Mermaids Don't Cry (Short Story) COMPLETE

The Discovery

The cave was so dark that he could not see anything. He followed a group of fish with little blue lanterns on their heads as they lit his path to the boat. The fishes were very curious and tailed right behind him as he entered inside the bedroom through the cabin window. The skeleton looked inside the dresser drawers to see if he could find anything that reminded him of his past. In one of the drawers he found an old picture frame with a miraculously intact photograph of a young sailor and his "bien aimee". The sailor had a pocket watch dangling from his trousers and was wearing a ring that looked like the one the mermaid wore around her neck. Suddenly, the skeleton's memory of his wife came flooding back. The last thing he could remember was setting off on a fishing trip and then sinking with his crew to the bottom of the sea.

So many questions rushed to his mind. How long had he been gone? It suddenly hit him that perhaps he had been in the cave for a very long time and that his wife was probably deceased by now. A deep sadness came over him. He lay on the bed hoping that she could fall asleep. Quickly the sadness turned into despair: how could the mermaid be so cruel and cast a spell on him that would make him roam the ocean floor, forever haunted by his memories. As he was lamenting his fate, he suddenly remembered that he was once the best fisherman of his town. He became determined to capture the mermaid and force her to turn him back into an inanimate state. When he opened the closet door of his cabin, he was happy to find all his fishermen gear intact, just as he had left them the last time he had gone deep-sea fishing. He found a pair of diving fins, a net and his harpoon. He put on his diving fins and darted out of the cave like he had been a fish his whole life. He was ready to hunt down the mermaid.