May 29, 2018

PodCastle 524: Shine like the Sea’s Deepest Secrets

28 minutes

* Author : Kathryn McMahon

* Narrator : Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali

* Host : Setsu Uzume

* Audio Producer : Peter Behravesh

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Flame Tree’s gothic fantasy anthology Pirates & Ghosts: Short Stories.

Rated R for blood, guts, and monstrous appetites.

A shadow passes overhead and mermaids rise from where they were playing hide-and-seek among the jellyfish. It has been weeks since they’ve fed. If the shadow is a whale, the mermaids will only wish it safe passage. But the shadow is a galleon. Is it the one I’m looking for? I rush upwards.

The sky is noon-bright; the air, still. The ship’s main mast, cracked and scorched by lightning, lays toppled. Torn sails flutter on the fore- and mizzen-masts. The ship has been left to drift at the whim of the current. Mermaids crawl up the hull and cling to barnacles. Their voices, which usually hiss like the breaking waves, bend to wordless song. Lured by their music, sailors peer over the rail, their faces gaunt, their gums rotted. No matter. The mermaids’ sharp teeth will slice bone and reach the marrow.

As the mermaids sing, I linger in the water and try to mimic them. My bubbles are quietly stolen by the frothing waves. Mermaids spy my efforts and say not to worry; they will eat the man who killed my lover. I tell them that this is not his ship. But they are hungry.

Sailors close their eyes in ecstasy. Some fling themselves overboard and mermaids dive after them. A few bites, and intestines unravel in the waves like loose mooring rope. Hammerheads join the feast, much braver than other sharks when facing mermaid appetites.

As the sailors die, they see me, one apparition to another. Yet they do not stay long. Like the captain I lost so long ago, they promised themselves to the blue devil and are soon washed away in a spectral tide.

Except for the mermaids, I am alone. I died before my captain, gutted by the same Spanish sword. Those who feared my lover called her Sadie the Axe. She captained the Sea Rose, though some knew it as The Disgrace of the Waves. Her body lies among the sea feathers, so like the plume of her tricorn hat now lost to the depths. A hat she wore as she claimed the deck and prepared for siege. A hat that rested beside our bed every night when I would pull her into my arms and beg her to find her way back to dry land. But she was free beneath the black sails.

The water is thick with blood, but all the useful bits of flesh have been swallowed. The mermaids retreat, pot-bellied, to languish on the sea floor. I drift down to where they flirt and giggle with the Rose’s figurehead. It was carved to look something like them, but mostly like me.

Down here both moon and sun are inked out and the mermaids’ eyes reflect what stars abound: the living sapphires that hunt each other and twinkle in and out of sight. I see with the spirit of eyes. If I still had a heart, I would feel like I belonged to these glittering creatures. But my heart was eaten by a red crab and I belong to no one. So, instead of wishing on stars, I wish on the night beasties for the death of the man who murdered my sea wife and me.

The mermaids, those eternal creatures, call me Pandora. I never stray far from the chest of silver and gold that, like a dead heart, curdles between the wooden ribs of the Rose where her halves lie on the shivering undercrust of the sea. Sadie stole the Rose from her own marauding father who then claimed it had ...

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