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…