Siren Queen

by Nghi Vo

Like we understood to make wide circles around the drunks on the streets and how calico cats were the luckiest of all, we understood immortality as a thing for men. Men lived forever in their bodies, in their statues, in the words they guarded jealously and the countries they would never let you claim. The immortality of women was a sideways thing, haphazard and contained in footnotes, as muses or silent helpers. “But things are different here,” my mother always said. She had never set foot in China, would pass all her life on American soil, but she knew how different things could be. She clung to that, and so did we.

I daresay that there are a dozen girls prettier than you walking around on Ord Street.” It hurt less than you might think. “Pretty” was a word that could come before “chink bitch” just as easily as anything else.

“Is it true then?” I asked. “Is that what the Wild Hunt on Halloween is for?” Mrs. Wiley shrugged. “We’re only human, and who knows the actual truth of it? Every year, they go riding, and every year, they give over one girl or boy to what’s waiting in the dark. No one sees that girl or that boy ever again, and then there’s a party that’s never loud enough or wild enough to cover the fact that there’s something that can take even from the likes of Oberlin Wolfe, John Everest, and Elgin Aegis.”

I thumbed through the script cautiously, waiting for the moment the siren fell in love with the grizzled captain, but I found nothing. She was a monster straight through. She never stopped trying to kill the man who had destroyed her world and killed her family, not until a stray bullet aimed at her enormous sea serpent caught her in the chest. She died hissing with hate, and I smiled.

“I tell them that in Catalonia, the afternoon siesta is a sacred tradition and required for excellent work,” he had said quietly. “Is it?” “Oh who knows, but it does leave me feeling refreshed and well rested in the middle of a long shoot, doesn’t it?”

“It is the way of the world, I suppose,” Harry said, smiling a faded smile. “The good move on, and the wicked remain.” I envied the kind of girl who could walk over and wrap her arms around him, but I wasn’t that. I perched at the marble kitchen island, my chin in my hands, and watched him instead. “The wicked is making me eggs,” I observed. “I don’t have any complaints.”

“What do you want?” he asked, his voice dry and papery. Everything, I could have said, but I only smiled. “Let’s start with what you’re never, ever going to do to me.” No maids, no accents, no sham marriage, no more attempts to replace me with imitations, and then I paused. Su Tong Lin had never gotten to ride off in the sunset with a handsome hero, and now that I had the chance, I wasn’t sure I wanted to. “Monsters, however, are just fine,” I said finally. “I’d like to see more monsters.”

Tara came sometimes, too, but she never cared for the fires. I thought for a while that we could live like that, split with my heart in the flames and hers on the page, but we couldn’t. There were five years where we were good to each other, a year where we weren’t, and then she moved to San Francisco to join the dreamers in the fog.