Nebula Awards Showcase 2016 (16 page)

A hand grabs my shoulder from behind and I almost scream. I'm pulled backward, the door to the hold clicking shut in front of me.

“Don't watch, Lily,” Dad says in that low voice he puts on whenever he wants to protect me. My blood boils, fear and anger and adrenaline roaring through my system. “Go back upstairs and pretend you never saw any of this.”

“They're fish!” I snarl. “What the hell is Sunan doing? This is all kinds of wrong. They're not even people, they're just goddamn fish!”

“It happens on ships sometimes,” Dad says, and I can't believe what I'm hearing. “It doesn't hurt the meat.” He looks straight at me, those serene dark eyes unfamiliar for the first time in my life. “I didn't want you to know until you were older, but I suppose you were bound to find out sooner or later.”

“You knew?” I whisper. “Does everyone on this ship know?”

My father sighs. “Go upstairs and don't think about it.”

I have this horrible epiphany. Dad used to have his own boat too, long ago. Mermaids are common enough; even the big ones could fit in a bathtub. He could have kept them alive, feeding them, fucking them—is his story about Mom just that, a story? Or is it true that he kept a fish for himself, hurting it—raping it—until it gave him three daughters? Or was there more than one fish? I think of the dumb, mud-mouthed catfish mermaids that drift into our nets behind the house sometimes, and my stomach turns.

“Have you been fucking them, too?” The words spill out before I can stop them.

“Lily, go upstairs.” His voice has gone cold and dangerous.

“This is really sick, Dad,” I manage.

“I'm not going to tell you again,” he says, and when he looks at me, I wish he hadn't.

I go.

My mother was not a fish. My mother was a warm, human woman. I am certain of this, even if I cannot remember her at all.

There was a story I heard once about a man who got his dick bitten off by a catfish. He was peeing in the water and the catfish followed the stream of urine straight to his dick, crunched it right off.

This was our second-favorite story growing up, after the story about our mom, and now that Iris is an almost-biologist, she likes to tell us smugly that it's the ammonia in pee that attracts fish, something about tracking prey through the ammonia leaking from their gills. I don't know if this is true. But I've felt the crushing power of a catfish's jaws, the bony plates on my arm while I wrestled them down to the hold. The catfish in the Mekong are huge, bigger than me. I am learning, as I get older, that many things are bigger than me.

In her second year of high school, Iris shut down. She stopped going to school, staying curled up in bed all day, and at night she would cry in her sleep. She wouldn't talk about what had happened, but I found out from May, who knew some of Iris's friends, that one of the boys at her school had followed Iris into a broom closet when they were cleaning up the classroom together. He was a close friend, a big, heavyset guy with short hair and glasses, but Iris would flinch whenever someone mentioned his name.

As I lie in my hammock, I think about catfish. I think about crushing mouths, crushing holds. All the while, the brown mermaid's scent and voice sing in my blood, pulling it, tugging and setting it aflame.

I swing my legs over the side of my hammock and slip out of the sleeping quarters, taking the lantern with me.

Ahbe is making his way up the stairs as I descend, and he stops me with a laugh and a hand out against the wall. “What are you doing up so late, Lily?”

I look at him, that fire a cold burn in my chest. His shirt is hastily buttoned, his knees damp with seawater. “I'm going to check on the fish,” I say. The words feel flat in the wet, stifling air.

“I just did that,” Ahbe says. “They're fine. Nothing's spoiled; we should be able to get them to the market by tomorrow.”

“No. I want to see the mermaids,” I tell him, deliberately, and his face changes.

“I didn't know you knew about that,” he says. “You're too young to go down to the hold by yourself.”

“I'm fifteen,” I say. I think about the way my dad talks, the rich, strong core of his voice, and I channel that as I add, “I'm old enough to decide what I want. And I want a mermaid.”

Ahbe stares at me in the lantern light, and I can see his resolve wavering. “I guess it's all right,” he mutters. “I was fifteen too the first time I had a mermaid. Just be careful—they bite.” He sucks in his cheek. “I didn't take you for a
tom
, though.”

I knock his arm out of my way and he laughs. “Go to bed, Ahbe,” I snap. “You're stupid. I'll lock up the hold when I'm done.”

He tosses me the keys before he vanishes up the stairs, and I'm left alone in front of the heavy metal door to the hold.

It's impossible to be a fish's daughter. It's almost as impossible as believing that your father is a monster.

I open the door and walk inside. Another set of stairs descends from the doorway, disappearing underwater after the third step. The mermaids appear to have calmed down a little, the surface of the water no longer choppy with tails. Only the slowly moving tethers stretching from the wall mark their presence beneath the waves.

I raise the lantern slowly across the room, searching for the brown mermaid. There: I catch a glimpse of her white eyes peeking just above the water. She is bound tight against the wall, tighter than any of the other fish. To get to her, I will need to wade across the hold.

I take a deep breath and shuck off my clothes before descending into the water. It's freezing cold; the shock, the new weightlessness of my body, shoot thrills of adrenaline and terror through me. The mermaids dart away from my legs, smooth contact of scales against skin as they brush by. I walk faster, purposefully. I remember the fins and teeth on some of the tigerfish mermaids we caught earlier today. Maybe if I'm confident, they'll think I'm a predator and stay away.

By the time I reach the brown mermaid, I'm shivering and my body is pebbled with goosebumps. The lantern wobbles in my hand, casting an orange glimmer over the rippling waves.

The mermaid surfaces, her chin just brushing the water. I can see her spines, the pods and fronds, and the rest of her soft, blobby body floating with the motion of the ship.

A sound hisses through her teeth, and it's a moment before I can understand what she's saying. “The girl-child.”

“I'm not a child,” I find myself saying through chattering teeth.

She smiles, blind eyes glowing silver in the darkness. “No, no child. What is your name,
luk?
”

In all of those European myths we had to read in school, they made it clear that you should never give your name to a faerie. But this is just a fish.

“Lily,” I say. I wish I had pockets to put my hands in. “Why do you keep calling me
luk?
”
Why can you talk?
I want to ask, but the breath is sucked back into my lungs. I am afraid of the answer.

Her arms are stick-thin, tipped with delicate toddler-hands and bound above her head. “Let me go and I'll tell you.”

“Fat chance,” I say. “I didn't come down here to get eaten by a fish.”

She clicks her jaws. “It is the other way around, no? You eat the fish.”

“Yeah,” I say. “That's the way it's supposed to be.”

The mermaid laughs at me. “And are you content with the way things are supposed to be,
luk?
” Perhaps she smells my hesitation, hears my grip tighten on the lantern, because she softens her voice to a deep hum. “I will not hurt you. Let me go and I will tell you everything you want to know.”

Maybe it's because I want to believe her so badly, maybe it's the fire singing deep in my body, maybe it's the image of Sunan in the water on top of a mermaid; before I really know what I'm doing, my fingers are picking out the knots attaching her tethers to the ring above her head.

As soon as the last knot slips undone, her hand snaps out, lightning quick, snagging my chin. The twine tethers still attached to her wrists lash against my bare chest. The lantern bumps against her head as she draws close and licks my face, her tongue cold, alien, and rubbery. Her teeth are inches from my eyes.

“Are you really my mother?” I whisper.

The mermaid's tongue sweeps across my forehead, down my nose, and across my mouth before retracting. “Ah,” she sighs. “Not my broodling. No, I would remember one like you.” That childlike hand is nightmarishly strong. “But you are ours nonetheless. You taste like the ocean, not like the stinking land above.” She lets go of my chin, but I don't back away. “I would grant you a boon,
luk
, in place of your mother. But I must have a bite of your flesh to make it true.”

Dad used to tell us an old tale about a magic fish that granted wishes if you caught it and released it back into the sea. I don't remember this part of the story.

Her baby-fingers trickle across my shoulder. “Right here. It will not hurt much.”

A hysterical laugh bubbles up inside me. I am standing naked in the hold surrounded by mermaids, talking to a magic fish. What am I afraid of? I have had worse injuries; I can handle a single bite. I am an adult now.

I open my mouth to ask her for enough money to get off this stinking boat, enough gold to drown a sailor in, to drown all of the sailors in. I open it to ask about my mother, if she knows her or can find her or bring her back. If my mother is alive or dead. Whether she was human or fish, truly.

But then I think of my sisters: Iris, shaking beneath her blankets and clutching the biology textbook like a magic charm, and May, who had given me hers to protect me at sea. I remember that there are more important things. I think about the people who hurt my sisters, who could hurt them, about the boy in the broom closet and Sunan in the hold. About my father on landing, his eyes bitter cold.

I tell the mermaid my real wish.

She grants it.

There are many versions of this story, each with a different ending.

In one, I swim away with the brown mermaid. The sun wavers in a jagged disk overhead, glinting in strange scintillations. The water is cold, the pressure enormous. It pushes in on my billowy body, still tender, pressing it into a tighter, sleeker shape. Our tiny, delicate hands are locked tight as we dive deeper into the ocean.

In another, a large storm scuttles
Pakpao,
along with all the other fishing boats in the area, on the reefs by Teluk Siam. The hold cracks, allowing the mermaids to escape. Everyone survives and is discovered days later. The rest of the story is fairly uneventful, equally implausible, and made up by people who care more for happy endings than truth.

But here is what really happens. The brown mermaid disappears and
Pakpao
makes it safely home with a hold full of live mermaids. If the crew looks a bit dazed and disoriented, if they are not quite themselves and walk as if they are not used to having two legs, it is just the result of sunstroke. If the mermaids in the hold swim in frantic circles, their eyes rolling wildly in their heads and their wails ricocheting through the hold, it is just what fish do. After all, mermaids are fish, not people. The Japanese traders find the catch acceptable and the mermaids are transported by tank to restaurants across Hokkaido. We make a huge profit.

With the exception of yours truly, every member of
Pakpao
's crew drowns within a week of returning home. Though I live, our family does not escape this tragedy unscathed; my father's body is found floating in the nets behind the house. A joint funeral is held. Sunan's widow speaks tearfully about how her late husband stopped talking after his last fishing trip and had spent the days before his death trying to walk into the river, a story that resonates with the families of the recently deceased.

My sisters weep, their futures secure. I weep, too, licking the salt from my tears. There is a bandage on my shoulder and a bite beneath that will not heal.