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Drown
Author: Esther Dalseno

Prologue

 

It was destined to fail because it was an artificial species. It was nothing but a whisper in the dark, a smear upon the perfect page of humankind, some skeletal thing that has long since corroded in the closet. Little pieces of it swept away with the breeze every time the door opened. Of course you know the story, didn’t we all? We all read about it as children, and didn’t all the little girls flock to the movie houses when a bigtime studio produced a version of it, a happy, sappy, songs-and-talking-animals sort of ordeal? We sucked the marrow out of it, and the bones just drifted away with the tide.

It came about, of course, because of the wrath of a woman.

The rumour was to blame. A commonplace, folklore rumour typical to a fishing village settled on the coast of one of the world’s most unpredictable seas. That rumour still exists and hardly in this town alone. It is written on the face of every person you have ever met, in the subtext of every book you’ve ever read. It is the hope of every unhappy person. Right now, it is on the tip of your tongue.

There was once a woman whose heart broke in two. She had been carrying a basket of tomatoes, ordinary tomatoes so swollen and red it almost seemed like they too were beating. She was carrying the basket to her husband, who loved these tomatoes, who also loved her. Her own husband, who was ill in bed and required soup. They lived in the lighthouse, and this lighthouse thought it had seen everything. It was so old and venerable, so esteemed by the wind that howled at its throat, so adored by the waves that crashed at its feet. It thought that nothing had the power to surprise anymore, but how foolish we are in our pride!

The woman ran down the pier, and the gales screamed their warning. As she flung open the door, birds of the air swooped down on her in foreboding. The ocean roared as she alighted the stairs. Every raindrop wept for her. Even the molecules in the atmosphere slowed time for her, giving her micro-chances to turn back. But as she pushed open the bedchamber door, lightning illuminated the room in sorry resignation.

And then the woman with a heart like a swollen red tomato beheld the sticky cobweb of limbs entwined upon her own bed. She dropped the basket. She ran away as fast as she could, because both sides of her ribcage were ramming together now in battle, and she could feel her very bones crack and cry out from the pain. And in the black blur that always proceeds the moment when a heart splinters in two, she remembered that she had once heard a rumour, and it could save her from this condition.

If she were a rational woman, she might have reconsidered. She could have wept and banged her fists against the rocks and wailed and rocked like a baby, without her mother’s arms. She could have returned to the lighthouse, and in the presence of her husband, made demands and delivered ultimatums. Resolved, she could have slept by his side that night, shivering as he snored beside her, a careless arm flung over her body. Every night thence she could have replayed his excuses, his explanations, until they grew so frayed at the seams that she would have to sew them up with her own rationalities. She could have cooked his every meal. She could have raised his children to respect him, ignoring the black bile that seeped from her heart, the heart so dark now, like a shadowy dog. And when he died, she could have looked down on his withered body and laughed at the bittersweet taste of a life gone to waste. However, she was not a rational woman, and she did not reconsider.

Instead, she got in a boat. The battle of the wind and seas hardly perturbed her as she pulled the oars in a fury. The lighthouse watched as she rowed for miles out to sea, so far out that she escaped the realm of its light. For two days she rowed, not feeling her thirst, barely registering her fatigue, because the splinters of her heart dug into her will and forced her on. Then, on the final night, her sorry limbs bathed in the milk of the moon, she slipped over the edge of the boat and began to sink.

She sank. She fell below, down past the depths, past all water, down to where the ocean ends and earth begins again - the barren place. She did not drown. She fell to the core of the earth, where there is no place further to fall into, a place where time no longer exists. And it was there she met the beings, and she realised the rumours were true.

They approached her there in the darkness, one by one in single file, yet they were an enormous united body. They asked her questions in their voices, in their single unanimous voice, in a language she began to understand.

“We are the past and the future,” they declared. “We are bid to receive the ones that seek us, and grant their heart’s desire. But beware your heart’s desire, for those that seek us hide broken hearts, and broken hearts are divided. They will lie to you, they will deceive you.”

The woman looked at her heart in all of its fragments. Its voice was clear and true as it reminded her of the injustices done to it. Nothing so forlorn and broken could lie to her – could it? However, the woman was not a rational woman, and did not heed the beings’ warning. “Strip my humanity away, that I may never again walk in the race of men,” was her one wish.

The beings withdrew from her and she was left in the darkness. It is impossible to tell you how long. But from time to time, she could hear their sole, unanimous whisper and knew they were undecided. Finally, after what seemed like a split-second eternity, they returned. “We are not God that we can fulfil this request,” they said, and waited.

The woman was confused, for the rumour had misled her with its reports of unlimited power. She wondered who bid them, and why they spoke of God. She wondered if they were servants of the Devil. But her heart told her that none of them existed at all.

“We are merely spirits of water and air,” the beings explained.

“Then I wish to die,” resolved the woman, angry now that she had not done so in their pursuit in the first place.

“If you were destined to die, then indeed you would have drowned. Yet here you are, and the life inside you must be born.”

She was not surprised, for she did suspect – after all, a woman is a woman, and if a woman knows anything, it is her own body. “I wish you to take it away. I wish to never see its face, and the face of my love looking back at me.”

The beings were not surprised, nor did they blink their eye. They gazed upon her solemnly and declared, “We will not do what you ask. Our power lies not in life and death, and our jurisdiction is transformation. But we are wise and we have a solution, we are crafty and we will make you a bargain concerning the child.”

And so the woman began to listen, and to accept, and to finally feel a cold jubilance at the promise of their words. She was granted, in part, her wish – for human blood runs too far and too deep to be erased in its entirety. She began a new life, deep below the surface of the earth, in a part-human form, and thus began the race of merfolk.

Years passed, of which she dwelt in the depths furthest away from the light of the sun. Slowly, she began to create this race out of what remained within her, and the people were cold blooded, long-lived, and possessing each a heart that did not beat.

I should tell you that the lighthouse, when it heard the sad tale of this woman, was so surprised it began to weep. Tears of brick and stone it shed, all falling in great, deadly slabs. It was such a colossal structure that when it was finally reduced to rubble and dust, it realised it had swallowed the entire village, and not one life remained.

 

 

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