Becoming Mermaids

Chapter 15: Roman Wilderness of Pain

Sam lay on the cold tile with her tail covering her face. The hard surface was sucking heat out of her body, but it was so nice to have something solid to touch. She was tired of floating effortlessly in the water, listlessly doing laps. Her body shook. She had long since lost the ability to cry.

She was still changing— or at least, she believed that she was. It seemed to her that her scales were creeping higher up the sides of her torso, and she thought she could feel the beginnings of a dorsal fin on her back. The hip bones under her skin were either gone or buried so deeply she couldn't find them with her thumbs. The tail was now pliant up to her bellybutton, and the webbing between her fingers seemed a bit longer, down to the first knuckle.

If I don't stay out of the water, she thought, I'll turn into a fish. She imagined her arms melding into her sides and her hands becoming flippers. Her neck would thicken and her cheeks would spread out to her shoulders. The scales would ride up over the smooth skin of her breasts and her back, and finally close in over her flapping mouth.

She missed being human. She missed work— chatting with Stacy and Donny, and even Jamie, her teenage boss. She missed wearing clothes, having even the thinnest layer of cloth between her private, sensual body and the public persona she wanted to portray. She missed gravity, and desperately wanted to comb her tangled hair.

In short, she was tired of lounging in bed and wanted to get back to the real world.

And eat food. Real food— cooked, not living. How could these assholes believe she really wanted to eat live fish? She always winced when she felt their still-beating hearts on her tongue. Why didn't they ask? Why did she always have to be alone?

Hungry as she was, she couldn't bear the thought of eating any more sardines. She might starve to death, she knew that. But the prospect of being trapped in a fish's body and spending her days swimming back and forth was far worse.

The door squeaked and she propped her head up. They never opened the door while she was on deck. Maybe something's happening! Maybe they're finally going to let her go! She'll tell them about the magic gemstone and they'll get somebody else to wear the tail and she can go back to her normal life and— oh. It was Dr. Hobbs.

Somebody behind Dr. Hobbs shoved him through the door, and he nearly fell off the ledge, into the water.

Sam watched him with unblinking eyes, which drooped from hunger. Dr. Hobbs's own eyes were filled with pity. He crept along the treacherous ledge so that he could sit down beside her. Sam coiled in her tail like a cobra.

"Christ," he said, not looking at her, but down at his feet dangling over the water. "What have they done to you?" He ventured a glance at her face and saw the scar joined by a hundred little marks of abuse. Her once full cheeks were now almost hanging like jowls. Then, uncertainly, he took a lock of her matted hair in his fingers, twisting the thick felt. Sam leaned into his hand to feel the warmth and pressure on her face. She wanted to speak, to talk the way people do, but she was having trouble forming the words.

It didn't escape her that this was the man who had captured her, bound her, handed her over to the ones who'd brought on all this misery: the arguably unethical scientist. But by that point, she didn't care. Any human contact was better than none.

She found, to her enormous relief, that she was able to cry again.

The effect of the siren song had long since worn off on Dr. Frederick Hobbs. The feelings it evoked were more of a wake-up call than a compulsion, with consequences that long outlasted the spell itself. Far from forgetting his wife and family to want to join the mermaid in the sea, it made him see traces of Sam in his daughters. He was especially appalled at himself, not just for capturing her, but for realizing that it took magic for him to see the face of suffering. He considered himself an inadequate human being for needing such nudges.