The Sirens

by Emilia Hart

This was when she started school, when she had first begun to grasp that she was different.

A whirlpool or other tidal anomaly might also explain other local events, including a nineteenth-century shipwreck, and, more recently, the discovery of an infant child at a cave in Devil’s Lookout—according to some theories, the sole survivor of another, smaller shipwreck.

Samhain, when the veil between the human world and the spirits’ stretched to its thinnest point.

For Da believed that water threatened not just their skin but their souls. And on Samhain night especially so. They might find the midnight washerwomen, their long spindly hands rinsing the shrouds for those who’d die on the morrow. Or else be set upon by an each-uisce; the shapeshifter who lurks at the water’s edge, disguised as a horse, ready to drown those who dare to mount it.

Da had made becoming a woman sound like something dangerous.

naiad convict ship

aquagenic urticaria.

the ancient beliefs in fairies and selkies. She did not dare ask if he believed in merrow.

Last Monday, we were focusing on narrative art—how pictures can tell a story. He showed me a painting of Orpheus and Eurydice, by Carl Goos.

“The surrealists believed that our dreams could help us find our true creative selves,” he said. I felt the hairs on the nape of my neck move in time with his breath. “Maybe you should make more art about these dreams, these nightmares. It might feel … cathartic.”

For the first time, she’d experienced the world and its injustice; the way the cards are stacked against her, just because she’s female.

With this awakening, there’d been something else, too. A new awareness of her power. Freed from her prior inhibitions—from the compulsion to be nice, to be a good girl—she’d become something she could never have imagined being. She’d become … dangerous.

Most people just want an easy life. It’s unsettling when someone starts pulling apart the stories we’ve stitched together, the things we tell ourselves for comfort.

The most famous is Pedro Rodrigues Filho, who was apparently the inspiration for Dexter.

The girls are like sharks. They sense it when you’re weak.

All her life, Lucy has prided herself on her passion for the truth. And yet she had never sensed what her sister had known all along: that her parents were hiding something.

“What I’m trying to say,” Melody murmurs, dark eyes staring into Lucy’s, “is that we don’t need to worry about your sister. There’s something about this place, something different. It keeps its women safe.”

She had asked Lucy to make a choice. But sometimes, there is no choice. There is only love.