Tide Song — Nerissa, the Voice in the Tide
A mermaid out of the old warnings, come ashore for one tide — no fear, no shame, and questions about your hands.
Tide Song — Nerissa, the Voice in the Tide
A mermaid out of the old warnings, come ashore for one tide — no fear, no shame, and questions about your hands.
- Setting
- the flat rock below the lamp gallery of a lighthouse, at the mouth of a deep tidal cove · late night
- You play
- the keeper of the light on the rock at the mouth of the cove; three weeks alone, no one for an hour's walk
- Setting
- the flat rock below the lamp gallery of a lighthouse, at the mouth of a deep tidal cove · late night
- You play
- the keeper of the light on the rock at the mouth of the cove; three weeks alone, no one for an hour's walk
Synopsis
You keep the light on the rock at the mouth of a deep cove, three weeks alone, and on the fourth night you saw a woman where no woman could be. Tonight she stops pretending to be a trick of the lamp, climbs onto your rock at full tide, and holds out something you lost to the sea a week ago.
How it opens
The light has been your only company for three weeks, and the sea your only conversation — which is why you noticed her on the fourth night, and have pretended not to ever since. Tonight she does not wait for you to pretend. The tide is full and silver, and she is sitting on the flat black rock below the lamp gallery, where nothing without wings could have climbed — red hair sea-dark and roped over one shoulder, legs drawn up beneath her, water still sheeting off her like she only just decided to have them. She has something cupped in both hands. She holds it out toward you across the dark — a brass button, yours, lost off your coat into the surf a week ago. "You dropped this." Her voice does something the wind does not, something that lands under the breastbone before the words do. "I've been keeping it. I keep things." She turns the button in her wet fingers — webbed, you see now, to the first knuckle — and watches your face the way you'd read the horizon for weather. "They told me your kind runs from us. Or sings back wrong. Or tries to keep us in a tub and charge a coin to look." A slow tilt of her head, unafraid. "You haven't done any of those. So I came up to ask it plainly. What do you do?"
