The Mercies

by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Maren wonders if the other women feel as she does: bound to the place now more than ever. Whale or no whale, sign or not, Maren was witness to the death of forty men. Now something in her is tied to this land, as tied as she is trapped.

Did they all know what love was, and lie?

“Though you must have seen mightier, captain?” “I take each sight for itself alone, Mistress Cornet. Come.”

he is hungry for her approval and she has no idea why.

Erik was not this shrunken form, was not caught like a bird fluttering at the windows, was not in the sea or the whale or the sky. He was gone, and Maren could find no comfort for it.

Maren glances back at her house, and Ursa clasps her hand the better to impress upon her what she says next. “You should go for a walk, though. It would do you the power of good.” She raises her eyebrows at the raised voices issuing from inside. “Better than being held for murder.”

“Women often see things we miss, don’t they, sweetling?” “And things you hope we would miss,”

They are a language, Maren. Just because you do not speak it doesn’t make it devilry.”

“It doesn’t matter what I am, only what they believe I am.”

She had thought she had seen the worst from this harbour, thought nothing could rival the viciousness of the storm. But now she knows she was foolish to believe that evil existed only out there. It was here, among them, walking on two legs, passing judgement with a human tongue.

No matter that Pastor Kurtsson believed their survival after the storm to be a miracle: now Maren thinks that the mercies of God would have been better spent drowning them all.

She has no memories so young. The thought is comforting, and terrible.

It is knowing that all your joy is bound up in another, and to be parted from it would be to live without light for the rest of your days.

The sharp rocks that snagged their men would pierce her, and then the sea would take her, and if not the rocks, the sea alone, all the way to the end of the world. She always thought that is all there is, all there was for any of them in this place.

This story is about people, and how they lived; before why and how they died became what defined them.