Our ship remembers the sea, yet the only water we know these days comes from the giant mermaid’s tears. Once a mighty pirate vessel, we are now a model ship-in-a-bottle inside our abductor’s grotto.
I was once known for stealing every gem from every royal crown. Now, I of a thousand rubies, am captured by the watery sapphires of the mer-giantess’s eyes. I didn’t know mermaid tears taste saltier than human. That the larger the body, the deeper the sorrow. I have graduated from sharpening my knives on leather belts to becoming a master desalinator. I store our drinking water into buckets, then use the remaining salt to preserve the tiny fish left in the wake of another one of her crying spells.
My work for the day finished, I drape myself over the ship’s mermaid figurehead (tiny and unimportant compared to her vast beauty) and patiently wait. I want to be the first to watch her arrive, dulse-tangled hair, shipwrecks caught between her teeth, skin tinged green with the sea.
Not everyone adapts to our new routine the way I do.
The old sailor—always quick to call my love for the giantess unhealthy or remind me she doesn’t give two corals about my tiny existence—has to plug his ears each night before going to sleep in his hammock. He hears the song of the sea, that suicidal shanty. I once had to use every nautical knot I know and tie him to the mast so he wouldn’t plunge overboard. The water is far away now, undulating out past the mouth of the grotto, but he still hears its nocturnal siren murmurs. If he jumped now, he would become a blood-and-guts stain against the curved glass of our bottle prison.
The captain charts desperate courses, bent over his maps and tools, pulling at his hair until he is bald and baby-faced. He and the old sailor used to concoct elaborate escape plans but have long since given up, tiring of failure. Whenever I bring his seaweed-and-minnow stew dinner down to his cabin, he stares at me with eyelash-less eyes. “I thought you were smarter than that when I hired you,” the captain sometimes says. “You used to be hard as a shell, girlie, the best thief in the land.”
“I was,” I agree every time. But she has opened me up like an oyster, and now my soft insides ache for the first sight of her every day like the clockwork dawn.
The captain’s parrot isn’t faring any better. Once upon a time he flew nightly to the crow’s nest and serenaded Cygnus, the swan constellation. She had almost accepted his invitation to elope when the giantess came upon our wave-tossed ship, snatched it from the storm, and took us home to her collection. The parrot doesn’t judge my feelings. He knows what it’s like to love impossible things.
I hang further off the edge of the figurehead to catch a glimpse of her through the foggy, slightly distorted glass. Why are you sad? I want to ask her. Unburden yourself to me; I used to know all about unburdening people of their gold and silver, but grief is a new spoil I think I can learn to bear. Are you sweet or salty up close? Will you let me pillow myself on your plush shoulders? Can I have one of your shiny scales to use as a mirror? From now on I only want to see myself in you.
The giantess drops to the floor and the grotto shakes, our ship rattling in its bottle. I cling tighter to the figurehead and take in her form as her tears wash down the glass like a rainstorm, a watery blur. Greenbluepurple scales hug her skin, crawling up her breasts. A strong tail supports her even on land, while her hands are webbed and her teeth needle sharp. Sometimes she inserts tweezers through the bottle’s throat to straighten our sails. The tweezers never come near me, although I’m not sure I would mind the pinch, as long as it came from her hands. Today she only gazes through her naked eyes and cries cries cries into the mouth of the bottle.
The old sailor curses as he mops up the saltwater that slinks its way onto the deck. His peg leg gains an easy grip onto the slippery wood floor. I descend into the ship to prepare dinner with a stupid smile on my face. My lips taste of salt.
When I return, the old sailor is still here, scowling. “Listen, I know a thing or two about loving the wrong person.”
Of course he does. He had a messy love affair with the ocean once and she has been calling him to his doom ever since.
“We’re not the same,” I tell him.
He shakes his head morosely and wrings out his mop.
That night, after the giant mermaid has re-corked the bottle, covered it in grimy canvas, and placed us on the grotto’s highest shelf, I go to sleep shivering. I dream of growing large enough to become a giantess myself. Our prison shatters, wood splinters and glass shards flying every which way and ricocheting off the stone walls.
I emerge from the rubble ready to dry her tears. To walk into her arms.
