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

The truth is, I fucking hate mermaids. I can’t stand them. I would never tell Iris or May this, but mermaids scare me. Their empty eyes, their parasite-ridden bodies, their almost-hands, almost-human faces…they are the most disgusting, terrifying fish I’ve ever seen. There is nothing about them that I like.

I can’t even eat them. Once, for May’s birthday, Dad brought home a thin slab of silver-scaled kapong mer-tail for us to share. It was the most expensive food we’d ever had, and it tasted like plaster in my mouth. May and Iris wouldn’t shut up about how delicious the white flesh was. I wadded mine in rice and choked it down, knowing that Dad had spent a large chunk of his last catch’s salary on this special birthday feast. He liked to spoil us whenever he got the chance.

The mermaids in the hold won’t stop whimpering. I can hear the high-pitched, teakettle sounds through the walls of the ship as I lie in my hammock with my hands over my ears, trying to sleep. It’s a noise they make under stress, according to Iris. Something about air whistling through their gills and the vibrations deep in their bodies.

I don’t fucking care why they’re making the noise. I just want it to stop.

It’s even harder to sleep because I keep thinking about that brown, spiny mermaid. Those blind, luminous, predatory eyes. The unhinged jaw, the tapered waist, the brief curves on her chest. The scent of her skin, salty and alien.

Luk.

I swallow.

Sunan and Ahbe are gone, taking the night shift on deck. Across the room, Cook and Dad are asleep. The electric lantern swaying overhead isn’t doing anyone good, so I snag it and hop from my hammock, slipping quietly out of the cabin.

As I pad down the stairway to the hold, the whimpering gets louder until it’s a fevered whine in my head. I imagine the brown mermaid laughing, floating in the water. Too soon, I’m on the landing at the bottom of the stairs, my sweaty palm on the metal door’s cold handle. I pull it open.

The hold is full of seawater, coolers of frozen fish bobbing up and down with the outside waves. The mermaids swim in confused circles, making distressed cooing noises. They are tethered to metal rings on the wall, thick twine wrapped around their delicate baby wrists and hooked into the sides of their mouths. A mermaid whose body is mostly muscle, long and heavy like an arapaima, surfaces with a treble hook stabbed through its cheek and disappears back into the water without a ripple.

Sunan is kneeling by the wall, the rocking motion of Pakpao slopping fake waves up to his chest. At first I think he’s hurt because there’s blood in the water nearby; the mermaids keep circling closer, keening when the hooks and tethers prevent them from reaching him. Then I realize the pale crescent disappearing in and out of the water is his ass. His pants hang on a ring nearby, their ankles drenched in seawater, and he’s holding something down as he rocks back and forth, back and forth. It’s not the ship rocking, it’s him. A thin, clawed hand slashes over his shoulder; he swears, the sound echoing, and slaps whatever’s underneath him. A heavy silver tail thrashes the water.

A hand grabs my shoulder from behind and I almost scream. I’m pulled backward, the door to the hold clicking shut in front of me.

“Don’t watch, Lily,” Dad says in that low voice he puts on whenever he wants to protect me. My blood boils, fear and anger and adrenaline roaring through my system. “Go back upstairs and pretend you never saw any of this.”

“They’re fish!” I snarl. “What the hell is Sunan doing? This is all kinds of wrong. They’re not even people, they’re just goddamn fish!”

“It happens on ships sometimes,” Dad says, and I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “It doesn’t hurt the meat.” He looks straight at me, those serene dark eyes unfamiliar for the first time in my life. “I didn’t want you to know until you were older, but I suppose you were bound to find out sooner or later.”

“You knew?” I whisper. “Does everyone on this ship know?”

My father sighs. “Go upstairs and don’t think about it.”

I have this horrible epiphany. Dad used to have his own boat too, long ago. Mermaids are common enough; even the big ones could fit in a bathtub. He could have kept them alive, feeding them, fucking them—is his story about Mom just that, a story? Or is it true that he kept a fish for himself, hurting it—raping it—until it gave him three daughters? Or was there more than one fish? I think of the dumb, mud-mouthed catfish mermaids that drift into our nets behind the house sometimes, and my stomach turns.

“Have you been fucking them, too?” The words spill out before I can stop them.

“Lily, go upstairs.” His voice has gone cold and dangerous.

“This is really sick, Dad,” I manage.

“I’m not going to tell you again,” he says, and when he looks at me, I wish he hadn’t.

I go.

My mother was not a fish. My mother was a warm, human woman. I am certain of this, even if I cannot remember her at all.

There was a story I heard once about a man who got his dick bitten off by a catfish. He was peeing in the water and the catfish followed the stream of urine straight to his dick, crunched it right off.

This was our second-favorite story growing up, after the story about our mom, and now that Iris is an almost-biologist, she likes to tell us smugly that it’s the ammonia in pee that attracts fish, something about tracking prey through the ammonia leaking from their gills. I don’t know if this is true. But I’ve felt the crushing power of a catfish’s jaws, the bony plates on my arm while I wrestled them down to the hold. The catfish in the Mekong are huge, bigger than me. I am learning, as I get older, that many things are bigger than me.

In her second year of high school, Iris shut down. She stopped going to school, staying curled up in bed all day, and at night she would cry in her sleep. She wouldn’t talk about what had happened, but I found out from May, who knew some of Iris’s friends, that one of the boys at her school had followed Iris into a broom closet when they were cleaning up the classroom together. He was a close friend, a big, heavyset guy with short hair and glasses, but Iris would flinch whenever someone mentioned his name.

As I lie in my hammock, I think about catfish. I think about crushing mouths, crushing holds. All the while, the brown mermaid’s scent and voice sing in my blood, pulling it, tugging and setting it aflame.

I swing my legs over the side of my hammock and slip out of the sleeping quarters, taking the lantern with me.

Ahbe is making his way up the stairs as I descend, and he stops me with a laugh and a hand out against the wall. “What are you doing up so late, Lily?”

I look at him, that fire a cold burn in my chest. His shirt is hastily buttoned, his knees damp with seawater. “I’m going to check on the fish,” I say. The words feel flat in the wet, stifling air.

“I just did that,” Ahbe says. “They’re fine. Nothing’s spoiled; we should be able to get them to the market by tomorrow.”

“No. I want to see the mermaids,” I tell him, deliberately, and his face changes.

“I didn’t know you knew about that,” he says. “You’re too young to go down to the hold by yourself.”

“I’m fifteen,” I say. I think about the way my dad talks, the rich, strong core of his voice, and I channel that as I add, “I’m old enough to decide what I want. And I want a mermaid.”

Ahbe stares at me in the lantern light, and I can see his resolve wavering. “I guess it’s all right,” he mutters. “I was fifteen too the first time I had a mermaid. Just be careful—they bite.” He sucks in his cheek. “I didn’t take you for a tom , though.”