One day she was swimming near the surface—far too near the surface, her family would have said—and saw a large, large ship of a sort she had never seen before. On the prow of the ship she saw a strange thing.
It looked like her—like a mermaid, but frozen and sealed to the ship.
She swam alongside the ship for a long time, trying to see how the sailors had bound this mermaid to their craft. It was not easy, for the proximity of the ship necessitated keeping out of sight of the sailors. She would break the surface to catch a glimpse of the other mermaid and then would be forced to plunge below the water again before she was spotted.
There was a fine wind and all the sails were full, and so the ship clipped along the surface, and after a time the mermaid grew tired. But she wanted to see, she wanted to know, and so she followed and followed even when she could no longer stay alongside. Her tail started to drag, and her swimming slowed, and then suddenly the ship was far ahead of her, disappearing over the flat line of the horizon.
And the mermaid was alone, and far from home, and did not know how to find her way back again.
This ought to have made her sad, or frightened, or any number of other distressed feelings. But while she was sorry she might never see her family again, she wasn’t as upset as she should have been.
Rather, she felt the freedom to go where she chose and do what she chose. Yes, there would be consequences (she was not so silly as to think there wouldn’t be), but they would be her choices and her consequences and not the ones laid out for her by someone else.
Freedom was far more intoxicating than safety could ever be.
She wanted to see and know more than she ever could at the bottom of the ocean. So she swam after the ship, because the ship would go to land, and the mermaid had never seen land before.
And so she crossed the ocean and came to the place where there was land. The mermaid spent many days watching the people on shore and the ones who came out to the sea on boats. Always, always she was careful to avoid the hooks and lines and cages and nets, because she had found her freedom and she loved it, and she would not be bound to someone else’s will again.
Until the day she was busy trying to loose a fish caught on a hook, and it was shaking and fighting and she was trying to help, but it was too panicked to let her. She didn’t see the net come down from above, and then she was caught.
She panicked then too, just like the fish she’d been trying to aid; she thrashed her tail, pulled with all her might, but all her thrashing entangled her more securely than before until she was hauled, furious and weeping, to the surface.
His eyes were dark and full of surprise when they saw what was in his net. Surprise, and wonder, and then a little sadness that she almost missed. When he raised the knife, she was sure he would fillet her then, but he only spoke some words she did not understand and cut away that which bound her.
She swam away and wondered about the man who’d let her go.
That night, the fisherman watched the sea from his cottage, which was perched on the rocks above a small cove where he tied up his boat at night. It was cold, for it was coming on winter and it never really was warm in the North Atlantic anyhow. He buried his hands in the pockets of his coat and stared out at the churning mass of water and looked for her under the moon. But though he turned his head at the sound of every faint splash, he did not see that which his heart most longed for—the sight of her fin silhouetted against the moonlight.
He’d likely been a fool to let her go. Nobody would believe the story if he told it, and he wasn’t about to make a fool of himself down at the tavern in the village. He was old enough to be past the bragging flush of youth, though not so old that he would have minded seeing the light of wonder in their eyes had he brought a mermaid home.
He could never have done it. That he knew for certain. He could not have taken that wild thing that looked on him with such wild eyes and forced her to stay with him, to make her a prisoner, to profit by her hurt.
She hadn’t looked as he expected her to, the way he’d been told since he was a boy listening to tales that a mermaid should look. Those stories spoke of pale bare-breasted women with long flowing hair, human women in every way except for their tail fin.
What he’d caught in his net had been far more alien, a creature covered in silver scales all over, with webbing between its fingers and teeth much sharper than any human’s. But her eyes had been a woman’s, and they’d looked into his heart as a woman’s eyes do and seen all the loneliness there.
He’d felt in that moment that his heart was visible outside his chest, that if she’d wanted, she could have grasped it in those long scaly fingers and taken it away with her.
Then he’d come to his senses and loosed her because he knew he should and the state of his heart was no concern of the mermaid’s.
But still he watched the water in hope, for the dearest wish of all fishermen is to see a mermaid, to brush up against something magical and hope some of that magic would stay with him for always.
He watched and watched, but he did not see her.
When finally the moon was past its zenith, he put away his dreams and went inside to sleep. He knew he would never see her again and in his own practical way thought at least he’d seen her one time. That was more than most fishermen. He’d touched magic, and he should not want for more.
He did not see her, but she watched him from beneath the water near his cottage, and she knew he was looking for her. She couldn’t say how she knew this except that his eyes had been a little sad when he let her go. His loneliness had burrowed into her heart, and the ache of it burned inside her.
The mermaid had heard stories, spoken-under-the-breath-in-secret-places stories, about those of her kind who had left the deep and walked upon land.
There was no special magic about this unless you considered that mermaids were magical in and of themselves; the mermaid did not consider herself anything special because she had always known her own kind.
In those stories, those secret stories, the mermaid only had to touch dry land and her fin would be transformed into legs to walk about. If she touched the water of the sea again, her fin would return.
The mermaid had never wished to walk upon land before, but suddenly she found she wanted this with all her heart. She could think only of all the things she’d never seen that were hidden past the shore: all the people and all the things for which she had no name and wanted to name so she could place them in her memory and keep them there.
It was dark, even with the moon, and there was a stretch of sandy beach hidden in the rocks, a little cove where the fisherman tied up his boat at night.
The mermaid thought she would swim to that place and touch the dry shore and see if the stories were true. Her heart was bursting with anticipation—how wonderful, how free, how perfect it would be if she could pass between the shore and the sea. Not like a man did, of course—men swimming in the water were awkward, flopping things with their limbs splashing out in all directions.
No, she would be as lithe as a fish in water and graceful as a human on land and all the world would be open to her. All the world and its wonders, and she would see them, every one.
She swam into the cove, and when her head rose above the water she saw the jagged rocks rising on either side and the boat nestled inside. Beside the boat was a small wooden pier and a short beach that connected to a set of steps leading up to the fisherman’s cottage.
There were no lights in the cottage, and the mermaid was certain the fisherman was inside and asleep and would not look out and see her there. Even if he did, she reasoned, he would only see a shadow moving against another shadow—the light of the moon did not reach this place.