The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea

by Maggie Tokuda-Hall

was magic, the name, a spell that kept her safe.

She was exactly who her mother wished Evelyn was, but Evelyn saw none of herself when she met the Lady’s eyes.

The notion of one hundred sons seemed too cruel a punishment for any sin she may have committed in her short life.

Death and marriage, both so frankly inevitable, both so unavoidable. Mandatory.

If she couldn’t love Keiko, maybe there was something wrong with her, something inherited from her loveless parents. Maybe she was born with a broken heart.

She was not a creature of courage, but she was one of spite. This one little rebellion would sate that, at least.

There’s freedom in stories, you know. We read them and we become something else. We imagine different lives, and while we turn the pages, we get to live them. To escape the lot we’ve been given.” Florian

“We don’t just read to imagine better lives. We read to be introduced to all kinds of lives. Any kind. Not just for ourselves, but for everyone around us. To understand others better. It’s escape, and it’s also a way to become more connected to everyone around you. There’s power in that, you know. In understanding. It’s like magic.”

Happy. As if that were a bad thing. As if that were not allowed — not for Flora, at least.

“You think the world of men is so complicated? It isn’t. You’re all the same. Weak, and small, and eager to push your own failure off on others while pretending I couldn’t possibly understand the great forces at work that forced your hand. Half of a woman’s life is spent pretending she doesn’t notice just how stupid and prone to failure you all are!”

The spell of safety Florian cast over her life was slipping, and yet she did not seem to be a female anymore, either. The loss stung. She was neither, it seemed. Or at least, she didn’t reap the benefit of either.

“Of course.” The Lady Ayer sighed. “Love does not work in terms of convenience. Or any kind of sense.”

“There’s nothing out there to punish evil, no one out there to reward the righteous. We’re all just adrift.”

She was adrift in a body that did not want her anymore, a body that was no more.

don’t care who you are,” the witch interrupted. “There are a thousand girls just like you in this world, and I haven’t the patience, fortitude, or, frankly, the time left in my life to know you each.”

“Because I am older than you and wiser. And because I do magic and I know things. That’s what I do.

But now that little girl had grown into a fine man. An excellent sailor.

Blood and piss. The life of a pirate.

She knew that smile. It was the smile many young men gave her. When she walked by, or when they met her. It was that smile she was always expected to return. It was that smile that had nothing to do with her but was — somehow — her burden to bear.

He smiled broadly, the easily confident smile of a young man entitled to the world.

She was not capable of love, apparently, and so she could not receive it.

But what was prayer except the request for a better story?

“You do not like me,” Inouye said. His voice was matter-of-fact. And what he said was true. Evelyn violently disliked him, and often, in moments of solitude, she comforted herself with little fantasies about his bloody demise.

Magic was at its core, she said, a kind of madness. It was a willingness to look at the corporeal world and to see it only as the story up to that point. That everything that followed could be changed. Rocks fell because the belief that they would fall was so strong. But that belief wasn’t binding. It didn’t have to be binding anyway. For a price.

“There are those who are neither a man nor a woman. Those who were born and called the wrong gender and must reshape their story for those around them. But you. You’re something else. You’re whatever is safe. Both, maybe, but not neither. Or interchangeable. Names are funny things, because they can feel like lies but tell our truths.”

Their greed sickened her. These men of power, these men who had raised her. Who taught them such cruelty? Who allowed them such means?

But he was not listening, not really. He simply waited expectantly in that way men sometimes did when waiting for their chance to talk.

“Do you . . . ? Should I call you by he or she? Or they?” Evelyn asked. She didn’t seem to care which, and for that, Flora was more grateful than she could say. After all of the time spent worrying, fretting, over the lie that was Florian, and now she could be anything. She could be herself. Florian smiled. “I guess it doesn’t really matter. Any of them feel true.”