The Merrow

"My name is Arie, and I'm a merrow. My friend James says in some other cultures, my distant merrow cousins are called mermaids."

--From Arie: A Myth Come to Life by James Gray (unpublished)

She had been waiting, her long, green hair drifting lazily in the cold water. She fanned her tail idly, stirring the seaweed. She should've heard the signal by now, the series of clicks and moans, stuttering, then drawn out, the "hello" in her own language.

The sounds were made by a human. Or rather, by a machine the human used.

She recently learned a few things about humans. She knew that at least two of them had machines that could make sounds similar to the sounds a merrow makes. She knew these two humans were very, very curious about merrows in general. One of the two was also particularly interested in her; the other human was interested in her friend.

The human she knew best was called James. She met it some time after her friend met the other human; her friend called the other human Brendan. The sounds James and Brendan made with their machines weren't always exactly like the sounds merrows make, but over time she and her friend came to understand them well enough to have conversations with the humans, after a fashion. Merrow language is simpler than human languages, because their world is simpler.

She spent her days - and nights when the moon was bright enough - in ways most humans would envy. Food was plentiful: a variety of crab and shrimp, European lobster when she could find it. Sometimes she and her friends would see who could open and eat scallops the fastest. She swam lazily over the beds of sea lettuce and played hide-and-seek in the forests of sugar kelp. Merrows did not build; they did not plan, not beyond the next meal; they did not claim territory. There was no reason for sophisticated language.

James asked if he could call her Arie. James told her Arie was the most beautiful merrow humans knew, and the most famous. She was a bit surprised by this; she didn't know humans knew any merrows at all, and she certainly didn't know that there were merrows who were famous in the human world. She was curious about James, though— merrows are insatiably curious— so she agreed.

Over the course of months, James told Arie things about the human world, and about his place in it. Arie marked "months" by the times the moon provided light at night, scattering a peaceful, lambent glow over the kelp forests and rocky reefs in shallow water. The time between bright moons she called "moon turns". On the nights the moonlight lasted longest, she and her merrow friends would spend as much time playing and talking as they could.

James told her he had travelled all over the world. "World" was a difficult concept for Arie. She had never been more than a dozen or so human miles from the part of the seabed she knew best. James told her people all over the world adored him. "They like me as much as you like your friends," he told her. "And there are many, many humans, more than there are strands of kelp."

Friends were important to Arie. She thought James must have many, many friends, the way it talked about others liking it. More than the strands of kelp, James said. She thought of James surrounded by humans, like kelp stalks surrounded her and her friends, all the humans turning to it. They wanted to hear what it had to say, to be near it, she thought.

He asked her who the greatest merrow was. He tried words like "queen" and "king" and "ruler". Arie was completely unable to answer. The other merrows just are, she said; like the sun is, or the crabs are, or the shy, sinuous octopus.

Arie didn't know - she couldn't have - that nearly everything James told her was a lie. He even lied to her about the name he picked for her: when he discovered that merrows were real, he remembered a famous animated movie with a beautiful mermaid; he took the name of the animated, famous mermaid and lopped off the last letter. He had plans for Arie. He worried about intellectual property troubles - copyright and so forth - if he left the name intact.

Maybe the biggest lie he told was that people everywhere liked him. In truth, everyone who knew James well at all disliked him; many despised him.

Arie and her friend often talked with each other about James and Brendan. Brendan asked her friend if he could call her Lí Ban; like James, told her it was the name of a beautiful and famous mermaid. Brendan didn't take Lí Ban's name from a famous movie, though. He did a bit of research about merrows - he knew they were part of Irish folklore - and discovered there was a story about an Irish mermaid called Lí Ban. He chose it to try to honor the place merrows had in Irish folklore and mythology.

Arie thought herself lucky that she was friends with James and not Brendan. Brendan never talked to Lí Ban about visiting far-off places or being liked by everyone. He mostly asked about her life and the lives of other merrows. He wondered what she liked to do, what she liked to eat. When Lí Ban told him she liked to play hide and seek in the kelp, he didn't respond right away. Then he asked another question: "what do merrows call something that surprises them and makes them very, very happy?" She told him, and he was quiet again. He finally said, "I don't think I know how to say that in your language, but in my language we would say 'wow'".

Brendan Dunne was as different from James Gray as a kitten is from a cobra. He was a research scientist, studying whale calls in the waters near Cape Clear Island, off the southwest tip of Ireland. His goal was to try to reproduce the sounds, to talk to whales. He was using novel signal processing techniques and noticed certain signals—sounds—that were not associated with whales. He eventually isolated the sounds, and when he played some of them back into the sea, he was astonished to hear calls that were similar, but not identical, returned back.

Brendan's research assistant was brilliant with the technology—he helped Brendan greatly with analyzing the new signals—but couldn't understand the value of basic discovery. Learning something new, something no one ever knew before, seemed unimportant to him, apart from its ultimate monetary value. “How will we market this?" James would ask. "We won't," Brendan would reply.

When James finally started talking to Arie—the day she had been waiting and waiting for him—he told her things she couldn't believe at first. He told her Brendan was going to trap Lí Ban, to take her and show her to other humans. He told her Brendan would never bring Lí Ban back, that he would keep her until she died. Arie would never see her again.

Arie felt heavy; she felt an ache inside she had never known before. She felt wrong. She couldn't put words to her feelings: in her language, there are no words for "rage" or "despair". The name "Brendan" played over and over in her mind, conjuring other emotions beyond words. "Malice" and "greed" played no part in merrow life.

"You need to tell Lí Ban to get Brendan close to her, then drown him."

She knew what "drown" meant; she had seen air-breathing creatures struggle if they were held underwater and eventually stop moving altogether. She had seen it once when a minke whale was caught in errant fishing nets. Her mind rebelled. To purposely cause death? It was beyond anything she could possibly conceive.

She could warn Lí Ban, though; she could tell her not to talk to Brendan anymore and to never go near him. She began a panicked search for her friend.

While James waited, he made some more notes on his laptop. "Arie is nearly ready for me to ask her to come with me and see the world, to see how people crowd around me and want to be near. Doesn't matter that it's her they'll come to see. The money will be in my pocket. It's close. So close. I think Brendan will be out of the way."

He also worked on the book he was planning to publish, a book about a myth come to life.

When Arie found Lí Ban, she was talking to Brendan. Arie grabbed her arm and tried to pull her away from the shore. "It's bad," she said, using the merrow word for crab that had been dead too long to eat. "It wants to take you away, take you to humans."

Lí Ban tried to free herself, tried to push Arie away. "Brendan would never do that. It's my friend. I want to keep talking to it." Her voice was pleading.

For the first time, Arie heard Brendan talk; or rather, she heard the machine that made the sounds Brendan used for merrow-speak. "Lí Ban, is someone with you? I'd like to talk to them."

"Leave her alone." Arie was angry, frightened. "James told me what you want to do. You want to take her and show her to humans. You want to keep her until she dies."

A few moments of silence; Arie was still frantically tugging Lí Ban's arm. Brendan spoke again: "Lí Ban, I'm not going to take you away. I'm not going to hurt you."

Arie stopped pulling. She and Lí Ban grew very still. Something was wrong, very wrong. James said one thing, Brendan said another; they couldn't both be true. Arie remembered a time when she was young, and was caught by a wave breaking on the shore; she tumbled and tumbled, not knowing which way was up. It made her head spin, as it was spinning now.

Merrows don't lie. There was no word, no concept, no touchpoint for someone deliberately not telling the truth. It was as foreign to them as hatred is to an infant. "What is this?" Arie let go of Lí Ban and looked at her, eyes wide. "What do we do?"

Lí Ban shook her head. Brendan spoke again. "Lí Ban, James is wrong. I would never never do anything to hurt you. I just wanted to learn about you." He used a word neither of them understood: "James lied to Arie."

"What does that mean? Lied?"

Another moment of silence, then, "it's like James saw a cod, and told you he saw a crab. Like he told you merrows have blue hair."

"Our hair is green." Lí Ban and Arie were both confused, but Arie was starting to understand.

"James is saying things that aren't the way they are," Arie said. "Like if I said eels have claws and legs. Brendan says that James is saying something wrong, like that eels have claws and legs." Wrong, or not right, was as close as Arie could get to "lying".

Lí Ban looked at her friend, eyes wide. "What if Brendan is the one saying something wrong? What if it really does want to catch me?" Lí Ban began swimming in nervous circles.

Brendan broke into their confusion. "I never wanted to do anything that would hurt you. I will find James and talk to him. Lí Ban, stay far enough away from shore so I couldn't possibly catch you. Arie, stay with her and keep her safe. Take care of each other. I'll talk to you tomorrow, here in this same place, just after sunrise."

Arie took Lí Ban's hand. She was again feeling the heaviness, the ache she felt when she and James last talked. But now it was different. Now she was afraid of James.

"I think James is the one who is wrong." Lí Ban seemed to understand, and nodded. "If Brendan says to stay away from the shore, if it says I should keep you safe..." Arie's voice trailed off. The thought of James now made her stomach sour.

The two stayed together the rest of that day, and all that night. Most of the time, they held hands. They didn't play, they didn't talk much, they didn't eat, they didn't sleep. They hid themselves deep in a kelp forest and waited.

When the sky began to brighten with the new day, they swam, hand in hand, to where Brendan would be. They swayed slightly as the sea gently rocked them. Neither of them knew what they would say to Brendan. Neither of them knew, until then, what it meant to feel threatened; they had no word for it, this thing that made every part of them feel somehow wrong.

They looked up at the brightening sky, they looked toward the shore, they held hands. Waiting, they drifted a bit closer to shore; neither of them was paying much attention, and neither noticed.

There was a sound like a drawn-out "whuuump" - the sound they heard when something plunged into the sea at speed. Their hands gripped each other's more tightly.

There was a human leg wearing a bright yellow boot in the water very near the shore. It was hopping quickly, agitated.

James, thought Arie. James said all the humans liked its yellow boots, that they wanted boots the same color.

Another "whuuump" and another leg. They didn't know whose: this leg wore a dark green boot; it also hopped frantically. Then both legs of both humans were in the water, two yellow boots, two green, stepping first forward then back, pivoting and turning.

The body of a human - a whole human - plunged sideways into the sea, with hands not its own around its neck, its arms frantically beating at the yellow-booted human holding it under.

The human in the green boots began feeling around the rocks, grabbing and pulling. It found a loose rock and swung it upward, out of the water, once, twice, again and again. The hands around its neck released it and disappeared above the surface.

The human in the yellow boots sank to its knees and toppled into the water. Small eddies and swirls of red-stained seawater drifted around its head. The arms were swaying like stalks of kelp.

The other human walked away from the merrows and disappeared onto the rocky shore.

Lí Ban was motionless. Arie again pulled her arm, tried to get her to move, to get away.

"Lí Ban, Arie, this is Brendan." Sounds came from the machine. Lí Ban tried desperately to pull away, to swim to shore. "Are you there?"

Neither Arie nor Lí Ban fully understood what Brendan said. He said more humans would come, that they would get in the water to get James. Brendan said things about James and the machines. James hadn't just talked to Arie, he said things to another machine, and the machine remembered the words. "Other humans will want to know what James said to that machine," Brendan told them.

They understood when he told them James was dead.

They understood when he told them to swim far, far away, and to not come back, not ever.

It was a long time before Arie and Lí Ban played again in the soft moon glow, or in the sharp, sparkly sunlight. It was many moon turns before the ache and the heaviness and the sour feeling - the feeling of wrong - left them.