Foam on the waves
Issue one: short story by Molly Olguín
“But think again,” said the witch; “for when once your shape has become like a human being, you can no more be a mermaid. You will never return through the water to your sisters, or to your father’s palace again; and if you do not win the love of the prince, so that he is willing to forget his father and mother for your sake, and to love you with his whole soul, and allow the priest to join your hands that you may be man and wife, then you will never have an immortal soul. The first morning after he marries another your heart will break, and you will become foam on the crest of the waves.” (from ‘The Little Mermaid’ by Hans Christian Andersen)1
Long ago, in the ancient days before California was a state and the pueblo had hardly been built, a girl called Aurelia lived in a house by the sea. It was a very beautiful house, roofed in tiles red as blood, in the old colonial style. Wrought iron flowers decorated the bars on all the windows, and the inner courtyard boasted avocado trees and passionfruit blossoms. Her mother wove blankets of unsurpassed finery, and so there was a room devoted entirely to her loom, the knobs and handles crafted with brass. Her father sold furs to the Americans at the outpost, and there was a room in the house heaped full of seal hides and the softer fur of native rabbits, as well as the skins of seals and sea lions, which Aurelia loved to stroke and pet. Her grown brother Hernán oversaw the ranch, and so the great house also boasted a stable, stocked with strong and well-fed beasts. The house held every luxury a man could desire in that country or any other.
Only Aurelia cared nothing for the grand house, and very little for the family who doted on her. All her love was reserved for the scene she glimpsed between the lovely bars in her room: the wide blue ocean, the sliver of golden beach before it. As a child she was allowed to run half-wild over the park and beach, the strict observations of civil society having been loosened after the family left the heart of the viceroyalty. She was the only member of the family to be born in California, and had been left without the tempering influence of other girls her age. That early wildness had taken root in Aurelia, so that even at fifteen she longed for nothing more than to play in the waves like a child. Each day she begged her maid to take her down to the water, and each day her maid relented against her better judgment, standing on the beach and watching as the girl stripped down to her shift and waded into the surf. Her brother worried about her soaked linen and her nearly grown body, and so he would often leave his duties on the ranch to keep watch over her play, standing guard against any man who might take advantage of Aurelia’s indulgence.
She swam far out, and sometimes he worried over this, too. Like any californio Hernán could swim as far as his strength would allow, but he feared that Aurelia lacked respect for her own frailty. “You must take care not to dive too deep,” he warned, as the maid squeezed water out of the girl’s hair and draped a woven blanket around her shoulders, “or perhaps a siren might come and drag you down to the depths, where the sea king lives.”
“Are they all monsters?” Aurelia asked him, dark eyes wide in her face.
“Oh no,” he assured her. “They are people like we are, or so the stories say. But in their desire they forget that while they can breathe water, we must breathe only air. Many sailors have been drowned accidentally by fish-girls who wished only to take them home.”
“I wish I was a fish-girl,” his sister said with a wistful look at the horizon.
“Then you are foolish,” he said.
The maid was helping Aurelia into her dress now, and he was obliged to stare at the dark splashes that fell from his sister’s limbs onto the sand.
His voice adopted a teasing tone. “Would you give up your happy home, your soft bed and linen dresses, your family, the light of the sun and moon?”
“For my heart’s desire I would,” Aurelia said seriously, and he laughed at her.
Soon after this, their uncle, the honorable Señor Jose Rudecinda Sepulveda de Cordoba, sent word that he expected them to pay a visit to his own grand home up the coast. He wished to see his niece and nephew. In particular, he wished Hernán to meet his cousins, each of them lovelier than the last––although they could perhaps be wealthier. It was not a simple journey, but they were as yet well in funds, and Señor Jose had a title direct from the king of Spain, and so they went. The journey was undertaken by ship, and would take only a week to accomplish, if all was well.
Three days into their journey, Aurelia woke in the middle of the night, her cabin rocking wildly around her. Her maid held a lantern in one shaking hand, and informed her that a storm had blown in on a black cloud. They were sailing towards home as fast as could be managed.
Aurelia unlatched her cabin door and stepped out onto the deck, avoiding the sailors who were running furiously about. Freezing rain whipped around the deck, and waves like roiling mountains threatened to swallow them up. A hand descended onto her shoulder; Hernán stood behind her in his nightshirt, shouting words she could not hear against the wind.
She ducked out from under his hand—if the deck was safe for the crew, and for her brother, why not for her?—but at that moment the ship was rocked by an enormous swell. She lost her footing on the slick planks, buffeted by the wind so she hit the ship’s wooden railing with bruising force. When she could move, she clambered onto her knees and looked about for her brother, but he was not behind her. He was not anywhere on deck.
Cold with fear as much as rain, she looked over the side: and there was a hand, white against the black water, and her brother’s gasping face visible for just a moment before he was swallowed up again.
She cried out to the sailors but none of them heard her, as the second mast had just split, shooting fragments of wood across the deck. All she could do was watch the spot where Hernán had disappeared. But there he was again! She could just see his face, pale and slack, as though he had been knocked unconscious. Or perhaps it wasn’t him? For she could also see the confusing glimmer of an enormous fish’s tail, a second face, and a pair of smooth arms clasping her brother tight.
“Real enough,” Aurelia whispered, words lost to the storm. There could be no question. She could see them clearly now: a girl as beautiful as the dawn, a strong tail beating behind her, keeping Hernán above the waves. She was looking at him with a queer expression that Aurelia understood perfectly, because her own heart was drumming against her ribs with a sudden sick longing. She wanted to touch the girl—wanted to be the girl—wanted, fiercely and entirely, to enter the world where the girl lived. For a wild second she thought about leaping off the side of the ship herself—joining her brother and the siren in the water—but it was, of course, at this very moment that a sailor caught sight of the drenched girl at the railing. She was caught up in immovable arms and taken below.
The ship lasted through the night, sailing broken but whole back into calm water. Every soul aboard mourned for the lost boy, except his sister. “He is safe,” Aurelia said, but would not say how she knew. She was the only person aboard unsurprised when he was found floating on a piece of broken mast the next morning, entirely unharmed.
Still, she clung to Hernán when he was rescued. “Tell me everything,” she begged. “Please, tell me everything about her.” But Hernán did not remember anything about a girl with a fish’s tail, or whatever secrets she might have whispered to him beneath the waves. He insisted it had been God and the tide that brought him back alive. He had no way to understand the brief look of anguish on his sister’s face. “You are wrong,” Aurelia said, and this was all she would say.
The ship sailed them back to their own familiar harbor until repairs could be attempted, the trip postponed. In the meantime Aurelia grew quite sick with her own knowledge. She closed her eyes and there was the moonlight slipping across dark scales; she dreamed and there were cool arms dragging her down to unknown wonders. She begged her mother for stories of the sea-king, and her mother relayed them gladly at first but later with worry as Aurelia’s questions did not cease. If the sea-king had a palace made of coral, would it be near to the beach or further out to sea? If the mermaids drowned sailors only by mistake, did that mean they were truly kind-hearted girls, who might welcome a traveler? If the sea-king sometimes sank ships, was he as terrible as the Spanish king, who sometimes ordered ships gunned down? Green shadows appeared under Aurelia’s eyes, and she refused to eat, her gaze turned always westward to the sea.
Eventually a doctor was called for, and he declared her melancholic. He bled her at her tender elbows and drew her a bath fed with ice shavings in an attempt to restore balance to her humors. But Aurelia sank into the frigid water, her bandaged arms hanging over the sides. The waves of dizziness felt like nothing so much as being caught in a strong current. She shuddered and sighed, cold ripples washing over her limbs, and the doctor was sent away. A black-cassocked priest came in his stead. He covered her with smoke and prayers, shaking his beads and crucifix while she coughed and choked on the incense. Her brother found her at a west-facing window one night on naked feet, ashy crosses daubed on her brow and wrists, her pretty hands reaching through the bars and towards the horizon.
“Something more must be done,” he said heavily.
“You could always let me go,” Aurelia said, with another longing sigh.
There was another story both brother and sister knew by heart. It was less lovely and more frightening than the sea-king and his palace full of glimmering girls, but this was because it was true. A woman lived alone in a canyon near the river Porciuncula, in a house made of palm fronds and whale ribs. Their father called her a crafty lunatic, who tricked the ignorant into trading items of true value for simple herbs and foul poultices that reeked of shit and salt. Their mother called her a kind of native curandera, a healer who knew gentle remedies and cures forgotten by male medicine. The Gabrelinos called her a witch and a foreigner, for her skin was said to be white as bone, and they feared her. A witch will either eat you alive, or grant you your heart’s desire.
“Will you come with me to see the witch?” Hernán asked his sister.
“Of course I will,” his sister said. Privately she thought: I will have my heart’s desire.
After midnight the following evening, Hernán came to Aurelia’s door, dressed in a long black coat. She followed him quietly through the sleeping house, into the quiet stable, and mounted the pony he offered her. They rode together out past the quiet town and onto the road that led to the witch’s canyon. It was a long time, or so it seemed to Aurelia, before they came to it: scrub and palm plunging suddenly into the earth, a wild forest waiting below. The path was too curving for the ponies; they left them picketed to a thin palm and continued on foot.
From above, the forest was what she would expect from any canyon: tangled pepper trees and spiked palm fronds, elderberries and the ever-present underbrush of calabazillas and coyote gourd, all happily choking the uneven ground. From within the forest, the moonlight should have shone through the gaps in the canopy as brightly as it did on the open road but, as they traveled down the path, it became steadily darker. The trees were not right, Aurelia realized: they were too tall, too thick, too uniform in shape. Pine trees, their thick-furred branches blocking out the sky entirely. She kept hold of her brother’s shirt to keep from falling.
She knew the hut at once when they came upon it, situated in a little clearing on the canyon floor, the moonlight shining on it in one bright beam. It was indeed built of bone, hundreds of whale ribs bound together so tightly that they formed curving walls. Pulsing firelight spilled out through the cracks. The door was made of smaller animal bones, woven together into a rattling curtain. Hernán drew in a sharp breath, and she saw that a withered hand had parted the curtain.
“The girl may come in,” an old woman said in a hoarse voice, “but the boy must wait outside.”
Hernán began to protest, but Aurelia put a hand on his arm. “Can you cure me?” she asked. The old woman laughed. “Oh yes,” she said, and Hernán subsided. Aurelia left her brother standing unhappily at the edge of the clearing, and swept aside the door, passing into the witch’s hut.
The witch was a small woman, hunched and bony, but her single braid was long and white, and her yellow eyes possessed a canny knowledge. Her skin was as foreigner-white as the Gabrelinos had said, and she wore a black rag draped over her head like a widow. She stood before a squat clay cauldron, a fire already lit beneath it, with a thin spider crouched on her shoulder.
“I know what you want,” said the witch. “It is very stupid of you, but you shall have your way, though it will bring you to sorrow.” She smiled at Aurelia, revealing very sharp teeth, as yellow as her eyes.
“It is what I want,” replied the girl.
“I can give you a mermaid’s tail,” the witch said, stroking one of the spider’s long legs, “and a mermaid’s breath, but I will not do it without payment.”
“My father is a wealthy man,” Aurelia began. “He has much trade in furs, in leather goods, in beautifully woven cloth.”
“I have no need of furs,” the witch said. “Or cloth, or leather.” She looked Aurelia up and down dismissively, and said: “I will have your voice.” Aurelia put a hand to her throat, but the witch went on. “I will have your tongue,” she continued, “and all the words it would have spoken. You will go to the sea wordless and silent, but you will go. Does the price suit you?”
Aurelia trembled at the thought of losing her tongue, but thought again of the beautiful face of the mermaid, her white shoulders, the pearls in her hair, the alien world that must be so much stranger and wider than her own. A hot burst of longing filled her chest. “Yes,” she said, feeling the awful truth of it. “I would give anything.”
“I have already named my payment,” said the witch, and spat something dark and foul into the pot. Smoke immediately began to rise. She plucked the spider from her shoulder and tossed it inside. She picked up a small wicked knife and pricked her own hand, letting the blood drip into the potion. The smoke began to writhe after that, twisting into such horrible shapes that no one could look at them without fear.
“Now I must have your tongue,” the witch told Aurelia, holding up the knife. “Close your eyes, if you like.”
Aurelia closed her eyes and felt the witch’s fingers on her jaw, forcing her mouth open. She felt the strange sensation of the knife clicking on her teeth, and then there was a hot pain and a sharp yank. She opened her eyes, blood bubbling in her mouth, and saw the witch toss something small and pink into the cauldron.
All at once the smoke vanished, and the witch tipped the draught into a little clay jar, fastening the lid with a red rag. Then she took up a poker from the fireplace and told Aurelia to open her mouth again.
“Drink it at the seaside,” the witch told Aurelia after cauterizing the wound and handing her the jar. “And be cured.”
Aurelia could not reply, but she took the potion and nodded her thanks.
Hernán had fallen asleep by the time Aurelia left the witch’s hut. She shook him briskly awake, and thanked God that the moon had set and he could not clearly see the state she was in. Although he asked her again and again to tell him what happened, she did not reply, and he fell into a sullen quiet. They rode home in silence. When they arrived, she left him to stable their ponies, and let him see her walk towards the house. But at the last moment she turned and ran towards the shore.
When she reached the beach, the first pink haze of dawn had appeared over the water. She peeled off her coat and then her gown, ripping the buttons in her haste, and left them in a sad bloodstained pile with her shoes. She stepped into the cold surf, the waves just coming up to her knees. In the distance she heard shouts; Hernán must have raised the household. She tore off the lid of the clay jar and put it to her empty mouth.
As soon as the potion passed her lips, her legs sprang together and became a scaled fish’s tail, no longer capable of supporting her weight. She fell gracelessly into the water and was taken up immediately by the tide, rolling her this way and that like an overzealous lover. When the current released her she found herself in six feet of water, the slope of the beach bending further down. She was delighted to find that not only could she breathe freely, she could see with perfect clarity, even into the deep.
Diving down was the most natural thing in the world. Her tail pumped powerfully behind her, and her hair streamed loose and free about her shoulders. I am almost there, she thought eagerly, imagining what delights the palace of the sea king would offer, what her mermaid would say when they met. If she remembered Aurelia and the storm at all.
But the sea was vast, and Aurelia did not know the way. She soon got lost, and could not tell for sure in which way the palace might lie; the water was a pure and endless blue wherever she looked. Her mother had told her that witch-lights lit the palace from below, so she should have no difficulty finding it. Or perhaps a friendly porpoise might come to her aid, for her mother had also said that the merfolk rode them like horses; but it was only just dawn, and she was nowhere near the surface. The only animals she saw, apart from mindless schools of fish, were sharp-mouthed eels and an inky, grasping octopus.
Eventually she reached the ocean floor, which cheered her until she realized that she still had no idea what direction the palace might be, or what shelter might look like. She had been up all night, and was very tired, but the deep was full of liquid shadows, and she did not dare risk resting in the open. Her tail fin beat idly at the sand while she thought, which was a mistake. Any fisherman’s child could have told her as much. But Aurelia knew nothing, and had soon stirred up a small cloud of dust. She did not see the sand shark until it had slipped almost motionlessly through the cloud, until its long rows of needle-like teeth were nearly upon her.
This could have been the end of Aurelia—so soon after purchasing her heart’s desire! But she did see the angular head in time, the wide mouth opening up. She struck out in a panic with as much strength as she could muster. Her blow caught the shark beside its mouth, right on its gills. This was extremely lucky, for not only did it stun the beast for just a moment—long enough for Aurelia to slip away as fast as her new body would carry her—it also drew blood. All sharks can smell blood in the water from miles away, and dusk and dawn are when they hunt. The sand shark sped after Aurelia like a ravenous arrow, knowing, in the dumb way of beasts, that it would only be safe from its own cold sisters if it made a kill. Aurelia fled blindly before it.
Before her in the water, nearly a mile away, she spied a tall blue column. Could it be the palace? She hurried to it, brand-new muscles struggling to do her will, but as she drew closer she discovered that it was a whirlpool. There were more whirlpools beside it, like strange and deadly pillars in a courtyard. She ducked between them, hoping to confuse the shark, or trick it into the swirling water, but soon lost herself in swerving and straining against their orbits. The shark was not foolish enough to follow her, and so she passed through the foaming labyrinth alone.
When she had left the last whirlpool behind, she found herself at the edge of a strange rocky gorge, red coral growing here and there over its sharp caverns, long stalks of seaweed drifting up from deeper in the ravine. But she looked more closely and saw something white at the heart of the seaweed forest: a little house on the ocean bottom. A faint coal of hope lit in her breast; perhaps this was the outskirts of some sea-village? At the very least it was the only shelter she had yet seen.
With great care, she entered the forest, only to find that it was not quite seaweed after all, but polypi. They were the same bloodless green as the weeds that washed to shore, except these were strange and grasping—half animal, half plant. She took great care to avoid their touch, for as she passed she could see things caught in their arms: anchors, planks, foolish sharks, half-rotted tuna, the white skeletons of drowned men. She shuddered horribly when she saw a mermaid in those clutches, weedy fingers buried in her hair. But Aurelia passed through the forest safely, and came upon the house. Enormous ribs formed its walls. A bone curtain formed the door. It was the witch’s house, she thought dizzily. How had the witch’s house come to be here?
“I see you have visited my sister,” an ugly voice said. A fat hand swept open the bone curtain. The woman who came out was as unlike the witch in the canyon as it was possible to be: as large as she had been bony, as dark as she had been pale. Her hair was a tightly curled snarl that seemed to grasp like the polypi, little bones caught in it here and there. Her tail was black and smooth, like a shark’s. Only her eyes marked her as the witch’s kin: they were the same wicked yellow. “I know her work when I see it,” the sea witch said disdainfully. Twin eels twisted around her arms like a lady’s shawl, flashing their red eyes and sharp teeth.
Aurelia opened her mouth to beg for shelter, and then remembered she could not speak. The sea witch gave her an appraising look.: “If you will feed my water snakes their breakfast, I will let you rest in my house, and do you no harm. If you do not perform your task to satisfaction, I will eat you and return your bones to my sister on the waves. Do you agree?”
Aurelia could only nod.
“The water snakes eat flesh,” the witch said, and went back into the hut. The eels remained, expectant.
Aurelia went back and looked through the polypi for something freshly dead, passing the little mermaid with contained horror. Eventually she found a porpoise whose lower half was free enough from its bonds that she could touch it without fear of being snatched herself. She selected a sharp rock from the reef floor and hacked at the porpoise’s dead side until she could work her fingers into its strange pink innards and draw away the meat.
She carried it piece by piece back to the eels, and fed them one at a time. Their teeth nipped at her fingers, and their long tongues licked at the blood trails in the water. When they were sated, she swam to the door and swept aside the curtain, too exhausted to fear what might await her. The sea witch was curled around a hollowed-out skull, which served her for a cauldron; she flicked her fingers lazily at a seaweed pallet. Aurelia fell upon it and passed at once into a dreamless sleep.
Days and days passed. Each morning, Aurelia would wake to the witch offering her a choice between death and the completion of some task, and each morning she accepted the bargain with a nod. The tasks ranged from the domestic to the impossible: one day Aurelia was asked to clean the sea witch’s hut, the next to bring her the fresh skull of a humpback whale, the next to launder the witch’s clothing, the next to fetch her a shining eye on a living stalk. The eels helped her, on occasion—they were more intelligent than land-beasts. Aurelia learned many things. She learned to put small sea creatures in her mouth and suck the life out of them for sustenance, to hunt and kill the razor-sharp animals that glowed eerily in dark water, to trick whole schools of fish into following her to the grasping arms of the polypi. Her hands grew long-nailed and cunning. Seaweed tangled in her once-fine locks.
“You are doing very well,” the sea witch told her. “When you fail me, I will make such a delicious meal of you.”
Aurelia looked up from that day’s task—carefully braiding the sea witch’s wild hair.
“Every care shall be taken. I will cook you with fine spices,” the witch said kindly, “in a pocket of air trapped in a shipwreck. I will dress you in honey, season you with smoke. You will be so succulent and tender that I shall remember you always.”
Aurelia’s fingers worked delicately through the dark hair, and the witch’s eyes drifted shut.
Every day Aurelia did the witch’s bidding. Even the day she was commanded to weave a necklace from the dead mermaid’s hair. She spent hours carefully plucking the long black strands out by the roots. It occurred to her that she could not recall what the girl she had seen the night of the storm looked like. Surely it had not been this girl. She studied the frozen face: the slack mouth and rotting eyes. No, she decided. It had been a different girl.
“Come here,” the sea witch said, as a reward. “Watch how I weave this spell.”
She had the mermaid necklace wrapped cleverly around her fingers, like a child with a piece of string. “You might be able to do it yourself, in a few days—if I do not eat you.”
In a few days time, Aurelia came upon a ship freshly sunk, and on the surface a little distance away she found a boy clinging to a piece of wreckage. He had saved his own life by roping himself to a floating spar, but the exposure was killing him. He barely stirred when she bent over him, his eyes fever-bright. He had long yellow hair, bright as gold in the sun. She thought of the trapped mermaid in the polypi, the witch telling her to watch, and reached out to stroke the yellow spill of it. The boy moaned in fear.
He will die no matter what I do, Aurelia told herself, and used a shark’s tooth knife to cut every yellow strand away. She brought her prize back to the ravine in a thin, careful braid. She wound it through her fingers until the yellow braid looked like a net, sunny and soft and ready to catch something. She felt something invisible spark between her palms.
“You do very well indeed,” the sea witch murmured.
Back in the beautiful house by the shore, Aurelia’s parents wore mourning clothes. They had buried the clothes she left behind in the little cemetery attached to the mission, and bribed the priest into saying the right words over them. They were deeply grieved, but found themselves comforted in their sorrow. The day of Aurelia’s funeral, a strange girl washed up on the beach. She was younger than Aurelia, and her hair was a blonde that had been dyed green by saltwater. She spoke not a word of Spanish, but was able to communicate with delicate smiles and graceful gestures. The family welcomed her thoughtlessly, as though the Lord had sent them a new daughter to replace the old. They called her Blanca, for her pale hair and for her past—blank as a white page.
Hernán was not comforted by Blanca, although she smiled at him in particular, and did all she could to put herself in his way. He was preoccupied with thoughts of a rescue—for he alone was convinced that Aurelia was alive. Like his parents, he had seen the girl taken by the waves but, while they had only seen their daughter swallowed up by the tide, he had glimpsed his sister’s transformation. Blanca, lovely as she was, could only distract him from his sister.
Hernán decided to return to the witch’s canyon. He had been reluctant to do so, although in his heart he knew it for the truest course. He quailed at the thought of returning to that foreign black wood, the white-boned house. It took him weeks, but eventually he worked up the nerve to mount again on his shaggy pony, to ride for the canyon under the light of a crescent moon.
The witch was waiting for him in the clearing, bone curtain held open. “I’ve been expecting you for days now,” she said in her creaking voice, and he flushed with shame.
“Where is my sister?” he demanded. “What magic did you work on her?”
The witch looked at him with disgust, then went into the hut. He followed her, watching her hunt through her fetid treasures until she pulled out a wooden box with an iron lock. “Is that really all you would ask of me?” she said in her creaking voice.
The right words bubbled up in his mouth as though they had been waiting there all along. “How do I bring her back?”
The witch gave him a slow toothy smile and opened the box. Inside lay a knife made of onyx. He recoiled, but she lifted it up to show him the ragged edge. “Give this to your sister,” she said. “If she plunges it into the heart of the sea witch, she will be restored to her rightful form and regain her immortal soul.”
“She has lost her soul?” Hernán asked in horror.
The witch looked at him with a smile one could almost call fond. “Monsters belong to themselves,” she told him. “Not to God.”
“I will take the knife,” he said, white with distress. “Even if my heart is what you ask in recompense.”
The witch roared with laughter. “My price is less costly,” she said when she had recovered her breath. “Do not marry the girl you found on the beach. No matter what comes, or what fate befalls you.”
“I shall not,” Hernán said, startled. It had never occurred to him to marry Blanca. He might kiss her willing, silent lips, to be sure—he might even enter her silent room and draw back her borrowed sheets—but he was the son of a wealthy man. Marriage was not a desire, but a duty he owed to his father, to his name, to his beautiful house.
“Then I name myself content,” the witch said, with another yellow grin.
The following night, Hernán borrowed a canoe from one of his workers and paddled out as far as he could safely venture. He withdrew the onyx blade from his coat and carefully sliced his palm open, tipping the blood into the water. He waited, trying not to start at every little splash.
In time, Aurelia breached the surface, summoned from fathoms below by her brother’s blood. He had to clutch at the side of the canoe to keep from screaming at the sight of her. His sister’s eyes were pale gold, and lay flat in their altered sockets, like a fish’s eyes. She did not blink when she looked at him. Her hair was tangled and brackish, little living creatures caught in it. Her teeth were stained dark with blood.
“Aurelia,” he said eventually, his skin crawling and his voice thick with disgust, “I have found a way to save you.”
She only looked at him, her mouth as empty and gaping as any fish’s mouth. He fumbled to show her the knife and explain the witch’s instructions—he very nearly dropped the knife into the sea in his effort to hand it to her without touching her cold skin—but she took it in the end.
“You have to do this,” he told her with a shudder, “or when you die, you will not even go to hell, but become nothing. Foam on the waves. Tell me you understand.”
Unblinking, Aurelia gave a single slow nod.
“Good,” he said, but could not keep himself from flinching when she reached out with one slick hand, as if to touch him. “I will be waiting,” he finished, unable to meet her eyes. “We will all be waiting for you.”
Aurelia returned to the sea witch’s garden, onyx blade lightly clasped in one hand. The sea witch recognized her own death approaching, as all witches do. “Ah,” she said, gently. “You will leave me after all.”
Aurelia swam closer, tail curving in a gentle arc around the sea witch. “Do you require further instruction?” the sea witch asked. “Cut out my heart and eat of it. When you have swallowed the last morsel, your tongue will sprout again in your mouth and your tail will split apart. It will feel as if a sword is slicing you in two, but you will be free to return to the lands above the sea. Your soul will be returned to you, and I shall be foam on the waves.”
Aurelia smiled at the witch. If she had still been human she might have wept. She offered the witch the knife, hilt-first.
The sea witch had not often been surprised over the years of her long life. She accepted the knife that would someday be her death, and said slowly to Aurelia: “You offer me my heart’s desire. What price will you take?”
Aurelia stroked her own throat in reply.
“Your tongue belongs to my sister,” the witch was forced to admit. “I cannot return what is hers by right. However—” she reached for a little leather bag dangling from one of the many necklaces she wore, and ripped it off “—perhaps this will serve.” Aurelia pulled the string, and opened it. Inside was a severed tendril of flesh; it took Aurelia a moment to recognize it as a mutilated tongue.
“It was given to me in fair trade,” the sea witch said, “and its owner will not soon return. Will you take it?”
Aurelia put the dead thing into her mouth.
“Here,” the witch said, and used a claw to carve a dark line into the skin of her own breast. Aurelia bent forward and sucked the black blood in around the alien tongue choking her; it coursed down her throat; it hardened, took root. The witch hummed, deadly fingers clutching Aurelia by the shoulders. When Aurelia swallowed, the muscle was hers. She curled it around her teeth and laughed with delight, her first true sound in months. She licked blood from the witch’s breast, and laughed again.
“Thank you,” Aurelia said. “But I will not leave you, or this place,” she told the witch in her newborn voice, honest as children always are. “How could I abandon my heart’s desire?”
Miles above and miles away, Hernán abandoned the empty shore, returning to his father’s house. He told himself he felt only loss, and not relief. He changed into his nightshirt, doused his candle, and did not look out his barred window to the sea. Late in the night, padding on silent feet through the dark, the girl Blanca came to him.
He took her hands and pulled her to his bed. Her green hair shone strangely in the half-light from the window. “I cannot marry you,” he told the girl who was not his sister. She was not his blood or his charge; she was not his to protect. But still he told her gently of his duty as a son, of a promise he had made on his sister’s behalf. She only kissed him, and he did not know if she understood. Her hands stroked at his jaw, easing his mouth open. He brushed her smooth teeth, and then she parted them, and he closed his eyes. She took his tongue in her empty mouth, and swallowed everything in him down, grief and guilt and anger, until Hernán was wordless and hollow.
In a year Hernán would be married to a stranger, and Blanca would slip quietly away. A grand celebration would precede the wedding, the house by the shore bedecked with flowers and white crepe. His bride would run laughing to the surf, and Hernán would not notice the sun in her hair, her lace lifted by the breeze. Instead, his eye would catch on the foam at her feet. The waves rolling out to sea, pale latticework drifting with the tide, as steady as longing.
Molly Olguín is a queer writer and educator based in Seattle. Her collection The Sea Gives Up The Dead was chosen by Carmen Maria Machado for the 2023 Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, and is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2025. She has stories in magazines like Quarterly West and The Normal School. With Jackie Hedeman, she is the creator of the audio drama The Pasithea Powder. She loves small cats, crows, and monsters of all kinds.
Andersen, HC 1993, The little mermaid, trans. Mary Howitt, ed. Michael Hague, ill. Charles Santore, new York, Jellybean Press.