Ned Harris lived cloistered at home for forty-six years beside the wide expanse of the sea. He’d spent the bulk of those years languishing in the cold shadow of his father: a tall, cruel, imposing man who whipped Ned with a belt as quickly as to look at him.
Ned Sr. made it a point to come home from work loaded often and beat his wife and Ned. Ned and his mother learned to cling together in mutual fear and helplessness, and in this way, found their only refuge in each other.
Ned was weak in his father’s eyes, but it was Ned’s constant, accusing, mute presence that drove his father to eventually drink himself into a slow, guilty, ulcer-ridden death just after Ned turned forty.
For six years Ned and his mother lived alone without the specter of drunken violence stalking in at two in the morning crashing into vases, smashing phones and sometimes bones. Those six years were, at least, free.
One day they spent all afternoon at a beach soaking up sun and waves.
“Mom, look at all the shells I got today. Won’t they look splendid pasted around the bathroom mirror?”
“Oh yes, Neddy, you’ve found a fine trove. I can hardly wait to set to work on that bathroom,” she told him warmly. He flopped on the sand next to her as they watched the waves and a wistful, faraway look crept into her eyes.
“Neddy, do you remember the first time I took you to the beach when you were about five and you were afraid of the water? As I remember, the only way I could get you near it was to tell you that if you got pulled under the waves, the mermaids who lived at the bottom of the sea would rescue you and bring you back up. Once I promised you that, you went to the sea and couldn’t get enough of it. And you were such a fine swimmer, too. I was so proud.” She sighed warmly. Ned smiled as he gazed over the waves.
“Yeah. I was, like, eight, before I stopped believing in mermaids. I can’t believe you went that long letting me believe in them,” he said with a wry smile.
“It was just so hard for me to let you grow up. But, never the less, I’m proud of the man you’ve grown into,” she stated in earnest, patting his sandy leg. “Still, I hope you haven’t grown up so much as to not even entertain the possibility that magic and mermaids exist in the world.”
Ned chuckled faintly. “I’ll try to keep an open mind.”
This conversation would be their last as Mrs. Harris died peacefully in her sleep that evening when they returned from the beach. For weeks after the funeral, Ned wafted dreamily between the empty waking life and the vivid fantasies that beleaguered his thoughts. The better part of his life lay buried in his mother’s grave.
What drew him to the beach on a night several months after the funeral, he could not say. He simply needed some recourse to feel happy again and hoped he may find it in revisiting the place he and his mother spent her last day on Earth.
At first he could only sense a strange, dark shape seated amongst the rocks. The clouds shrouded the moonlight. After a few minutes the clouds passed and Ned discerned the shape of a woman seated atop one of the rocks. She sat turned away from him so he could only see her from the waist up. She was nude with a long trail of blonde hair cascading down her creamy shoulders and back. She looked towards the stars and continued singing for a few moments before becoming aware of Ned’s presence. She turned to him and Ned felt his heart quake tremulously as he saw she had no legs, but a long, emerald green mermaid’s tail trailing over the rock.
He felt glee well up in him as he remembered what his mother told him about mermaids.
The mermaid smiled gently to him as though hearing his thoughts and motioned him to come to her. Her soft eyes gleamed warmly.
“I’m so glad you’ve come,” she said to him in a gentle whisper. “Come to me and I promise to love you as my own child.” She reached out her slender arms to him. He shambled forth, wrapped his arms around her and buried his head in her soft chest. She rocked him like an infant as he wept joyously.
“You promise to stay with me? You’ll make my life whole again?”
“I promise to love you as my own child,” she asserted once more and Ned took hold of her again.
She took his hand and kissed it to her mouth as he sat back from her to take a moment to catch his breath.
A sharp pain broke Ned’s eyes open in horror. Instead of a hand, a bloody, oozing stump stood at the end of his arm as the mermaid unhinged her jaw like a snake and swallowed the severed hand whole, crunching the bones like twigs. Ned screamed and flailed back from her but her tail elongated for serpentine miles and lashed him back to her. It coiled around him like the tail of a great python. She leered into him as he struggled and strained against her fierce grip to get away.
“What are you doing? You can’t hurt me! You promised to love me!” She tightened herself around him.
“I promised to love you as my own child,” she said dispassionately as she unhooked her jaws again and prepared to swallow him whole. “Did I forget to mention we mermaids tend to eat our young?”
__________________________
©2010 Maria Mitchell
Maria Mitchell is a writer of speculative fiction, composes music compulsively, and lives in California. Her work has been published in Ethereal Tales, Fried Fiction, and 69 Flavors of Paranoia.
Tags: Maria Mitchell
