Lost in an ocean of mermaid’s tears, I gulped my final breath. Solitude took me, and I fell through eternity.

I drifted down like a leaf in a storm never sure of when or if I’d land. I lost all definitions of up and down as obsidian stole the blue and my dreams of a life on the seas faded like a morning mist.

They came for me like a swarm of mosquitoes. It was all true. The Mer were real. Did it justify my sabotaging the ship, the death of five hundred men? Frankly, I couldn’t have cared less.

Author’s Note: Men have obsessed over Mermaids for centuries. This piece asks the question would they value an answer over the lives of their own kind.

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When they rose, I ran. I hurtled through the graveyard skipping over the tombstones like a stone across a pond. Into the streets I raced; they were there. They were everywhere.

There are times when you might fade, capitulate, and that might have been mine. It wasn’t. I was stronger than that.

I turned tale and sped back whence I’d came. Leaping the open coffins, shimmying in silence, I shot back to the one place I always felt safe, and they could do nothing.

“Why won’t you let me be,” I whispered, as my coffin lid slammed shut. “Not ever.”

Author’s Note: I thought it might be scary to not only run from the dead when alive, but when you were dead, too.

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And they flew. I thought they almost touched the moon, cupped eternity with those misshapen digits. To be free, how I envied them their freedom if not their appearance.

Momma said they were once like us, human, but not now. They chittered and chattered like the creaking ice on my window pane, an incessant smothering. Did they mock, or mourn?

I kissed momma goodbye. She slept, but it seemed right. The meadow was cold, freezing even, but open. They came, and they took me, swooped me off into the midnight sky. I chittered then, too. Who wouldn’t? It was cold.

Author’s Note: Like everyone, I wish I could fly, but would we if the choice meant losing our humanity? Flying aliens made this dilemma possible to answer.

Categories: Fiction, Richard Mark Ankers | 4 Comments »