Short Story: Mermaid Hunt

Captain Marda is hunting mermaids…or are they hunting her?

Artwork by ​Mayticks.

​When hunting mermaids, it’s best to keep your rudder close and your first mate closer.

That’s why Captain Marda allows these brief nighttime trysts with Barth. Barth lays his stubble against the smooth white of the place under her collarbone, and she keeps the map open on the communicator. He whispers things like, “fins like gold” and “seaweed hair” to himself, into her thighs, and she watches the dot of their sub blink across the blue screen.

During the day, Marda holds the crew like so many round pebbles in her fist, each one slick and wily, insubordinate. Morale is low and she can’t sleep with all of them, so she lets them sleep together. Men and women all intermixed in the metal walls at night, howling like beasts.

But each day Marda gets closer. The sub circles coral reefs off the coasts, where mermaids are said to like the colors of the schools of fishes and train them to swim around their necks like jewelry or live behind their ears, beneath their long hair. Archipelagos — the sub skirts strands of islands like gemstones spread across blue lagoons and green shoals. Sometimes mermaids like shallow places, but mostly they like the dark and beautiful uncharted, abandoned, soulless parts of the undiscovered world. Superficial creatures, they are easily distracted by gild and shine.

The sub comes up for air only once a week. Captain Marda lies in half-naked dishevelment at the helm, her ear always trained for the ping of radar. The sea is blanket smooth and it is unbearably hot. Barth looks somehow fatter sitting in the sun, his eyes squinting at the sea.

Captain Marda knows she will find the sea dweller. She is ruthless — trained for this moment, a seasoned killer. She wears her long brown hair in braids under her cap and does not smile. They are scouts, not pirates, not picnickers, not mutineers, not smugglers. They have superiors to answer to. The matronship sends sarcastic memos, threatening Marda with a demotion. She reads and then deletes them. She sends her weekly progress memos back with no retort.

It was the same last war when there were so many mermaids that they lined the beaches with their tails flopping lazily in the sand like fish out of water. Or more…