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It began as all things did: a girl on the shore, terrified and desirous.
“You’re so pretty. You really are. You’re the most gorgeous girl I’ve ever seen. Do you know that?” If she said yes, I do, she was a conceited harpy. If she shook her head and rebuffed the compliment, she was falsely modest, playing coy. It was fae-like trickery. There was no answer that wouldn’t damn her.
She was tired, tired of trying so hard for something she didn’t even want.
“How come all the spiders are men?” “Because then it feels more satisfying to squish them,”
There was an intimacy to all violence, she supposed. The better you knew someone, the more terribly you could hurt them.
“You’re the sort of girl who likes to make life more difficult for herself. If you weren’t so pretty, you would have failed out already.”
What is a mermaid but a woman half-drowned, What a selkie but an unwilling wife, What a tale but a sea-net, snatching up both From the gentle tumult of dark waves?
We must discuss, then, the relationship between women and water. When men fall into the sea, they drown. When women meet the water, they transform. It becomes vital to ask: is this a metamorphosis, or a homecoming?
“Everything ancient must decay,” he said, and it had the cadence of a song. “A wise man once said thus to me. But a sailor was I—and on my head no fleck of gray—so with all the boldness of my youth, I said: The only enemy is the sea.”
That was the cruelest irony: the more you did to save yourself, the less you became a person worth saving.
