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

“I don’t mind missing school,” I say. “I’d rather be here with you.” This is better than school, I figure; the algebra of the nets, the geometry of Pakpao out at sea, are more valuable lessons to me.

Dad smiles and ruffles my hair. “You’re a good girl, Lily.” Standing, he unclips his pocket flashlight from his belt and hands it to me. “I need to make sure we have enough ice in the hold, but you might as well start on the nets now.”

As he walks toward the cabin, I twist the flashlight on and grip the metal handle between my teeth, working in the small circle of electric light. I tie on the plastic floats and metal bobbins until the sky lightens and Ahbe hurtles from the kitchen. “We’re leaving! Are the nets ready?”

“Just about,” I reply. “They’ll be ready by the time we need ‘em.”

He grins, raking back his hair. “Awesome. I’ll let Captain Tanawat know that we’re all set!” He dashes off again, thin brown limbs flashing. I wonder if May will marry Ahbe out of all the fishing boys. I think he would be a good choice.

The motors roar, churning the green water below. Other ships are pulling into the docks, unloading their catches of basa, perch, and stingray for the fish market starting to construct itself on the shore. I don’t see any mermaids on sale, not even the pesky local catfish ones. Maybe they’re saving them for international markets.

Pakpao barely clears the heavy-limbed trees clustered by the riverside, their branches drenched with musky river-scent. I duck, keeping my attention on the nets. By the time I finish fixing on the last bobbin and remember to look up, our stork-legged village has disappeared from sight.

The monsoon rains catch us an hour into the journey downriver, so we don’t end up letting out the nets until the next day, when we’re almost at the delta that opens up into the sea. Dad, Sunan, Ahbe, and I work together, feeding out the bottom nets with their bobbins first, then the large central net, and finally the top nets. The nylon stings my fingers as it’s yanked through the water, but I won’t complain, not in front of Dad and the others. I’d rather nurse my wounds in private.

It isn’t long before the nets grow heavy. Pacu, carp, lots and lots of catfish. We pack them into coolers full of ice, where they’ll stay until we return home, and send Ahbe and Sunan to cart them down to the hold. No mermaids yet; maybe they’ve been scared into deeper water by the storms.

“Fuckin’ hell,” mutters Sunan as we drop the nets back into the water. “Not even a fuckin’ mud-eater. At this rate, everything in the hold’s gonna spoil before we catch anything good.”

“Be patient,” hums my father. The river mouth is widening, and salt cuts through the thick, live smell of the water below. “There will be plenty in the open sea.”

“The better kinds,” adds Ahbe, as Sunan casts him a sour look. “Tigerfish, lionfish, yellowfin—”

“I know what brings in the money,” Sunan snaps. I keep my head down and focus on the nets. “I don’t need you to name all the fish in the sea, kid.”

The two of them bicker as the river empties into the ocean, trees and thick foliage giving way to an expanse of open sky. It always scares me, how exposed everything is at sea. At the same time, it thrills me. I find myself drawn to Pakpao ’s rail, the sea winds tossing my hair free from its braids. The breakers roll against the trawler, and as we buck over the waves, the breath is torn from my lungs and replaced with sheer exhilaration.

When we pull the nets in the next morning, they are so heavy that we have to recruit the cook to help us haul them onto the ship. There are a few tuna, bass, and even a small shark, but the bulk of it is squirming, howling mermaids. As we yank the nets onto the deck, bobbins clattering over the planks, I realize that we’ve caught something strange.

Most of the mermaids tangled in the nets are pale, with silvery tails and lithe bodies. This one is dark brown, its lower body thick, blobby, and inelegant, tapering to a blunt point instead of a single fin. Its entire body is glazed with a slimy coating, covered in spines and frondlike appendages. Rounded, skeletal pods hang from its waist, each about the size of an infant.

Worse, this fish has an uncannily human face, with a real chin and defined neck. While all of the mermaids I’d seen before had wide-set eyes on either side of their heads, this one’s eyes—huge and white, like sand dollars—are positioned on the front of its head. And unlike the other mermaids, gasping and thrashing and shrieking on the deck—there are few things worse than a mermaid’s scream—this one lies still, gills slowly pulsing.

“We got a deep-sea one,” breathes Sunan.

Ahbe crouches over the net, mouth agape. When he reaches his hand out, my father barks, “Don’t touch it!” and yanks Ahbe’s arm away. His body is tense, and when the mermaid smiles—it smiles , like a person —its jaws unhinge to reveal several rows of long, needlelike teeth.

I can’t stop staring. The mermaid has a stunted torso with short, thin arms and slight curvature where a human woman would have breasts, but no nipples. This shocks me more than it should; why would a fish have nipples? Heat rises in my face. I feel exposed, somehow, fully clothed though I am.

“Wow,” Ahbe says. His eyes are shining like he’s never seen a deep-sea mermaid before. Maybe he hasn’t. I haven’t either. “We’re gonna make a lot of money off of this one, huh?”

“If you don’t lose a hand to it,” my father replies. The other mermaids are wailing still, the last of the seawater trickling from their gills in short, sharp gasps. “Let’s bring them below. Do your best not to damage them; we need as much of the meat intact for the buyers as we can get.”

We descend on the net with ropes and hooks. The brown mermaid’s eyes are blind windows, like an anglerfish’s, but her face follows me as we move around the deck, securing the mermaids, pinning their delicate arms to their torsos so they won’t shatter their wrists in their panicked flailing. Once they’re bound, Dad and Sunan lift them and carry them down to the hold. With Ahbe packing the other fish into coolers, I draw close to the deep-sea mermaid, rope in hand.

That mouth opens, and I swear—I swear to god, or gods, or whatever is out there—a word hisses out: “ Luk .”

I drop the rope and stumble away. Ahbe’s at my side in an instant. “Shit! Lily, did it hurt you?” He grabs my hands, turning my arms over. “Did you get bitten?”

The pods at her waist clatter and air whistles between her teeth. She is laughing at me as they bind her and drag her down to the hold. “ Luk. Luk. Luk .”

Daughter.

My belly burns. I can’t stop shaking.

On Pakpao , we keep most of the catch frozen, but mermaids are a peculiar, temperamental meat. You have to keep them alive or the flesh goes bad. In fact, it goes bad so quickly that some places have created delicacies based on rotten mermaid because of how impossible it is to get fresh cuts in non-coastal towns. The Japanese traders who visit our village have great saltwater tanks installed in their ships which they load up with live mermaids, carted straight from the holds of wet trawlers like ours. From there, they’re shipped to restaurants, which take great pains to sustain them. Still, they rarely last more than two weeks in captivity, which means there’s always a market for fishermen like us.

Mermaid is a cash crop. Iris, May, and I wouldn’t have been able to go to school if not for the ridiculous amounts of money people are willing to pay to eat certain cuts of mermaid species—not the catfish mermaids from the river, but the ones harvestable on the open sea. These are the people who say that the soft, fatty tissue of a deep-sea mermaid is the most succulent luxury meat you will ever taste: like otoro but creamier, better. There are others who claim it’s the thrill of the forbidden that makes mermaid taste so good. I had a classmate once who told me that eating mermaid, especially the torso, is the closest to eating human meat you’ll ever get.