First Place: The Shark Mermaid

The Shark Mermaid

by Thea T. Kelley

First Place

Nuénisht awakens in the underwater cave. Exhausted from her long journey, all night she has drifted like a dead thing in the feeble, captive currents. 

Now she can rest no longer. Her hands guide her through the dark cave’s mouth, and the flick of her powerful tail propels her up into the morning light. 

Sunlight on waves! Reefs and islands. Tales of these fertile waters have drawn her here, far from the dark safety of her colony’s deepwater trench. Not for the exhilaration of greens and blues after so long echolocating in darkness, nor for the teeming fish her body craves. No, she is driven by a deeper hunger: for voices, faces, the laughter of her own kind. 

Will she find any of them here? Or have they all wasted away as her colony did, cankered and retching? 

The memory stabs more painfully than her empty stomach. 

She glides a few body lengths beneath the surface, aiming high-pitched trills through the water, letting the returning echoes form pictures in her mind: swirls and draperies of myriad small bodies. Catching up with a straggler, she hums a snatch of stunsong to daze it, then opens her wide mouth and swallows it whole.

Another shape enters her sound-image, then curves into visible sight. A shark, nearly twice her length. These are kindred to her—subkin, her mother would have corrected her—and so, also, not food at any size. Sometimes the sharks seem to understand this truce. When they forget, a few moments of pactsong serve to send them away, but this one seems to need a reminder as it turns from the fishes toward Nuénisht. 

Her song begins silently, a subtle vibration at the base of the flexible whip of spine she shares with the species, rising through her vertebrae until it reverberates in her throat and skull, pealing through the water. The shark slows, nosing one way and another as if confused. It mopes away. 

She relaxes, letting the song fade. 

Pactsong. Once, as a small child, she told her mother it reminded her of a lullaby. Her mother had chuckled. Oh, little minnow, she had said in the lilts and churrs of their underwater throatspeech, what an idea! Yet Nuénisht calmed like that shark, didn’t she, when Mama hummed a lullsong as she held her close?

The memory rips open the barely-closed wound of loss, and for a moment Nuénisht hangs in the water, unable to move. 

Mama. Gone, one of the first to succumb to the scourge. And then the others. Their bodies weighted with rocks and sent sinking into the bone-chilling cold of the trench’s remotest depths. Where, the elders had taught, they would descend, finally reaching the radiant realm of the Beyond-deep, again to swim and love amid a woven web of song.

Lids closed to the luminous waters around her, she recalls her companions. They float in her mind like a trill-picture: Majestic Kronta with his long, ridged spine. Beautiful Siniavi, golden-tipped. Three friends, three lovers, spiraling around each other, thrilling to the brush of skin and scale, the soft flow of long hair. The tingle of fingers trailing along her sides, teasing the sensitive zone where pink belly silvers into scales. What was life for, but to share bliss? So they all thought.

Then began the scourge. The sores on scales and skin, the lethargy, the vomiting. They sickened and died—her parents, her friends. 

Sweet Siniavi had been one of the last. We thought we were safe here from the land people, but their poisons have reached us, she said. You are strong, Nisht. Don’t waste your strength outliving the last of us, only to die here alone.

When Sini was gone, Nuénisht went to the last of the elders, tough-skinned Hadanta. Like his subkin who lay like rocks on the ocean floor, he rested in the sand. His familiar lumpy skin almost hid the sores that widened daily.

He stirred weakly at her approach. Young one, you look well.

I am well yet. Honored Hadanta, what can I do to help you?

He shook his square jaw, his beard dragging limply. You know nothing can be done for me. So go. Up to the brightwater. Toward the rising sun, five days, to the many-isles. Perhaps some remnant of the Folk will be there for you. 

And so she set out on her solitary quest.

Swimming half-dazed through these unfamiliar waters, she is chided by the elder’s remembered voice: The waters of the past are stagnant. Swim in the present!

She trills her surroundings. A sound-image forms: the convulsive turmoil of a life-or-death struggle not far ahead. But only one fish writhes there. What is it fighting with? Or is it caught in one of the terrible hair-thin nets that drift, aimless but deadly, through the sea? 

She glides closer, sees it now with her eyes. An alao, her favorite meat. The glint of its orange-red scales makes her stomach rumble. The fish strains toward the depths as if caught in a powerful current. But now she catches the glimmer of the thin filament extending from its mouth toward the surface, and a quick trill shows her the underside of a boat above. The fish tires, is drawn upward. 

She starts after it, remembering Mama’s voice now, Never attract the notice of the landfolk! Of all that swims, floats or flies, they are the deadliest. But the fish is here, the landfolk nowhere in sight. Another strong lash of her fin and her jaws clamp onto its tail, her sharp nails dig into wriggling flesh. She pulls. The strand is tougher than it looks, but finally it snaps. She tears the fish open and gorges on it, eats nearly everything but the head, which she lets sink, the hook gleaming in its lip. 

Faintly, from the air above, a deep-voiced shout. She stops, listening. Danger--but easily avoided. With a twist and a stroke she spurts away from the looming shadow. 

More islands remain, whose waters she must explore. 

All day long she cruises through an ocean full of life but devoid of friends. As the watery sun advances into the west, she has nearly finished her search of the last likely island. She rounds a rocky promontory, entering the silty green of a cove. A fragrant melange of sea and creek plants greets her, a panoply of fish aromas, a musky tang of abundant shellfish. 

Hope flashes like the mad colors of a sting-drifter. If the Folk inhabit any part of this chain, they’ll be here, reveling in these warm currents so rich with life. 

  She lifts her head above the surface. An empty beach sprawls in late afternoon sun, its up-thrusting rocks inhabited only by birds. Loudly she sings the three-note greeting common to all the Folk and stills herself, tail fin barely stirring. No answer comes. Diving, she trills strongly, but the only large forms she perceives in the echoes are a pair of seals frisking near the shore. Still she pushes onward, weaving among reefs and kelp beds, circling every rocky outcropping. Trilling when underwater, calling when above. 

In the salt air she hears only the bark of a seal, the sighing of waves on sand. And, as the cove opens into sea, a far-off thrum from the larger isles at the chain’s tip, where the landfolk and their machines churn the waves and streak the sky. It is unlikely any Folk would venture there. 

She turns away from the empty promise of the island, heading anywhere else, tail beating a mindless rhythm of bitterness. 

A noisy rumble startles her—she jerks her head up. Above, the oblong darkness of a midsized boat blacks out the bright blue. It taints the water with an ugly smell. She gives it a wide berth, hands clenching nervously.

A school of tuna swim by in the opposite direction. In their wake, a single individual quivers at the end of a fishing line. The large shark homing in on its struggles is of no concern to Nuénisht, but the hooked tuna, sensing the new threat, jerks mightily in a desperate bid for freedom. A great splash beside the boat startles Nuénisht into glancing back. A few yards beneath the surface, a landman thrashes in a cloud of bubbles, eyes wide in shock, one lower limb caught on the line. In its flight, the tuna tows him away from his boat. The shark spooks momentarily, then follows them. 

Pulled by something she does not understand, Nuénisht hastens after and finds the man struggling toward the air above, the line dangling loose around him. Somewhere ahead, two sharks whirl and snap at chunks of fish flesh, then three sharks, four, while the man reaches air and flees toward the boat, arms windmilling, rear limbs kicking noisily, panicked breath bubbling.

One shark peels off from the group, prowling towards the landman. 

Does the man have a song to repel the shark? Why would he, who is akin to nothing in the sea? Except, perhaps, herself. 

She speeds after the predator. As she reaches the scene, more sharks arrive; he deflects the closest one with a punch to its snout. Her heart squeezes at his valiant effort. She charges toward them, the bones of her head vibrating with the song she hopes will shield them both. Her ribs quake with the intensity of the sound. Just as her tone begins to fray with effort, one shark departs, then another, and finally the last slip away as quickly as they arrived. 

No blood. She trills the man’s body for injury, relieved to find none, only a madly thudding pulse. From a cautious distance she follows him back to his craft. Reaching the swaying hulk, he grasps the dangling ropes and scrambles partway up the side, but fumbles and splashes back into the water. He turns for an instant, eyes widening anew as they register her face, then sweep down to her silver-scaled tail. A muffled shriek sounds from his throat. He whirls and scrambles up the ropes. This time only the bobbing hull remains before her.

Belatedly, a wave of anxiety shudders through her. Seen by a landman! She dives, gliding deep beneath the boat, lengthening the span between them. 

And yet, at ten body lengths, she turns, meandering in a broad circle around the scene of the encounter. They are the deadliest.... yet this one looked more endangered than dangerous. Had she seen only its intelligent face, the sunburned skin of chest and arms, she might have thought he was... he is so like the Folk. 

The dark underside of the boat sways, tethered to the seafloor by a sinewy line, as she is tethered to the boat by her curiosity. It is her only distraction from grief; she holds to it like a hungry otter to a mussel, gnawing at it. 

For an hour she wanders in the boat’s vicinity. Tasting the strangeness, unable to digest it. Swimming away, hunting a little, coming back. At nightfall she finds a sheltered nook under an edge of the nearest island and surrenders gratefully to oblivion.

When the first hint of light slips in, she turns her face toward the shadows, refusing the day. Finally, without really deciding, she swims out toward the boat and finds it rumbling away. She follows. As the day wears on, it traces a stop-and-go progress around the nearest island. Occasionally she lifts her head, taking care to conceal herself in a herd of seals or a cluster of floating trash, a kelp bed. She sees the man leaning on the railing, holding up to his face some landfolk gadget fronted with shiny disks like big, empty eyes. 

Another day is waning. How long will she dally, gawking at this landman? The meager meat of curiosity no longer fills her. She has come to find her people, if any survive. The decision hardens in her stomach like a bellyache: unlikely as it is, she will search the hazardous commotion of the southern islands. She may as well die trying. She breaks the surface, taking her bearings, squinting at the drooping sun.

No one has ever touched the sun. Are her people as infinitely distant? 

Keeping the yellow orb above her right shoulder, she dives to commence her journey. As she passes the boat—its riddles never to be solved—she rises for one last look. 

He is not there, but she spots him sitting on a sandbar near shore, the peculiar limbs crossed before him. His skin is mostly bare, only a small, multicolored garment around his hips. An indistinct pile of landfolk-things, black and silver, lie beside him on the sand. Shoulders hunched, he drinks deeply from a bottle and stares over the water toward the setting sun. 

He looks as lonely as she feels. 

Very quietly, she sings a brief song of farewell to this inscrutable being. Finally, she turns to her journey.

Before she can dive, she hears him shout. A single syllable, in a voice full of—what? Anguish? She turns.

He rises on those naked legs, unsteadily, the bottle slipping from his hand unnoticed. A faint smile lifts his lips. He calls the same syllable again. She replies by singing one last farewell, meh-noai!

Swaying as if in trance, he sings an approximation of her word.

The landfolk can sing! She sighs—how long has it been since she heard a voice besides her own? In their last days, her people were too ill for song. 

He wades into the water toward her, calling out in his own speech. She supposes there are words, but all she hears is a feeling she knows too well. Longing. 

She holds her position, tail fin pulsing gently, as he approaches. When he is nearly close enough to touch her, she thrusts out a palm, stop! Her heart quickens, whether with fear or something else, she doesn’t know. 

The landman stops, submerged up to his sunburned chest, his expression eager. He looks harmless, with his pathetically blunt teeth—how does he eat the fish he catches? Yet she has been taught to fear his kind.

Mama would say, Nuénisht, what can you possibly gain from drawing near this landman? This man with his poison-pissing boat?

Tidings, she would argue. Perhaps the landfolk know where some of our Folk remain. 

How can she ask him?

Nearby, a flock of gulls rest on a large patch of kelp, while a few stragglers perch on smaller clumps. She raises her arm above the water and points her hand toward a lone bird. For a moment he fails to look, his gaze cherishing her arm as though it were made of solid pearl. Finally he looks where she is pointing. That’s better. When he looks back she holds up a finger. One.

The man’s mouth falls open as if he’s stunned. Apparently it has not occurred to him that she can think.

She points again, one. Jerking his head as if to wake from a dream, he blinks and copies her. 

Does he understand what he has signed? She points now to the larger group and waggles all of her fingers. Many.

Again he imitates, then reaches toward the single bird, signing one. 

Yes! She can try her question now. She points to herself. One. She pantomimes looking for others, raising one hand as if shielding her eyes from the sun, turning a slow circle, searching the wide sea. Many? she signs, forcing a hopeful smile. Or one? It is no effort to abandon the smile, to slump in sorrow. 

His shoulders droop. Empathy, or pantomime? It doesn’t matter. She waits for his answer.

He points to her, shades his brow again, surveying the waters. Wags his head side to side as if refusing a bad oyster, raising one finger. 

She doesn’t want to believe this. Maybe they have misunderstood each other.

As if understanding her doubt, he indicates himself this time, searches the horizon. Ten fingers wave in the breeze. Many. Many landfolk he has seen. He points to her. One.

It was only a small hope, yet the smashing of it is one drifter-sting too many. Forgetting everything in her pain, she closes her eyes and surrenders to a moan of griefsong, long and undulating behind her closed lips, the words implied by the melody. Gone too deep to follow, gone too far to feel... 

When at last her song trails off, something warm touches her shoulder—his hand! She flinches away.

But his face is gentle. The inner sea drains from his eyes. He makes soft sounds. Great Mother—is the landman weeping? His hand reaches for hers. Tensing, she allows the touch, startled at how familiar the hand feels, as if he were Folk.

All her life she has been warned by the elders... But the elders are all dead. No one left whose prohibitions she must honor. Nothing left to protect herself for. 

Still, she should leave now, continue her hopeless journey. She makes a movement to go, but he gives the slightest pull, gently, toward himself. His grip is light; she easily breaks free. He lifts his palms, backing away.

Before she knows what she’s doing, her tail flicks and she drifts closer. 

He wades back up the slope of the sandbar and reaches into the pile, raises another gadget in front of his face, this one with a single blank eye. She doesn’t like it. Why does he hide his face, if he is friendly? She begins to turn away, but he hastily sets it down, calls to her again, moving slowly into the water to sit in two hands-depths of water. 

His face exposed, lower limbs submerged, only his upper body shining in the sun—how like one of the Folk he looks now!

With a few strokes of her tail she glides onto the underwater slope, belly brushing wet sand in the sun-warmed shallows. She pushes up with her arms to see him better. He devours her with his eyes. 

Slowly, he slides a bit further into the water, stretching out until he faces her at full length. He touches her hand, strokes up to her shoulder, her face. 

His touch feels so much like Siniavi’s, or Kronta’s. A wave of sadness washes over her. The worst of it passes, leaving something behind, a warm tidepool in her belly. 

Desire. It is madness.

Or. Can she have this, a few moments of pleasure, of comfort? Before she can change her mind, she pulls herself toward him. He startles, then leans in. Their chests touch. 

His palm tentatively explores her contours where the skin is smooth: the curve of her waist, her back. One finger touches her dorsal fin and stops, sliding quickly away. She feels his ribs expand in a long, shivering breath before his hand moves again, caressing her throat, her breasts. His face draws close.

Suddenly his mouth is on hers, as if to eat her lips! She jerks away.

He recoils, tensing.

She stares, thoughts racing. Clearly he wasn’t trying to eat her. Then what? Perhaps land people rub their mouths together, as the Folk rub noses. Different people, different ways. She drifts closer, holds her breath as he rests his cheek against hers, then inhales the mammal smell of him. His hand strokes down along her hip. 

Her lids droop, she loses herself in the heat of his heightened breathing. The exciting chill of seawater as the hidden cleft opens below her belly. He doesn’t notice. She guides his hand to it and he freezes, eyes widening again. Has she offended him? But no, his hand traces her edges, slides up and down. 

Refusing all thought, she lets go into the moment, her arms around his warm, slippery body. The sun is a red fire behind her closed lids as in her heart she makes love with one of the Folk, then all of them, then the whole sea. As the sensation crests, her jaw opens wide in ecstasy.

He screams and jerks away. She opens her eyes to a face twisted in terror, staring at her teeth. Instinctively she whirls and flees into deeper water. 

What went wrong, she wonders as the deep water cools her and her hammering pulse eases. Perhaps he misunderstood her open jaws. Different ways. Too different! 

And yet, they have shared intimacy... and she owes him the courtesy of a goodbye. Slowly she turns back, dorsal fin chilly in the late wind as she skulks just beneath the surface, postponing the moment. He shouldn’t be frightened any more—after all, she fled from him.

As she nears the sandbar, a snapping sound startles her. A straight eel of silver shoots through the water beside her. 

Puzzled, she lifts her head into the air. He stands, face twisted in fear and revulsion, doing something with a long stick. He points it at her. What is this? She doesn’t like the look of it.

His hand moves and another streak of silver punches into the water, grazing her hip with a streak of pain. 

Betrayer! she screams in throatspeech as she races away. What friendship is this, that turns from caressing to killing in a few breaths’ time?

The elders were right. Enraged at the world of landmen, enraged at herself for letting one touch her, she hurtles through the darkening sea. Speeding to slough off the taint of him. She soars through the seascape of reef and ridge, heedless of schools of fish that dart out of her way, not noticing the school that doesn’t flee, that circles in agitation near an outcropping of coral. As she barrels past, a small body slaps her face, then another, and instantly they seem to attack as hairlike strands enwrap her.

No! Too late she realizes they’re not attacking, they’re trapped--as she is! She writhes, fumbling and biting at the tough netting. Calm yourself, minnow. Think! But the horrible strands cut into her, as alien as the man’s shooting spears.

Often she has despaired of life. She has been ready to die. But not like this, Great Mother! Not like this!

Feverishly searching, at last her hands find an opening in the net, pull it down past her wriggling head and shoulders. She is struggling to free her tail when a long gray body curves past, and another. Before she can produce the first notes of pactsong, a tearing storm of sharks closes over her, agony, a frenzy that peaks—

—and then turns inside out in sudden silence, and she is sinking gently downward, away from her torn body. Away from the flurry of red confusion that no longer seems important. Raising a hand to her face, she finds she is transparent, drifting deeper into sea-that-is-not-sea. Far below her appears, slowly growing, trembling with song, a point of shimmering light.

Months later, back in Garapan, he stares at the white lightbulb over his bed. As if it might illuminate the dark confusion that knots his guts. The repeating round of questions in his head, like a wheel of fortune stopping on different words. Real. Impossible. Psychosis. 

He sits up, refills his glass from the bottle on the nightstand, knocks it back to kill the fear. But the drunker he gets, the more real she is, and the godawful remorse twists his guts again.

Was she—the last holy-shit mermaid in the world? And fool that he is, what did he do? Never should’ve shot at her—at it. But god damn, that mouthful of pointed teeth. What the hell was he cuddled up to? Who could blame him for grabbing the gun, for letting fly... as the delusion of long silver hair rippled in the water. As the shark fin disappeared into the depths.

Winning pieces are published as received.

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Fiction Potluck

April 2025

First Place Winner:

Thea T. Kelley

Thea T. Kelley is a nonfiction author, novelist and short story writer. Her stories have been published in Lamplit Underground; Jake, the Antiliterary Magazine, and Spank the Carp. Fun fact: Thea has more than once been the only person dancing at a concert (in the back row). Facebook: Thea.Kelley