Chapter Text
The waves are high and the wind is strong, the water is black and the sky is screaming. Like a thousand harpies and a million crows, the crashing waves are howling your name.
Someone else is calling your name, too, but you don’t care to hear them until a pair of strong, rough hands grab you by the shoulders, shakes you to wake you from your trance and then drags you away from the rocks. And you know you’re not supposed to be out here because when the water is black the mermaids are playing and when they play, when they play, little fisherkids like you turn into fish and swim with them in the black waves forever and ever and ever.
Your name is David Lalonde, you are ten years old and you are a fisherling. That is, you are the child of a fisherman family in a fisherman’s village, and your life goal and entire purpose of being alive is to fill your nets with silvery-shiny and also fairly gross and slimy fish. That is what everyone tells you, that is what everyone does, that is what everyone there has done since forever.
You don’t find this to be a very promising nor entertaining prognosis at all. Fishing has never been your thing, no; you prefer to write deep-sounding words on paper in a form commonly known as poetry. In the late summer, you write cheesy, light and happy poems to woo the neighboring farmer girls and make them pass you some bottles of the apple juice you are so fond of. In spring you write about watching the seagulls hatch their young and about the warm winds hitting you in the face alongside with some salty sea droplets when you take your dingy boat out for the first time since autumn, in summer you write about the jellyfish that sting your limbs if you swim too close. During autumn, you write about your brother because the color of the leaves on the few trees remind you of how his eyes looked, and you write about him until your eyes are swollen and your cheeks are red and someone, someone, anyone has to hug you and smooth your ugly pale hair until you stop trembling. During winter, you write about the dark waves but most of all you write to keep the elders happy; because when they are happy they tell you stories.
You love stories, but you would never let anyone know. Apart from the elders, especially one of them, because he will read your stories and poems and he will tell you his own in return.
And he knows how to tell stories. You sit by his rocking chair for hours on end, jaw slack and eyes wide, past the sun setting and then rising again, as he paints worlds and magical creatures and heroes and princes and princesses with his words and you scramble to understand. When he tells his tales of worlds long past and worlds yet to come, you are a tall knight in shining armor as opposed to a bony kid with ugly worn, brown wadmal pants, you are a swordmaster and not a fisherman’s kid, you are everything you ever wanted to be.
He tells you about mermaids, and suddenly you are all ears. He tells you of their evil and he tells you of their lies, and why they are malign creatures of the wicked depths. He will tell stories of the parents you once had, how their boat went under with your sister one day, when the whales took them. But he will not, no matter how much you plead and pout and beg and write nice poems, ever tell you why your brother with the orange eyes who was strong and beautiful just disappeared on a stormy winter’s night.
The fire warms your frozen bones on yet another night spent by his feet, the moon is high and the air outside is cold and crystal clear. The ice is thick on the water and the snow heavy on the thatched roof above your heads.
“And know Dave, that their singing is just as fatal as it is beautiful – these beasts lure unknowing men onto their reefs and hidden rocks with their melodies. Your ears may never be uncovered when you are in mermaid waters; either that or you must be chained to your ship,” he warns you. “Such beautiful women they may appear to be, but like their tails they are fish under the surface, cold, slippery and do like sharks kill.”
The other elders always look at you funny, this pity in their eyes that they think themselves to hide so well. You can see it in the hurried smiles they give you as you walk by, you read it in the way their conversations always seem to halt so often when you are nearby. And of course there is the forbidden book that they try to keep unseen, the one bound in black leather and you know, you just know that they’re hiding something. But you won’t push. Soon spring will be here, school will be dismissed in March and with it the endless shoving and backtalking and snickering by the other fisherlings will stop. When the ice melts and fuses with the waves you will repair and upgrade your dingy boat and go further than you ever have before. When you are older and have your own covered sailboat you will go into mermaid waters because you want nothing more than to see one for your own but not yet, not yet, you must wait. When your back is strong and your head is clear, you will find the sirens.