SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Aiko lies on the bed, pale and still. There’s flour and bile on the front of her jacket. “Hang in there,” I whisper, but she doesn’t respond. I swirl the pot, searching its contents for any hint of Aiko, but Seo-yun’s face grins out at me from the patterns of light glimmering across the liquid’s surface. I shove it away from me, spilling some on the carpet.

I grab another one of the myriad crawling thoughts tangled about me, sinking my teeth into its body, tearing it into pieces as it screams and howls terrible promises, promises it won’t be able to keep. I eat it raw, its scales scraping the roof of my mouth, chewing it thoroughly. The more broken down it is, the easier it will be to sort through the pieces that are left when it comes back up.

How long did you know? Did you always know?

I’ll find her, I think as viscous black liquid pours from my mouth, over my hands, burning my throat. The field of containers pools around me like a storm of malicious stars, all whispering my name. She’s in here somewhere, I can see her reflection darting across their surfaces. If I have to rip through every piece of Seo-yun I have, from her dreams to the soft, freckled skin wrapped around my body, I will. I’ll wring every vile drop of Seo-yun out of me until I find Aiko, and then I’ll fill her back up, pour her mouth full of herself.

How could I ever forget her? How could I forget her taste, her scent, something as awful and beautiful as home?

“The Fisher Queen” originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May/Jun 2014.

My mother was a fish. That’s why I can swim so well, according to my father, who is a plain fisherman with a fisherman’s plain logic, but uncanny flair for the dramatic. And while it’s true I can cut through the water like a minnow, or a hand dipped over the edge of a speedboat, I personally think it’s because no one can grow up along the Mekong without learning two things: how to swim, and how to avoid the mermaids.

Mermaids, like my father’s favorite storytale version of my mother, are fish. They aren’t people. They are stupid like fish, they eat your garbage like fish, they sell on the open market like fish. Keep your kids out of the water, keep your trash locked up, and if they come close to land, scream a lot and bang pots together until they startle away. They’re pretty basic.

My sisters tried to talk to a mermaid once. It was caught up in one of Dad’s trammel nets, and when they went to check the net out back behind the house, they found this mermaid tangled in it. It was a freshwater one, a bottom-feeder, with long, sparse hair whose color my sisters still argue about to this day. Iris, the oldest, felt bad for it and made May splash some water on its fluttery gills with her red plastic pail. She asked the mermaid if it was okay, what its name was. But it just stared at her with its stupid sideways fish eyes, mouth gaping open and closed with mud trickling out over its whiskers. Then Dad came home and yelled at Iris and May for bringing in the nets too early and touching the mermaid, which probably had sea lice and all kinds of other diseases.

I was just a kid then, but my sisters tell that story all the time. Iris is a marine biologist wannabe, almost done with high school but too dumb to go to university, who lectures us on fishes like we haven’t been around them our whole lives. She sleeps with the biology textbook I stole from the senior honor kids’ classroom under her pillow. May doesn’t give a shit about school and will probably get married to one of the boys living along the dock so she doesn’t have to repeat tenth grade again. The mermaid is one of those shared childhood memories they have, a little spark of magic from a time when they still believed that our mom really was a fish and maybe that mermaid was a cousin or something.

But I’m fifteen now, a full-fledged deckhand on a trawler and too old to be duped by some story Dad made up so he wouldn’t have to explain why our very human mom took off and dumped the three of us with him. I don’t care about stories of kids touching a glorified catfish either. It actually makes me sad, to think that my sisters really believed that our mom could be a dumb animal like that mermaid.

I’m lacing up my boots and getting ready to leave for the boat when May flops down from the top bunk, her black hair tumbling over my face. “Here.” She fumbles for her necklace and presses her carved-shell Buddha into my palm. “Come back safe, okay?”

I slip the waxed string over my head. It’s still dark out; the sun won’t be up for another few hours. “Yeah, of course. Go to sleep.”

She gathers the sheets up around her, their folds cresting like the ocean’s breakers. “I mean it, Lily,” she mutters. “Don’t come back a ghost.”

I tuck the dangling tail of her blanket under her belly. Iris, snoring on the bottom bunk, doesn’t even stir. “Ghosts are silly,” I tell May, grabbing my knapsack from where it hangs on the edge of the bed. Our little house is only two rooms, a blue tin roof over bedroom and kitchen, balancing on stilts above the river. Dad’s bedroll is gone, so I figure he’s aboard Pakpao already. “I’ll see you in a few days.”

I always check the nets out back for any fish that might have wandered in overnight, drawn by the ripe scent of trash. They’re empty tonight, no silver tilapia or pacu with their human teeth. No spindly-armed mermaids, either. I let the nets slip back into the water and trot down the walkway that connects the neighborhood of ramshackle houses above the river, wooden boards yawning underfoot. The green, thick smell of the river creeps up over the piers, rising into the night sky.

Our rickety trawler, Pakpao , waits at the edge of the docks, the crew drifting through the moonlight like specters. Pakpao looks like a child’s toy boat built out of scrap metal and blown up to the twentieth scale. Colored flags flicker in the damp wind, and rust creeps up the ship’s sides. My father’s stout, compact figure crouches over the nets, winding them up.

“Hey, Lily,” says Ahbe as I jog up the pier. At nineteen, he’s the deckhand closest to my age. “Ready for another four days at sea?”

“You must be feeling lucky if you think we’ll fill the hold and make it back home in four days,” grumbles Sunan, hauling a crate of plastic floats past us. His shirt has wandered off somewhere. “Cook’s looking for you, Ahbe. He wants to know what happened to the other batch of rice.”

“Gan was supposed to bring it in,” complains Ahbe, but he disappears downstairs anyway. Taking my cue, I follow Sunan to the nets.

Dad doesn’t look up from his work, patting the deck beside him for Sunan to drop off the crate. I sink down next to it, crossing my legs and pulling the nets into my lap. When the light’s better, it’ll be my job to fix the floaters and the heavy bobbins to the net’s mouth, widening it to span the surface of the river and weighing the bottom layer down to skim the mud below.

“I tried to wake you but you were fast asleep,” Dad says. He sounds apologetic. “Captain Tanawat wanted me here early to double-check the motor and our course to the ocean. Monsoon weather makes the fish finicky.”

I glance at him. My dad’s shoulders pump as he draws in the last of the nets. He’s the strongest, slyest fisherman I know. Someday, I want to be just like him. “Even the deep-water species?”

“Even those.” Dad sighs and lets the nets pool at his feet, kneeling beside me. His weathered hands coax the nylon strands out of their knots. “We might not find any mermaids for a week.”