The Little Pearlmaid

I haven't seen her for days. The sudden thought startled me, and my next thought was that I thought wrong. I tried to place when last we met or even spoke; it had been days. I owed her many, many apologies. I missed her birthday—our birthday, as it was one we fatefully shared. I could've had a letter delivered with a few roses; although she claimed to find their aroma nauseating, I knew it was on account of romance being foreign to her. My absence of consideration was inexcusable.

Notwithstanding, the past few days had been exhilarating and exhausting in the way only hard work could be. Father and I had, at last, rid this island of the scourge plaguing their community for decades, which coincided with my own coming of age. To say my whole life had orbited the mission wasn't untrue, as Father had been training me to wield a weapon since I developed fine motor control, but this specific objective was meant to be my initiation into the fold. My first hunt. I felt a little bereft now that it was over, though perhaps the proper source of my unease was that I missed Nahla.

Oh, how I missed her. Just thinking of her soft lips and sharp smile made me eager to rush to her side. I wished to hug her—she must've been shivering terribly without me there to warm her! She ran so cold it worried me, but she assured me her chilled, textured skin was a family trait. I thought it was a strange trait to have. It didn't detract from her beauty, so it was negligible. And beautiful she was. Her unique features captured my attention from the moment I saw her; a fine face with pouty lips that stretched into a toothy grin, down-turned, mesmerizing eyes, and high cheekbones. Her dark hair reached her soft waist in thick braids adorned with shells from the beach near her house.

I put away my exhaustion as I made my way to her quaint cottage nestled on the outskirts of our village, where the forest met the shore. Her family had always been peculiar, keeping to themselves in the foliage in all their little homes that almost mimicked the very village they seemed to reject. Nahla was the only one who engaged with the villagers, though her interactions were almost exclusively with me. Always so shy, with a soft-spoken voice that begged to be left alone. We’d bonded over feeling othered; me, having moved to this village under two years ago; her, having no fondness for large gatherings and the sensitivities of social life, and before I knew it I had already begun courting her.

As usual, I only twisted the knob and the door opened. She didn’t believe in locked doors, she said. The silence alarmed me almost immediately, though I hesitated to panic just yet. Nahla was always humming something, incomprehensible words in a lilting melody that slithered between my ears. This was usually accompanied by the clang of a pot, the scratch of charcoal on paper, the squeak of cloth against tile. There was never this oppressive absence of sound. It was disquieting, and I stepped instead with caution reaching for my hidden blade. A curious smell hit my nose in layers; at first it was simply irksome, then it devolved into bad, and then–then I was calling Nahla? Nahla, are you home? because that was the smell of death.

It was then that I saw her. My Nahla, my fresh spring. My Nahla, my light, my love. My dead Nahla.

For a heart-stopping moment, when I truly looked, I almost believed it wasn’t her. My Nahla was human, and this—this was a siren’s corpse, we’d killed them all last week. We found their buried pearls and crushed them, even the smallest ones still in those sac-like membranes, just as my family’s bestiary instructed. So this thing on my Nahla’s kitchen floor must’ve broken in looking to feed and scared my Nahla away when she collapsed and convulsed as her pearl was destroyed.

The brief relief hurt more when I saw the ring of chains on the thing’s wrist matched the ring on mine.

“I–I don’t—How–? How could this, no, no! I didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean to, oh God—!”

Saliva pooled in my mouth, tangy with the taste of bile and incoming—outgoing—sick. I may have been able to stomach the sight before me if not for the stench, that awful stench. That terrible, loathsome stench. It was vile, and salty, and fishy, and not what a rotting human corpse would smell like–because she wasn’t human, had never been human, and would never be anything other than dead because I killed her with my own hands and had only just realized it.

How could she keep this from me? How had I not known that my own woman didn’t bleed red? How many nights had I spent seconds from death as she drooled over my flesh in hunger? What if we’d been wed? Would she have eaten our child right out of the womb? How could I not know? How could I not know? How could I not know?

“No, no, no,” I crawled my way to her half melted body, breath shuddering in my chest. Her legs were foam, pale like the crest of a wave with dreadful chunks of pink and red. Her torso was in tact, but it had just began to slide into the rest of foam when I cradled her to my heart. “Not you, please: I didn’t know, I didn’t–!”

I pressed my lips to her hair. I squeezed her shoulders. I brushed fingers across her face. Wake up, I thought. Any moment now she would wake, kiss me in the corner of my mouth, and beckon me into sleep’s embrace. This was a dream. A night terror from an incubus, and my chest was tight because that dastardly thing was sitting on it. It wasn’t real.

“Wake up,” I told myself. I told Nahla too, “Wake up, open your eyes.”

She didn’t. She never would.