Mermaid Sashimi

Deep under the weight of an ocean of caught fish and crabs she lay twisted in a suffocated stupor. Her gills competed pointlessly against her net-mates for the precious air dissolved in the water, and the reserves in her lungs had been long since depleted. Her mind danced a downbeat funeral march between dull, delusion-like memory in the dark, and the claustrophobic slime of a thousand dying fish flavored by a vague notion of survival.

She knew that death was swimming closer and closer but she could no longer tell why or where from.

…Then Death and her putrefying touch faded back out to the edges of her mind. She stretched as though she hadn't swum straight in days and launched herself through the narrow waters of the coastal planes. There the sand stretched endlessly in all directions coming to a fade-line so thin and sharp it could have been the horizon. No land rise, no dark water.

She didn't touch the sand, she didn't touch the air. She was simply tunneling through the water and she could swear that a razor thin vacuum film trailed behind her fins and fingers. She dodged kelp blooms that came at her fast enough to slice her in two, and they shattered in her wake. Spirits, is this even possible?

The sun flashed rolling, tortured eels of light across her vision as her speed mounted. She was just contemplating breaching the surface in a skyward dive to make the dolphins twitter with jealousy when she saw Her again; the White Fish with her fingers like sabers liquefying the flesh of every kelp bulb and shrimp she passed through. Death had resumed her languid chase...

And the sea was stale and tight again.

There was a tensing of the net above and below, a shudder. The fish flapped and a current of flowing life cut a high pressure vein through the space that could only be described as brine dissolved in fish. It was lubricated by plankton, feces and blood but it still ground against her; a sandpaper of fins, scales and barbs.

The animal current slithered and clawed up her tail and between her breasts making her flesh ripple. It ran up her neck and under her chin catching her left ear and forcing her head deeper into the unyielding wall of scales behind her head. Her hair tangled and pulled.  But the water moved, if only a little, and carried traces of fresh air in the torrent. Her mind sharpened.

- - - - -

Hooves and claws beat down on the pier as hoots and bleats of victory rang through the sea breeze.

The nets were full.

Dozens of borrowed appendages gripped the woven steel. Webbed green fingers, smooth red claws, massive lightly furred hands and even some more exotic tendrils and hooks danced across the webbing as mismatched sinews tensed and variable densities of skin, bone, and chitin rubbed and bled under the horrible rhythmic crashes of metal on wood that commanded them.

Shhhhhk! Kla-kka, shhhhhk! Klak-kka.

Birds filled the distant skies with cries of warning and departed.

- - - - -

As the pressure in the net increased she lashed out with her claws and severed bits of fish fluttered and drizzled down around her. Her gills strained another few seconds of life from the blood. She slashed again and again. The living wall behind her shifted and panicked, its shape cracking and resealing. She bit and clawed and thrashed. Anything to keep moving, anything to enrich the stale waters.

Then her whole world lurched. She felt a narrow surge of life caress her throat and filter into her bloodstream. Then, again… the net was moving. She was still sluggish, she was still weak, but the White Fish relinquished her hunt and swam backwards in to the fade-lines to vanish from her senses.

- - - - -

Shhhhhk! Kla-kka, shhhhhk! Klak-kka. Shk! Klak-ka shk! Klak-ka.

The rhythm picked up and the sound of joints popping loudly joined the heaving breaths, scraping metal chords, and the rain-like sputter of enough fish for a hundred dinners struggling into the air.

Shk! Klak-ka shk! Klak-ka.

The smell of the beach had changed. The scent of sweat and fish and salty wood filled the chill air. Cheers rang out in growls, caws, and song. The seas were generous again. A hundred minds beamed out instinctive thanks to heavenly beings and a few even wished they still believed in gods and spirits.
  
The birds hovered alertly, hungrily, but they maintained their distance. They knew their place.

On the sand the young, hairless girls clapped and danced at the sight of it. Then they ran to the edge of the water, toes and flippers and fleshy wing-fingers just barely wet, and they waited. When the nets slithered like living seafood sausages onto the creaking pier and past the line, the rhythm changed again; Shhhk! klakka klakka shk! Shhhk! klakka klak shk! and the nets split at the top. The girls scrambled into the waters to bring back the best of the catch to their honorable parents.  

As the ropes that laced the net tops together unraveled, the cords were still being pulled and as the coast line came to dread life with splashes and desperation the nets kept dragging, kept breaching. Soon there would be crabs. Maybe a Serpent or two. Maybe even a mermaid.

- - - - -

There was sand and red urine burning in her gills. The pressure was so great that her bladder and bowels were being squeezed dry and bile was forcing its way up her throat.  Her juices washed over her stomach and face to a beat she couldn't hear. The water got richer and more impure with each flurry of sand. Fresh oxygen sharpened her senses, replacing her malaise with a gallery of pains each clamoring so loudly for attention that she couldn't even tell where any of them originated. She was a shimmering rainbow of stink, throbs, bitterness, stings, noise and burns. Then she heard the high twang of metal chord breaking tension, and the fish-flutter all around her opened up to become a deafening roar. Then the roar shattered into a thousand trebly splashes and fleshy slaps.

She felt herself being flung forward, and her tail was caught between prickling and grinding, her hair untangled or pulled out as her head lunged up, then forward. Her skin tingled and chilled in the evening air. Her lungs knew what they were doing, and she breathed in the dense clear air above the waters. Then she was under again, slammed into metal chord and sand in the shallows by the dissolving mass that had been her seat in the hungry vehicle of the nets. There was briefly a weight dancing on her back, but it liquefied in the caustic freedom of the shallows, to swim away into the deeps or be stuffed into baskets and suffocated in the open air.

She tossed and dashed until the inexorable tug of the metal was out from underneath her. Then she put her hands into the sand and lowered her body to the floor. She thought she'd wait until she could hear, see, or smell her way out of the shallows, but the madness just kept raging around her overwhelming all senses.

- - - - -

A flippered girl in a mesh of thresh-cloth tied off at her thighs, waist and neck, stood motionless in the shallows having already satisfied her family's needs. She carried three great hairy crabs in the basket on her back and had five eels pierced on her reed. She lingered in the water, standing tall above her hunched sisters, just drinking in the plenty. She'd never seen so much food in one place. Besides, there was still room on her reed and it was still sharp in case a truly great prize broke the surface. She suspected there was something big in the water. Not a Serpent, not a Kappa. A fish. A great big fish. The kind that spawned tales. She thought that maybe she'd even seen it thrashing out of the unraveling pier-ward net. She could think of no girl on the island more deserving of such a prize.

Then she took note of the smaller girls, the soft footed girls in the shallows. Girls who'd braved the waters naked, not out of confidence but because they hadn't enough clothes to risk in the water. She looked behind her at the giants on the sand who watched the water for Serpents and she found her father. She walked back to him and deposited her eels and the crabs from her basket. She re-affixed her basket and ran back into the water to catch crabs for her lesser sisters. Most of the crabs would be coming up later with temptingly delicious but poisonous deep water fish. Then the leather booted giants of the family would wade in with their claws and paws to fill the storehouses. Now the few crabs were mostly huddled under the pier but it was still too violent there.

Best to wait.

- - - - -

The mermaid still hugged the floor. Her aquatic mind-space was beginning to create subtle and vague shapes balanced on scales of danger and position. She knew the individual sounds that made up the aural landscape except for one; a clumsy arrhythmic thudding of weight on paddled pinpoints chopping up the water and leaving craters in the sand. Crash… crash…crash-crash. Curious. Her danger pattern knew there was a hunt happening. She couldn't trace the predators, though. She took comfort in the knowledge that whatever they were, they weren't big enough to pose a threat to… her…

The crashes. Oh the crashes! They were the hunters… or… they were their … well they followed the hunters anyway…

A curious notion flitted through her mind. What if the hunters were coming from the sky?

And suddenly there was a shadow of danger gaping above her. Also the din that had blinded but also shielded her was thinning. She had to see and the water wasn't clear enough. So she disengaged her vertical spine and connected her horizontal. She bent her tail at makeshift knees and brought it under her so that smooth, hard scales rubbed her raw, fin-scratched skin. She pushed herself up with her arms and held her back straight up on her awkwardly bent tail like a cobra ready to strike. Her head breached the surface and she saw the air full of monsters that towered above like jellies but propelled themselves like crabs… monsters that from the waist to the wrists looked just like her, but everywhere else were unfathomable nightmares.

Crash-crash…Crash!

She turned and saw a girl monster with massive talons staring at her with what may have been bewilderment. The creature wore a second skin for defense and carried some sort of spear in a proper hand. The mermaid jumped backwards and flipped, switching spines as she entered the water wriggling. She found naked monster legs in her path and slashed at them. The water was still too dirty and agitated for her to navigate well, but with blood in it she couldn't see a thing.
Her head breached and she found herself coming up on a wall of girl monsters. Some were armored, but some weren't. Then she stopped, her eyes darted to the shoreline before she realized she'd heard the sound. A bellow in the air like she'd never imagined. A massive man monster with full, thick armor covering his tails was crashing slowly but unstoppably toward her. She turned seawards to see a closing wall of the girls brandishing their flimsy spears.

It was still too dangerous, the girls in the deeper shallows were all armored but… but they were all slow, the water was like oil to them. She could feel it. She switched spines and raised up, she twirled, the pains in her body made red streaks in her vision. She was searching for one thing, a length of this wall of monsters that was all skin.

- - - - -

"STAY AWAY FROM  ITS CLAWS!" bellowed her father as he smashed through the shallow waves. His voice was full of fear. Damn it. That was embarrassing. A mermaid was a catch like no other. A fish made for tales. The first and finest of story fish. The most mythic, the most beautiful, most delicious, most intelligent, but not quite the most dangerous fish in the sea. And her blood and brain would be one more piece in the puzzle of immortality for those cunning or fortunate enough to be allowed a taste. The older girls and the maiden women; the experienced and well armored, were guarding the open sea. The mermaid would be driven, but where would it go?

Ah-ha! There! The girl wondered if anyone else could read the hunt as well as she could.

- - - - -

A stampede of giants was closing the shoreline… where was she going to go? Her eyes went wild, her brain focused on just filtering out armor and… There! A corridor of bare skin. A doorway made of small, unarmored girl monsters huddling together for protection.

The mermaid sprang like a coiled snake or a sprinter and the sound of her spine rectifying itself for swim was all the girls heard before her claws made their ribs smile and calves weep. Then she was in open water, only one sharp – Spirits! - and painful left hand turn and she would be free. Even as slowed by exhaustion and injury as she was, she knew none of the monsters could keep up now.

Then a new pain pricked and tore her tail fin open. Instinct curled her fin like toes in the cold and her laminar rhythm was thrown. She swerved right in the murky shallows and her head caught a hard blow and was lifted from the water. The sun washed in and out of  her vision revealing a weave of stiff land-weeds and her chin was hooked in the basket. A crab struggled between her hair and the rim. Then a soft, webbed hand pushed into the small of her back dislodging her tail spine, and held her out of the water. It quivered with the strain.

Before the mermaid could adjust enough to re-attach her fish-nerves and thrash loose a new pair of massive, furry claws gripped her sides. A Bellower. Its heart beat was thunder and its smell was indescribable even when weak in the thinness of open air. She was twirled, dizzied. She felt a coil of some sort wrap about her, but saw nothing but flashes of sunlight through her own coppery hair.

- - - - -

The girl who had caught the mermaid looked up at the uncle that now carried it on one shoulder. He smiled over imported tusks and patted her head. Then he gently slid his hand down her back and lifted her up to sit on his other shoulder. She grasped his thick red hair for stability and looked past his mighty head at the limp and clearly sobbing creature that lay across the shoulder opposite.

Then she let her gaze go behind them to the red water where the pier-men and the midwives rushed about collecting torn sisters from the water. Her eyes made contact with a girl her age she knew who was trying to hold her intestines in with one claw and one soft hand. She snapped her head back around and put the image from her mind.

As the uncle she was riding stepped onto dry sand he raised his arms in victory and she raised her voice in a screech of conquest. It was glorious. No other girl on the island deserved it as much as she.

- - - - -

…and she was going so fast that the kelp could have split her in two, but not before she had blasted it to pulp with the shock waves of her joyful velocity. She swerved so hard she broke the water and then she saw Death in the reeds, waiting. She didn't stop. She didn't care. She propelled herself even faster and once she came within a hairs breadth of the reeds she jumped. She launched. She rocketed. The water pulled away behind her and she swam into the sky.