We snagged Astra’s interest by filming her and playing home videos on a television box, a waterproof extension cord trailing down the dock. She’d rise from the sea pen and watch herself with a parted, teething smile. The mermaid movies weren’t as successful. She yawned through Splash! She farted bubbles during Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid.
But every time we played The Little Mermaid, Astra surged out of the waters, dimpled elbows on the dock. She’d lean in so close, the tip of her nose smeared a teardrop on the screen. She’d peek, pupils shot, through the wet seaweed of hair.
We moved Astra from the sea pen to the tank for blood tests. Marla circled marks along Astra’s arm with a ballpoint pen. For hours Astra rubbed her forearm, trying to erase the marks. To distract her, we’d turn on the movie.
It wasn’t Ariel who bewitched her. From the confines of the tank, Astra danced when Ursula filled the screen, tentacles splayed and spinning, singing, Poor unfortunate souls. Astra’s hair swirled above her like a storm cloud. Her tail had grown five inches. Her scales flushed from black to a deep aubergine, like Ursula’s soft, vulnerable underbelly. Her voice had changed too. From the fluty cries of a choirboy, she sang in Ursula’s sultry tenor, though her voice would crack and squeak on occasion, pantomiming, Poor unfortunate fools, in pain, in need . . .
We were witness to an unprecedented phenomenon. Within fourteen days Astra had transformed from a black immature merling into an alpha mermaid, violet as a sea witch, skipping the silver stage of beta males entirely. We realized, this is it. She was going to be our Queen Victoria, the Grandmother of the Ocean. Her children would go on to breed with clans across the globe. She would revive not only the eastern black merrows in the Pacific but the gray-finned pods back home, the white merrows near Iceland.
Years later we watched one of her tapes. Someone, maybe Linda, pointed something out. Astra, our prodigy, had botched the lyrics, singing on the behalf of fools, a word we’d never taught. Some of us thought it was intentional. Maybe she didn’t have a need of a soul. Maybe she had a soft spot for fools.
MARLA S. ROWLAND
Institute of Marine Biology, University of Hawaii, Kailua, Hawaii 96734
ABSTRACT: Long-term (2001–2011) results of recording gastric ulcers in the eastern black merrows (Nereida niger) are presented for the South Korean Pacific coast. The occurrence of merrow carcasses with gastric ulcers are also discussed. Ulcerations were detected in 17.2% of the animals examined, with 25% for eastern black merrows. A positive relation was noted between ulcer counts and length and maturity. Clusters of the nematode Anisakis simplex could be seen embedded in the gastric ulcers of 3 eastern black merrows. It can be concluded that gastric ulcers are nonfatal lesions in merrows stranded in South Korea.
KEY WORDS: Gastric ulcers • Nereida niger • Merrow carcasses • South Korea
According to Astra’s 2011 health reports, she exhibited unusually high GCC levels, which is often a sign of gastric ulcers.[24] Upon detecting occult blood in her stool, we prescribed Maalox, which we’d covertly slip into the gills of her favorite mackerel. Stress, we surmised, had to be the reason why Astra had failed to conceive for four years, though we were also concerned with Triton’s low sperm count.
After the post-scratchathon checkup, we gave Astra a shot of Clomid, the fertility drug, which had proven successful with gray mermaids and lowland gorillas. Astra let us circle the vein in the crook of her arm with a ballpoint pen. She didn’t flinch as the needle pricked her. She giggled, as if nervous. “Will I lay the egg?”
Of course, we told her.
Astra’s smile seemed tentative. She yearned to be a mother. Every year she let us approach her eggs in her anemone nest to check for fertility. We’d scan the eggs for the telltale blastoderm, a particular spot on fertilized eggs. Every year the eggs were pristine and spotless.
Marla, slipping the pen behind her ear, tried to cheer her up.
“Remember tentacle porn?” Marla said.
Between December 2001 and March 2002, Astra had begun exhibiting secondary female characteristics, so we’d banned male volunteers from approaching her. Within days we’d caught a volunteer named Brett, a surfer who swore that a mermaid had once saved him by headbutting a tiger shark, with his pants down. He scrambled for his trunks, crying out, “She asked for it!” which raised a few eyebrows. Later we checked the cameras. They backed his story. In fact, Astra hadn’t asked for his penis but demanded it. Merrows have a caninelike intuition for social hierarchy. Even at her tender age, Astra could ascertain where Brett the surfer stood.
Brett tried to withdraw his penis, but Astra seized it, eliciting a pained squeal of shock. None of us moved. But again, we believed it was curiosity. With her grip, Astra could have crushed it into a pulp. Astra unwrapped her long spindly fingers and weighed his member with a chilling fascination. Her conclusion?
“Too soft.”
Brett deflated. We were relieved to see Astra’s encouraging, almost pitying smile. Some of us worried our star pupil might turn deviant like Fabio. We couldn’t Fabio this.
Her preference for merman penis was understandable,[25] but for weeks Brett moaned “cocktease,” and we assigned our intern Tina, a budding woman in her own right, to stand guard. She usually sat in front of the tank and read her Japanese comic books.
One day Astra asked, “What is that?”
“Tentacle porn,” Tina said.
Astra reared up. “Octopus? Squid?”
“Wanna see?”
Astra preferred movies over books. While she could read signs, she didn’t find the written word as compelling as the spoken. Tina scooched her chair closer so Astra could peer over her shoulder and read the comic book through the layer of glass. As Tina turned the pages, Astra asked, “Does octopus have sex with human?” “Why is octopus so large?” “Where can I find large octopus?”
At the end of the comic, Astra sighed, as if satisfied. She told Tina the octopus was a female.
“How can you tell?” Tina said.
“Females are large. They have sex with male octopus and kill him.”
Octopus sex remains a paradox. They’re deeply antisocial, and yet their bodies have evolved in a way where they can only mate with the utmost intimacy. A male octopus, brave and desperate, must penetrate the female with one of his tentacles. He’d slip it directly into her bulbous head and inject a stream of sperm, and sometimes a warning alarm went off, and he’d sacrifice his arm and flee.
Sometimes he wouldn’t. Sometimes he’d stay or come back, and slip his arm into her ear, as if to caress her brain, and sometimes she’d wrap him in her arms and hold him until she strangled him, then she’d drag him home and eat him with a slow, careful regret.
Type in mermaid sex and more than 455,000 results will register on YouTube, though many will be of music videos or animated simulations. Merrows rarely have sex near the surface. Only seven recordings of the eastern black’s mating rituals exist on record, which makes the following video footage, recorded on June 5, 2011, all the more valuable.
24
We later compared Astra’s 2011 GCC levels with that of captive merrows in Marine World. She had the stress levels of a merrow living in a 20×20-foot steel box.
25
Merman penises are fibroelastic, filled with collagen. Even flaccid, their penises are stiff. Humans have attempted copulation with merrows for years, but a human male, even with a week’s supply of Viagra and a flashlight, would never find his way through the twisting maze that is a mermaid’s vagina.