Mermaid_ A Twist on the Classic Tale - Carolyn Turgeon [22]
Lenia hovered over the ship, peering down at it, brushing up against the tallest mast, and then swam to the main deck. Men were piled on top of each other, as if they’d been running to the side of the ship when it went down.
She tried to take in the death and devastation around her. The men who’d dropped through the water, who’d come to rest wrapped around the masts and ropes. She’d seen this kind of wreckage plenty of times before, but it felt different now. A young man’s body was wedged sidelong in an open doorway. He’d been climbing up a ladder from below when he died. His hair was long and blond, swaying in the water around him, and his eyes were open, staring up toward the surface of the water. Had she seen him screaming during the storm, struggling for life? At what point had his soul left his body?
She moved in closer to him. I’m sorry, she whispered. His body was clothed in green and gold, a dark green jacket with a line of brass buttons down the front. He must have been important. She ran her fingers along the brass, felt the crude design stamped into it. Some kind of creature she did not recognize. Did the man she’d saved dress himself this way, too? She reached up and touched the dead soldier’s hair. It was not just blond. It was brown and yellow and cream, all at once, and she could see he’d lived and worked outside, the sun beating down on him.
Did you know him? Who is he? What is he like?
She almost waited for him to respond, but the world stayed silent, and the only movement was from above, as a stream of translucent jellyfish wended their way down.
She moved her face right next to his, slipped her hand around to the back of his neck, the skin there.
This body. So full of secrets, of the world above, of men.
Who are you? she breathed. What were you like?
Was there any of him left, in this decaying flesh?
Beneath the bloated skin, she could see how beautiful this young man had been in life. She stared at his lips, traced them with her fingertips, and then again her mind went back to the other man, how his lips had felt against her own. That bliss that had moved through her. She shivered, remembering. And, without thinking, she pressed her lips against the dead young man’s.
A mass of tiny fish fluttered by, brushing her face.
As she pulled away, she imagined what her mother and sisters would think, seeing her like this. Though they had once caught Vela, as a tiny mermaid, holding a human skeleton in her arms and pretending to dance with it. But Vela had been innocent then, a child, not a marriage-aged mermaid, as Lenia was now.
She swam to one of the other openings to the galleys below and pressed her body down through it. She’d been in plenty of similar spaces, of course, but this was where he had lived, and the hammocks, the chests of clothes, the wooden beams and tiny windows—as enchanting as she’d always found such human objects—all took on a special significance to her now.
A jug of amber liquid lay tipped over on the floor, and she went to it, uncorked it and lifted it to her mouth. Her first sip was straight seawater. She drank until the spirit hit her, burning down her throat, and she spat it out. Awful. She grabbed a fish swirling by and stuffed it into her mouth, bit down on its sweet flesh, its crunching bones, but the taste still lingered in her mouth. It took a few more fish, plus some sea flowers that were already growing through the galley floor, to get rid of the taste.
She shook her head and swam along the line of hammocks to the other end of the room. Some of the ship’s structure had broken off completely here. A few bodies had been caught, and one had been lanced by a broken beam, a giant wound blossoming from where the beam pierced flesh, alive with sea creatures feeding from it.
She swam to one of the hammocks that was intact and moved into it, let