A horn sounded at the cannery to call in its workers.

One week passed. Lorelei did not go to the cave, she even took the effort to walk three streets over, and so she could not see or hear the bay waters. Necessity overcame pleasure, and she could not bear to tell Sam that. She needed to…over what she wanted too. Her own shame, embarrassment of lying with a merman, kept her from looking at, let alone enter, that cave. She couldn’t face him; she did not feel like she could. The feeling of being conquered, even though she very much was not, made her queasy in the stomach.

“Can fae choose?”

“What?”

“Can fae choose what they are going to do?”

“Yes, the problem is desire is too strong, and many remain steadfast and simply choose not to choose.”

“Sounds difficult.”

“Could but won’t.”

“Being lazy sounds like a good term.”

“Foolish is better.”

Lorelei returned home. Her aunt and uncle were eating supper, she struggled passed them and into her bed. She slept well through the night, not even hearing the warning alarm of the cannery to call in its workers. They would not let her into the factory when she rushed to its doors. She was too late. Anyone who was late risked being fired risked losing their pay for the month. She was only a minute late, but they shut the doors on her anyway. Lorelei tossed her lunch pail down and her apron and stormed away, leaving her belongings like a monument dedicated to someone dead. She left and walked away, down Main Street, down the rocking shore, down the grainy beach to the cave.

It was empty. No nest, most of the markings on the walls were gone, except for a grouping of seven near the mouth of cave.

He did not lie to her.

“Sam!” she cried. “Oh Sam, oh Sam! I’m sorry!”

She fell to her knees, onto the bare cold stone. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I was being an idiot.”

“You were not being an idiot,” a soft voiced answered from outside.

Lorelei clamored out of the cave onto the rocky shore then onto the sandy beach. Sam’s head peeked out of the water.

“You told me you were going to leave,” she called to him, stepping towards the water.

“I couldn’t leave,” he said. “And besides, my exact words were I was going to leave the cave. I didn’t say anything about leaving you.”

She stood ankle deep in water. “Why?”

“Because I love you,” he answered. “Will you come with me?”

He offered her his hand.

She took it.

For years the village spoke of the girl swallowed up by a merrow, stolen away at the shore. They spoke her fate…death…enslavement…hunger…trapped in limbo. They spoke and spoke of it every night, every morning, at every gathering. They spoke of it until the cannery bells called them to work.


To answer some questions, the legends I used were Japanese, Irish, and English.

The legend of the Samebito is Japanese, and involves and rather friendly, talkative sharkman who cries rubies when his friends are hurt.

Merrows come from the Irish mythos. Merrows are described a relative of the mermaid. While mermaids are petty, mean, and drag sailors to their deaths, merrows are actually on very good terms with humans. Merrows are known as "sea ogres" on account the males are hidieous, while the females are beautiful. They often interact with humans (females seeking attractive, while males seeking some form of attention).

The weakness to iron comes from English legend involving thwarting faes and avoiding their tricks.

A bulk is based on Hans Christen Anderson's "The Little Mermaid". In the original version of the tale, mermaids do not have souls. However, the little mermaid, so in love with her prince, sacrafices herself rather than kill him, thus gaining pity from God, who gives her a soul or angel or spirit. She dies at the end.