A Ship of Bones & Teeth

by Karina Halle

I expect her to scream for help or try to swim away. Instead, the princess punches me right in the face.

I don’t know what it is about a woman that wants me dead, but I swear nothing gets me harder.

“Darling, your body would bring any man to their knees where they would be in the right position to worship you. It’s a body carved by god yet meant for sin, and it would become anyone’s salvation.”

Some might say he speaks straight from the devil, but I’m discovering I like what the devil has to say.

He promised he wouldn’t hurt me, but I’ve never been one to take a man at his word.

“Stay with me,” he whispers. “Don’t go back to the deep. Stay with me at the surface. With the sun and the moon and the stars.”

“I’m a Syren. Mermaids are mythical creatures that you men made up, as if there were swarms of females in the seas just waiting to worship you.” I let out a mirthless laugh. “Syrens, on the other hand, we don’t want to worship you. We want to eat you.”

Of all the battles we fight, grief is the one that we cannot win. There is no winning and there is no losing. Grief makes a home within your bones so that you’ll carry it for all time.

Loss and tragedy don’t stop more loss and tragedy from occurring and grief will always follow you, like a shadow you don’t want.

“Do you think your words will make my grief go away? Do you wish to fix me? Does it make you uncomfortable that I’m feeling this way?”

I bare my fangs right back, hissing at him, then I put on a demure smile. “Your nature can be unnecessarily savage.” “Says the woman who eats hearts for breakfast,” Ramsay says under his breath.

You are the moon, I am the tides,