The Mermaid: Unraveling the Mysterious Tale of The Void by Samantha Green

The Mermaid

Mermaids slumber in the quatervois of spring

“Why do you not submerge, sweet little things?”

But they titter at one’s thanatophobia because—

“Stulta mulier.”

If you touch reflecting waters,

time will not lose grace.

“But will it take my pain away?”

“Meliorism will get the best of you

throw down your sword of virtue.

Submerge into the deep.

Laugh with us as we sing:

The fishermen are coming.

The fishermen are coming.

Don’t you swim under...

Oceanus absorbebit te.”

There are mermaids in the deep waiting, waiting until you fall asleep. When the sea salt brushes your nose and the seagulls call on the edge of the boat when there is nothing but the shifting of blue and only the wind to guide you, does a man have permission to cry?

Perhaps that is why Thomas became a fisherman. When the land rejected him, he could be nowhere, in the middle of the sea, remembering the days of the fawn in the forest when he had followed his brother and father in secret on their hunting trip. It was the last time tears fell from his eyes in front of anyone else. Seeing his reflection in the eyes of a fawn opened his heart to the nature of God. The animal stood still for him, letting him reach out to touch its soft fur, and to a child, this was the closest thing to magic. At that moment, the heavens opened like doors in the sky, rays of sunlight kissing his cheeks.

BAM!

Thomas could have sworn the fawn’s blood was gray, and when his father emerged from the woods to shake him senseless. His wonder had fleed, and his tears evaporated, too. Thomas shouldn’t have been there anyway, wandering in the woods. He was told to stay home and help his mother bake the scones.

“Stulta Mulier,” his father, would spit at the ground for weeks, mumbling disappointments to himself, while Thomas’s mother held and rocked her six-year-old child. Thomas was never sure if his father was speaking about him or his mother. Would it have mattered, however?

“Drink,” an elderly fisherman held out a bottle of whiskey for Thomas. “It will keep the demons away.”

His stomach was empty, and they didn’t bring much food that day, but the stoic man could already feel the shadows creeping up his spine. He took a long drink, and feeling his chest burn, they sailed further to sea. A glaze came over his blue eyes, and soon,  after a few more drinks, the slate sky took over their color. The ocean opened its jaw and took him in. Thomas became the water, swaying, feeling nothing at all.

Nothing at all.

Nothing at all.

Nothing at all, and when tentacles from the deep crept upon the deck, wrapping around his legs, he thought nothing of it, for the pain of his innocence lost had been dulled down to an empty bottle of whiskey. The stench of the grey blood of the creature only lingered, and the horrid screams of his father ceased. The sacrifice for the bottle to drink? He had forgotten the song his mother used to sing:

Meliorism will get the best of you

throw down your sword of virtue.

Submerge into the deep.

Laugh with us as we sing:

The fishermen are coming.

The fishermen are coming.

Don’t you swim under...

Oceanus absorbebit te.

“The ocean will swallow you up,” his mother would tell him, explaining the Latin in her song. But the words had faded in his memory and settled to a low hum.

The sound of the hum dithered, sinking into the sea and rising again, growing louder and louder until it deafened him. The squid pulled until Thomas was swaying at the boat's edge.

“Thomas! Help me with this!” The old fisherman shouted and wrangled the squid's tentacles off his legs.

Thomas blinked and jumped back in a sudden fright. He tumbled back, shaking his legs until they were entirely free. The squid had somehow pulled itself to the deck and lay there, bleeding blue blood from its mantle. His heartbeat was in tandem with the contorted struggling of the squid.

“How’d you get up here, lil bugger?” The fisherman put his wrinkled hand on the slash in the squid’s mantel. “Better to die in deep blue, yeah? Thomas!”

Sobering, Thomas jumped to his feet and helped the man push the squid back out to sea, but before it dropped, their eyes met.

“The fishermen are coming,” someone whispered in his mind.

The squid was gone. The moon was hanging over the ship, and the water was calm. How long had Thomas been standing there? He closed his eyes and rubbed his neck. His throat closed up, and he could feel the tears build in his eyes, but he held them back, unsure of why he wanted to cry at that moment. The whiskey was gone, and his stomach was full. Maybe he had forgotten that he had eaten dinner. Sometimes, the sea did that. It reminded him of when he drove in the morning, and the journey was forgotten. Whatever was felt, day after day, on that commute to work had been forgotten. Was the ocean playing this trick on him now, too?

The old man slapped Thomas on the back, “Best get some sleep, son. The hunt starts soon and the mermaids are tricky. Boss said we’ve got to bring one back this time.”

The murky clouds dissipated, and the stars joined the moon in its midnight glory. The whales called out good night and creatures of phosphite swam in the deep ocean of this story. His dream, his dream, what a peculiar void of a thing, where the claws come out and rip open the chest, to pull out whatever was hiding. BAM! BAM! Stulta mulier. ‘You stupid son of a foolish woman! Stulta mulier! Stulta mulier!’

The fishermen are coming.

BAM! BAM! Stulta mulier! ‘Come back here and I’ll teach you, son!’ Close up the throat. Turn tears to sand. Slap the sense into a man. Carve his face into a stone. Write the rules so he understands until — what emerges in the deep? Quills indwell on skin. Mangle innocent sons. Hide in the woods and run. Rame rivers find seas. Monsters swim inside of me. Latibules save sheep, distractions and sin. Follow waterfalls to grim. Open doors into storms. Do not turn though you are worn. Condign mágoa night, bring those to belight. Improve from one’s own decline. Illuminate her descent. Heal what is dead.

The fishermen are coming.

Var som vattnet. They sing me to sleep. What emerges from the deep?

The fishermen are coming!

“Oceanus absorbebit te!” Thomas gasped awake. Under the stars, he could not see anything but the light of the moon and two eyes gleaming at him from the edge of the ship. He blinked and blinked again, but the eyes were still there, and when his eyes adjusted fully, the creature lowered itself out of sight.

“Freedman!” He yelled to the old fisherman, but there was no reply. He called out again, “Freedman!”

The mermaid laughed, her voice echoing along the water's surface, “Do not bother with him. He will only sleep. It is you I seek.”

Me? Thomas’s heart flittered, but he shook his head, stone-faced again.

“Submerge into the deep, my darling.”

There was a splash in the water.

“Show yourself creature!” He boomed across the blue, but his jaw shook like an injured squid. His hands gripped into the wood of the ship, and he squinted his eyes to peer into the water.

The mermaid laughed. The ocean's surface rippled, and she shot herself in the sky. Descending, the mermaid clasped his collar and ripped him off the boat. There is nothing that a mermaid cannot do when she has a hold of an unprepared man. Most fishermen voyage out to sea carrying their spear in one hand and a telescope in the other. They stand rigid, with their muscles flexed to keep their bodies well-planted on the boat. But Freedman insisted on getting sleep, and sleep caused water to filter through the cavity of his nose and burn salt in his lungs.

The mermaid’s grey claws were wrapped around his arm, gripping so hard the blood could not travel through his veins. Her hair was florescent, and her body was covered in misplaced sharp scales.  Thomas knew that if he attempted to touch her, his hands would bleed. Yet, there was something extraordinary about this creature. With every flick of her tail and the flickering light of the waning moon, the structure of his life was compressed, shifted, and molded into something new. How much debt did he accumulate in his younger, more precarious years? Was the currency in pounds or dollars? Did it matter? All the money Thomas did or didn’t have? Why was he forced to become a fisherman? Or rather, did he delight in the idea of leaving the land and never coming back?

“Mermaids are horrendous, so grotesquely divine that they cause men to venture out to the sea in the hope they will capture one, lock her up in their pools so they can admire her without fear of the unknown.” It was the voice of Thomas’s boss, who had given him a warning before he took the job. Mr. Echo is what the other fisherman called him because when he laughed at the sea, the sound traveled back to him in waves of reassurance. Every sea shell he passed on the shore held his laugh, so the ocean's surface was filled with his sound.

Thomas remembered his naivety, “But sir. A pool is not an ocean. Won't they die?”

“Ha! You are young, son. Very young indeed. You seek an experience that cannot be captured. For what? The men will not admire your empty pool. You will say to them, ‘I swam with a mermaid. I sunk to the depths of the ocean.’ I —and I will be frank with you— this world is structured upon land, and that is all. You can see, touch, and mold your houses into place. It is here where you breathe, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Out there, the water is deep, but it is void. There is nothing but sunken decay and simple-minded fish. Yes, yes, I will admit that it is refreshing to dip your toe in a pool and gaze at a mermaid; that is why men pay a heavy price to risk lives like yours to get what they want. Pour salt into the water, and she won’t know the difference. I say this in jest. Eventually, the creatures realize something is amiss, and they die.”

Thomas couldn’t tell if the water filling his lungs pained him or if the memory suddenly became much more important than his debt.

“What do they do with the mermaids, sir?”

“You ask so many questions, boy. Why? Don’t you have a pool in your yard?”

“I can’t afford one, sir.”

“Of course. Of course. How foolish of me to ask.”

The moon's light was gone, and the only light left came from the mermaid’s hair and the outline of her tail. She dragged Thomas to a small cavern at the bottom of the ocean. A dry pocket formed as the young man fell to the floor. The mermaid put her hands over his mouth and pulled out the water from his lungs.

“You did better than the others,” the mermaid spoke. Her voice was warm under the sea, like the note of a cello. “Most men choose to swallow water before we get here.”

“I can’t breathe!” Thomas gasped, holding his chest.

“The air is thin here.”

The mermaid held the fisherman’s face in her hands. Her claws had retracted, and her scales dissolved into her skin. Her touch was soft now, and as his breathing slowed, the mermaid lay down. Their faces were close, and he could smell the scent of tulips on her skin.

He did not even have to ask the question for her to answer, “Your logic does not exist here. You are here.”

Her eyes were gold with flecks of black, or were they green and yellow? He could not tell. Every time he blinked, the world around him changed. Was the mermaid as horrendous as Mr. Echo had said, or was she beautiful enough to hunt for display?

“What is your name?” She asked.

“What is yours?” They breathed into each other, and the smell of tulips sent tingles through Thomas’s brain.

The mermaid sat up and turned away, “Why do you want to know if you’re here to capture me?”

Thomas tried to move his legs, but they would not budge. His arms sank to the floor, and his head was heavy, “I thought you said logic didn’t exist here.”

“Of course it does,” she corrected him. “I only said that your logic does not exist here.”

It was hard for Thomas to breathe again. He coughed, and water trickled from his mouth. The mermaid stared at the helpless man, then closed her eyes and sighed, “There is no need to know. You have no net to catch me. I am only a fleeting moment to you.”

“Even so…”

“Even so?” The mermaid's teeth, which were like sharks, became dull. She smiled at him.

The tension in Thomas’s head was released, and then, slowly, his arms emerged from the floor, still weak but almost as they were once before.

“Yes,” he said, but his mind suddenly remembered he had a knife hidden in his pocket.

The mermaid lunged at the fisherman, claws out, rough scales grown on her skin, shark teeth. She grabbed his neck and held him there. Their eyes met, and there it was again—the smell of tulips. The creature could kill him at any moment. She had him there, in the void of nothing. Thomas could be lost forever with no accomplishments to leave behind.

The mermaid narrowed her eyes, “Are you afraid I will do the same to you as you intended to do to me?”

There it was again, the thin air, but Thomas slowed his breathing and answered, “Yes.”

She let him go. His legs and feet were released. Thomas reached into his pocket and set down the knife for her to take, but she left it as if the weapon had become a forgotten memory.

Thomas stood, adjusted his coat, and wiped the water from his brow, “Even so…”

“I admire your descent.”

“My descent?”

“Did you not leave the structure of land? Descend into the void to heal what is dead?”

Thomas scoffed, stuck his hand in his coat pocket with a grin, “You speak poetry here. Why not say why you brought me here plainly?”

The mermaid laughed in song and then said, “You know what I wish to sing when I see you?”

“What does that have to do with anything? Why did you bring me here?”

The mermaid disappeared into the water, singing:

Close up the throat.

Turn tears to sand.

Slap the sense into a man.

Carve his face into a stone.

Write the rules so he understands until — what emerges in the deep?

Thomas was pulled into the ocean's darkness again, but the mermaid gave him grace to breathe this time. She smiled at him, swimming around his dazed body in a violent passion. The light of her being caused his heart to jump and beat with such inspiration. His soul was being etched into a painting, and for a moment, he caught a glimpse of a woman hidden within the precautionary scales. There was a familiarity of home that flooded his senses. Once more, the smell of tulips crept over him. The nothingness glimmered with the light of sun and water, transformed into a garden.

The mermaid was gone, but her voice lingered through the fields of the flowers, “Tommy, when was the last time you cried?”

Thomas pushed the memory back, “What is your name?”

“It is safe to do so here.”

Thomas plucked a tulip from the field and held it to the sun. It was orange, then copper, and grey until ashes began to rise from the petals. The lush landscape was dying around him. His dream was collapsing. Thomas started walking slowly, attempting to convince himself he could stay in those tulip fields forever.

“Come back here, and I’ll teach you, son!” The voice of his father.

The man stopped. Trees surrounded him. Birds sat hushed in the branches watching.

Thomas stared into the eyes of the fawn. His hand was already stretched out, ready to touch it, and he pulled back, thinking he would hear his father’s voice again. There was nothing.

What emerges from the deep?

His reflection. No. Thomas had become the fawn. He stared at who he was when he was a boy and, seeing the wonder of his youth, melted the stone from his unfazed face and sent storms to his eyes.

BAM!

Thomas woke up in the cavern. His eyes were still wet. He did not ask the mermaid if it was from the ocean or because of what he had just seen.

The mermaid was seated on a rock, watching him. She was youthful, a cerulean glow radiating from her face from the water. There was nothing horrendous about her. Even the scales on her tail twinkled like starlight.

“Do you understand now?” The mermaid asked, sounding like someone Thomas had known long ago.

“Understand what?” Thomas moved toward her, transfixed. And yes, though her appearance was ethereal, that is not what drove him. Something had hooked him, reeled dear Thomas to a buried time, one before the horrid screams of his father, before the grey blood of the fawn, before his mother’s song.

He did not have to ask the mermaid's name. He already knew it. It was stuck, lodged deep within the crevice of his heart.

“Elise,” his voice trembled.

“Yes,” the mermaid took his hands, tulips rising from the cavern floor.

“Elise!” Thomas cried out again.

“Yes,” the mermaid kissed his forehead.

Water flooded the cavern.

“Tommy, wait!” A little girl named Elise followed Thomas into the woods. He had just turned six.

The little boy slowed to a stop and fell to his knees to catch his breath.

“It’s quiet here,” he said.

“Yes,” the girl sat next to him. “Did you do anything for your birthday?”

Thomas shook his head, “Dad had a rough night, so my mom put a candle in a cupcake. We sang Happy Birthday in my room. She told me to whisper.”

“Well, that’s something! What did you wish for?” Elise’s eyes were green with bright yellow specks, holding hope for the world.

Thomas swallowed, feeling something he had never felt before, “I wished you would get better.”

“My mom said she thinks I will. She prays every day.”

Elise rummaged through her backpack, “I have a present for you.”

“For me?”

“Mhmm,” she took out an orange tulip. “I hope you like it. I saw you smelling the tulips in my mom’s garden.”

Thomas cried. Elise patted him on the back, “Happy Birthday Thomas. Thanks for being my friend.”

He wiped his tears away and smiled at his friend. They sat there, staring at the sunlight through the trees. A doe and her fawn greeted them from across the clearing.

“Did you know,” Elise brought her voice down to a whisper. “If you touch a fawn, will it make anything you want come true? Then, with that and your birthday wish and my mom praying all the time, I’ll get all better.”

“Tommy?” The bartender said. “Tommy.”

Thomas glanced up from his drink with glazed, sullen eyes.

“You look like you’ve seen—.”

“A mermaid in my drink,” he cut the bartender off with a chuckle, loosening his tie.

He threw his head back in genuine laughter, “That’s not what I was going to say, but I think I’ll use that next time.”

Thomas cleared his throat, “Yeah, um, no, I just remembered something. A friend who was kind to me.”

“You’re a bit of a mess there,” The bartender laughed again, and Thomas averted his eyes to take another drink.

“Sorry,” he gulped down his guilt. “I didn’t mean to laugh. It’s just that I don’t really see you being such a romantic.”

“It’s fine. It’ll stay in this drink.”

The bartender tilted his head, and for a second, he found it difficult to breathe. The air had become thin, like a cavern in the ocean.

“Tell me about it,” the bartender croaked, a wisp in his eye, but then the phone rang, and the sound of billiard balls cracked at the opposite side of the room.

“It’s nothing,” Thomas grinned, taking his last drink of alcohol for good.

That is the peculiarity of she, the mermaid, that is nothing. She was there all along, the void bridge that turned into art. She is a lifetime in moments such as these, a thousand stories within a sip of beer to drink.

END.

A note from the Author:

Thank you so much for reading my short story. I enjoy studying philosophy in some of my free time and have been working on a large and complex project of trying to find and explain the universal concepts of masculine and feminine as I have a particular theory about them. This short story, "The Mermaid," is actually a sequel to a story I wrote called "Under the Cement," which I hope to one day be published in a short story and poetry collection. This story serves as an interpretation of the feminine, which is an alternative way to meet the metaphysical. I believe that through art and stories, we catch a glimpse of what is beyond our understanding. Again, thank you for taking the time to read this. It means the world to me.

Some of my work, including "The Ballerina" has been published by Stygian Society. You can check out their other content here:

https://www.stygiansociety.com