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The closest cottage to ours was three hundred yards away, hidden by some trees. Since most of the houses in the area were summer vacation homes, it felt like we were alone for most of the time. This tranquility gave me some time to think. After school, I spent hours staring out into the never-ending Atlantic Ocean. A view you never get in Switzerland, a country with so many hills and mountains.
However, one of the houses I passed with my bike on my way to school gave me the chills. The windows looked like they badly needed to be washed. They were so dusty that the house always looked dark. The roof appeared as if it was rotting away below fallen leaves. All signs indicated that no one has lived in this place for a while. Yet, there had to be someone because next to the house, there was a big wooden shed with a chimney. Smoke was constantly coming out of that chimney, no matter how hot a day it was. I pedaled a little quicker to shake the weird feeling off.
At the end of my second school day, we finished the head and the torso of the statue. Sam had to leave early because he was working at CVS. On Wednesday, Phe was working at the honey store, and I thought that I’d visit her there. She showed me the products and told me all the current gossip she heard from her co-workers. During her break, we went to a cute coffee shop to get an iced coffee. Well, she took one. I had to take a hot beverage since they were served in a non-see-through Styrofoam cup. This way, it was way less obvious that I wasn’t drinking. When we left the café, two guys wanted to stop us.
“Hey girls,” one of them said, only looking at me.
“Do you come here often?” The other asked.
“No, I’m only here on vacation, visiting my friend.”
“We’re also only passing through but maybe you’d have time to hang out tonight?” They were still completely ignoring Phe, although they addressed both of us.
“I have other plans, thanks, bye.” I grabbed Phe’s arm and started walking.
“You act as if this is something annoying. I’d love to have all the guys following me. They seem to get attached to you as soon as you cross their field of vision,” Phe said.
“Feel free to have both of them. I’d sometimes prefer to be invisible and have my peace and quiet.” I knew they were only noticing me because of my Siren aura and wouldn’t even take one glance at me if I still was my old self.
“So, what do you think of Sam?” Phe asked me as we crossed the street back over to her shop.
“He is really nice,” I answered. Nice and cute, the way little boys are cute.
“Only nice? I think he likes you,” She smirked.
“What makes you think that?” I raised my eyebrows. I hadn’t sensed anything in this direction.
“Just the way he adopted you into our group. He doesn’t seem that way, but he is picky with choosing people to hang out with.”
“How honored we can feel,” I laughed. “I might have gone out of a limb here, but I kind of got the feeling that Sam is not that much into girls.”
“What? I’ve never thought of that,” She exclaimed. “And you’ve known him for one day. I’ve known him my whole life.” She paused for a moment. “Then again, the last girlfriend he had was in kindergarten. I should keep an eye on this.”
“And what happened between you and that Timothy?” I asked, remembering his rude comment in the school parking lot. There must be more to his and Phe’s story if he was still so annoyed by it today.
“He and his friends are a-holes. None of them is used to ever losing at anything. So, this one time in 6th grade, he tried to kiss me, but I ducked and hit him. The stupid thing was that his peers saw that and therefore, since then, I had to play the cool one. I pay for it almost every day.” She sighed. “It is time to get out of here.”
“His behavior isn’t fair!” I said.
She laughed a short laugh. “What in life is fair?”
On Thursday, we taped all the plastic body parts together. When it was finished, we stood around it in a circle and eyed it critically.
“Cool,” Sam said.
“It doesn’t look like me, but it is cool, yes,” Joe stated.
It could have been anybody since there was no real face but just a round plastic head. Other than that, it reminded me of one of these happy soccer players.
“I’m so glad it doesn’t tip over!” Phe exclaimed. “I was a bit afraid that the legs wouldn’t stabilize the body enough or couldn’t carry it.”
“Well, it works,” I said.
“Good job and thank you so much, guys,” Phe high-fived all of us.
“Finally, I have my life back,” Joe sighed theatrically.
“One and a half weeks, Joe. What else would you have done anyway?”
“There is this awesome thing in my living room. It’s called TV. Oh, I’ve missed it so much. How about a movie night tomorrow?”
“I work until eight but after that, ok.”
“Same here,” Sam said. “How ’bout you?” They all looked at me.
“I have no plans. Movie night sounds great.” My insides jumped with joy. It worried me that I was so happy about such a simple offer. I definitely needed more occupation, especially during the nights. I couldn’t play board games with Luke and Melissa all the time.
Later that evening, I sat on the porch looking out into the dark, listening to the sound of the waves. I was wondering what my parents were doing at the moment. They were six hours ahead, which meant that their Friday had already begun. When Melissa was done with her shift at the hospital, where she works as a pediatric nurse, she joined me on the deck. With a gentle smile, she handed me a woolen blanket. I hadn’t even noticed how chilly it had become.
“Thanks.” I wrapped myself in the blanket. “I’ve been thinking about something. I know it doesn’t concern me now, but what happens with our kind when we die?” What if it was different from a human death?
“Hold on a second, I can show you,” Melissa said and appeared again a few seconds later with her phone. I looked at her in confusion.
“I have a video of the last Siren funeral. Of course, I wasn’t allowed to take it, but Luke wasn’t allowed to go and thought that it was so interesting. Let’s hope the Orbiters never find out about it.”
She opened a file and there I saw a woman lying on a patch of straw on a forest clearing. Many other women were standing around her, talking to each other.
“She was around 800 years old and felt that her body had weakened and that she was going to die soon,” Melissa said. “Few Sirens make it to that age since sooner or later, most Sirens kill themselves. It’s too much to bear to always have to resist everything and watch everyone around you die again and again. Therefore, it’s good to have a foundation in a Siren family.” She smiled at me. “Please, always talk to us if something bothers you.”
I better not even think about all the things that could bother me.
Then all movement around the woman in the video stopped, and everybody focused on her. I couldn’t make it out clearly, but it looked as if her flesh began to shrink. Her skin wrinkled until it fell flat to the ground like a balloon without air.
“When she died, the energy left her body, and all reactions failed,” Melissa explained. “Humans and animals stiffen first before they start to rot. I guess since we’ve been in a frozen state for so long, it’s like with food you take out of the freezer. You can’t keep the food for much longer once it’s defrosted. Once we are dead, we start decaying right away. The muscles and flesh shrink and cannot be used for Siren research anymore.”
Then, one Siren after the other lit a small log and threw it on top of her.
“Since it’s not a pretty sight, they have funerals where they burn the bodies,” Luke added.
“I see,” I said. “Wow.” I couldn’t lift my eyes off the screen, although the video was over now. “And how did you become a Siren?” I asked her.
She stared out at the ocean for a while. I almost thought that she didn’t remember anymore and had to think hard. Then she turned to face me.
“That’s something I’ll never forget. You probably still feel the pain of the metamorphosis too, as if it happened yesterday. Mine lies thirty years back. I was twenty-eight, married for a year, and four months pregnant. Apparently, a car hit me, while I was doing my daily cycling route. The driver took off, which cleared the way for the Sirens. That happened somewhere in the north of Provence in France. Michaela, who saved me, was a scary woman,” Melissa shook her head. “So, once it was safe to take my chains off, I actually thought she was some kind of cannibal who wanted to kill and eat me. But then she brought me to Claire in Ireland, where I spent the first three years. Michaela is good-hearted, but she likes to keep to herself. I was depressed for a long time, and my English was not so good.” She looked at me with affection. “You really are doing such a great job. You seem to have no problems at all in adjusting to your new life and the new body.”
I shrugged, “To say the truth, I kind of like it. I feel great. I have so much energy. I wish I had this energy as a human,”
Melissa smiled. “It’s nice to have you here. Anyway, luckily Claire didn’t give up. She read books to me and one day, she came home and told me that there was a part time job at the kindergarten for me. It didn’t have anything to do with my former job at an insurance company. So, I don’t know where she got that intuition, but it was what got me back on track. My English improved and after a while, I started to study and train as a pediatric nurse.”
“So, you didn’t have the easiest start either,” I observed.
“No, believe me, many times I had preferred to be dead instead. But we have to see it as a chance.” She readjusted the blanket we had wrapped around us.
“Mhh. I’m not ready yet to call it a chance. For that, I still think about my family too much,” I pursed my lips. “Today, my heart skipped a beat when I saw someone at school who looked like my sister,” I said.
Melissa squeezed my shoulders. “Otherwise, school is going alright? No problems with hiding our secret?” She then asked.
“No, all is well. Even lunch isn’t a problem. There are actually many kids who don’t eat since it’s uncool to eat cafeteria food.”
Melissa covered her eyes with her hand. “Seriously? I would love to enjoy some tater tots. They shouldn’t act so spoiled.”
“You still miss food sometimes?” I asked.
“I do. To just eat a normal meal and behave normally. But nothing can beat a nice and juicy heart now.” She chuckled.
“Roisin doesn’t seem to have problems with anything,” I stated.
“She was a wild spirit from the beginning. We found her in my third year as a Siren. She was the first casualty that had the right aura to be transformed. I watched Claire jam a needle that was already filled with someone else’s heart energy into Roisin’s chest. She woke up in one of the rooms at Claire’s house. Roisin was only nineteen, and it seems that younger people are better at adjusting. She was a fast learner, like you.” Melissa smiled at me. “But it was too hard for her to be so close to her family and friends and not be able to go back to them. That’s why we decided to go to New York together. We had always been curious about that city. It was a great time, the two of us, living in that tiny apartment in the East Village. I was living a second youth. I luckily found work as a nurse right away and for the rest of the time kept my eyes on the streets to help out 911.” Melissa moved her curls on one side of her head and ran through them with her fingers. “Roisin started studying zoology and helped out at the Bronx Zoo. When she turned twenty-one, she also started working at a club during the night. On my night off, I visited her. The free drinks were a big plus of course,” Melissa smirked at me. “It was sometimes hard to resist when I had one of these cocktails standing in front of me, knowing that I couldn't drink the whole thing, or it would kill me.”
“How about Cathy? What is her story?” I asked.
Melissa hesitated for a moment. “She had lived with other Sirens in Vancouver before but said that she wasn’t satisfied there anymore. Then, she came to New York. I actually don’t know much about her; she likes to be on her own.”
“Why was she there in the cave with us then?”
“She had been in the area as well. It’s Siren code that we save someone who can be saved.”
“But she didn’t really want to save me.”
Melissa chose her words carefully: “I’d say, she had respect for the responsibility.”
“To me, she doesn’t seem like somebody who is afraid of anything. And you were there; she could have walked away, couldn’t she?”
“You know, for someone who was so repellent in the beginning, you’re asking an awful lot of questions now.” She laughed lightly.
“Yes, and it appears that always when I get to the interesting ones, you don’t answer me,” I moved my chin forward.
“Oh no, don’t feel that way. I really enjoyed our conversation right now, but I don’t have the answers to all the questions either,” She said.
I narrowed my eyes. Something was odd, but I couldn’t place my finger on it. However, I didn’t want to start an argument for no reason at that moment, so I asked another question instead.
“And Luke, did you meet him when he was a Siren already?”
The corners of Melissa’s mouth automatically wandered upwards.
“No, he was human at first. Already very good looking then.” She smirked. Then she continued, “he should tell you his story himself, though. It’s much more entertaining when he enacts it. However, we left the city because of him,” She sighed. “Luke has his bad days, and on those, it’s better to be in a quiet area.”