#ginfic

They brought it back from the beach, the mermaid, a tan body with patches of sand on its legs and side from the island’s high tide line where they’d found it, just brown hair and lines of salt on its shoulders from drying seawater. Its lips cracked dry.

“We kill it or we let it make us rich men,” the captain said to the crew of thirty gathered on the deck. The mermaid lay in a heap by the mizzen, men with drawn sabers gathered about it. “I’ve been ready for this chance ten years.”

The crew cast their lots, and Jeno voted to keep it alive, if only because he’d be the one to wash the blood from the deck if the verdict was death. They tied by number, and so the captain had the final say.

They put it out of the way next to Jeno while they brought the captain’s glass box from below and filled it with buckets drawn up from the aquamarine waves. Jeno gazed at the thing’s tan skin on a deck the same color, brown hair on skin the same color. Braided seaweed clung tightly to its upper arms.

Jeno sat in the shade of the sail to repair the old mainsheet, rough rope catching between his fingers where the skin was softer. He’d never seen a mermaid, and didn’t quite believe this was one. It looked too soft to be the kind of creature that ate men, too young. Most of the crew had thicker arms and stronger legs. The young man at his feet had soft hands and unscarred skin, vulnerable places undefended from the stares of the crewmen.

Its eyelids cracked open as Jeno stared. It coughed. Brown lashes caked together with brine popped apart. Lips that peeled dry parted over a parched gasp.

It looked up into Jeno’s face with eyes the vivid blue of open water, water far from shore, far bluer than any water for miles across the shallow tropical sea they’d been sailing over for weeks.

Its lips moved. A bare whisper made its way over the creaking deck and laughter of crew-men. wa—wate—

Jeno pulled out the grog flask kept behind baskets of spare rigging where the shade stayed dark and cool. He put it to the thing’s mouth, tipped it up, let grog spill over its lips. Those deep blue eyes clenched shut. It flinched away. The brown spilled wet down it’s chin, turning it dark and shining. It wiped a slow hand over its lips, and silver flashed between its fingers. The ivory spikes of shark sharp teeth ringed its grimace.

“’ey, fool! Don’t let it drink while it’s still out here,” Captain Rosa snapped. The deck groaned under his stomping boots. The sharp points of his mustache matched the winging lapels of his maroon coat.

“You want it to die of thirst?” Jeno asked.

“It don’t need to drink,” Captain Rosa snapped. “Not in its honest form anyway.” He knelt down and seized its chin, forcing its mouth open. “You’ve already turned its teeth,” he said. He shoved its head back against the deck and it cringed against the rigging baskets. “Boys, watch your fingers,” he said.

Two of them lifted it up, easy and careless as if they held a bag of rice. The box they’d prepared was a beautiful prism of steel and glass with a lid that angled inwards like a cut gemstone. The captain had ordered it placed up on crates and nestled with sandbags just between the doors of his cabin, under the upper deck and out of the sun. A ballast of salt water already licked over the open edges with the ship’s rocking. Low and long, it could have been the coffin of a god.

As the crewmen drew near the box, its deep blue eyes fluttered open, its slack jaw widened like the maw of a shark. The man holding its legs yelled as its head tipped back and fastened leechlike onto the bosun’s bulging arm. Blood spilled over its jaw like juice crushed from a ripe orange. The red spilled down into the mermaid’s hair and stretched the flesh of one tan ear into a spindly arch.

They shoved it into the box, ripping it out of the bosun with a spray of red, and the glass box bloomed.

A massive serpentine tail flashed silver in the sun. Pink frills undulated through the water. A webbed hand with clawed fingers hit the glass so hard that the scarred and battered crewmen flinched back. The lid slammed. The iron latch that pinned the lid fast shut slid home and turned. Scales and fin boiled inside.

It stilled. Blue eyes pressed to the glass, not so changed from the body that lay on the deck as the snakelike body that twisted like a rope around itself. Its face remained sweet but for the second eyelid blotting out the blue and the way its hair had turned to pink tendrils. An unmistakable human terror twisted its mouth around teeth still seeping blood. Across the deck, Jeno’s own terror echoed it. The bosun kicked the glass over its face and again, the water boiled.