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Sometimes it really sucks to be proven right, more for the sake of the people around me than specifically my own, and it’s no consolation when you see evidence of just how right you were being played out before your eyes when you’re pretty much helpless. For me it was the conviction that, as much as I didn’t want to leave my old life behind or abandon my little brother either, there really was no way that a mermaid could ever hope to live in the human world, that it’d be bad for all concerned. That was why I made the torturous journey to the sea all those years ago, why I left everything and everyone behind to start over and carve out a new existence beneath the waves.
My best guess is that I’d been back in contact with human beings for no more than ten minutes at the most before things started to turn bad, what should have been a routine and mundane day for everyone involved turning into a chaotic mess. I don’t know if it was because the sight of me was enough to scare those that saw me deep down, to undermine their belief in the stability of the world as they imagined it to be. Or maybe it was just because they were a bunch of unprincipled pricks that laid eyes on a genuine, living and breathing mermaid and saw an opportunity to cash in. Whatever the reason, harsh words were exchanged, and in the blink of an eye, punches were being thrown over me.
And all that I could do was to hang there and watch in horror.

“Caroline,” Noah asked me with a shocked look on his face, “is that you?”
“Erm, yeah, Noah,” I answered. “I guess that it is!”
Before he could utter another word, Noah was elbowed savagely out of the way by what must have been one of his crewmates, a man that was, despite how much my little brother seemed to have grown since I saw him last, still a good foot taller than him. Stubble covered the majority of his leering face, and he kept Noah held back with not much more effort than it had taken for him to shove him aside in the first instance.
“What is this, man?” asked the newcomer. “In all of the years I’ve been at sea, I ain’t never seen a body hauled up in a net that wasn’t dead and drowned, let alone one dressed up as a mermaid.” He eyed Noah suspiciously. “Add to that the fact that you’re talking to her like you’re a couple of old friends and I smell something pretty bad brewing here.” The crewman poked Noah square in the chest with a finger that looked more like a sausage than a normal digit. “Is this some kind of joke maybe…like one of those pranks that they film for those compilation shows?”
“No,” Noah shook his head, “it’s not like that, Mike!”
“What is it like then,” Mike rounded on him, “tell me?”
“She’s a real…” Noah began to speak, but then realised what he was about to say and stopped.
“Jesus Christ,” said one of the other crewmen standing on the opposite side of the net, “look at the bit where her tail starts!”
Mike leaned in as close as he could, allowing me a chance to smell the combination of fish grease and body odour that clung to him like a second skin.
“That’s no bloody costume,” he bellowed, as if taking personal offence at the revelation that I was actually a real mermaid and not someone intent on pulling some kind of bizarre prank at his expense, “she’s a real one!”
“How can she be,” said one of the crewmen who hadn’t chimed in up until that point, “they don’t really exist, you stupid bastard!”
“She is,” Mike yelled at him, “I can see it with my own eyes!”
At that he reached into the net and began grasping at the portions of my tail that were within his reach, squeezing and pinching at the scales as though he was somehow challenging me to prove him wrong by doing nothing other than simply hanging there and allowing him to eagerly molest me.
“Hey,” Noah placed a hand on Mike’s shoulder, “take your damn hands off of her!”
I made a gesture for him to back off, almost pleading with him to stop what he was doing, as I had already sensed the course down which this encounter was going, and there was no way that he was capable of changing it on his own.
“Take your own advice,” Mike cried as he turned and punched Noah full on the jaw in one sudden movement.
The blow connected with a sickening sound, twisting Noah’s head around like a top and sending him crashing to the deck as his legs buckled and gave way beneath him. Mike turned back to me as the other three crewmen fell upon Noah, his bulk effectively blocking my view and meaning that I could not tell if they were setting on him to continue their colleagues work, or to see if he was in need of help.
“Take that arsehole below deck and let him cool off in the cell for a while,” Mike didn’t even bother to turn round as he dished out order for how Noah was to be dealt with.
He smiled unpleasantly as he noted my apparent concern for my brother’s fate.
“Now,” he stroked his chin, “what are we going to do with you?”
Perhaps for the first time the enormity of the situation and just what a mess I was in began to hit home. Before I had been instinctively driven to devote all of my attention first to the shock of being hauled up in the net, second to the surprise of looking Noah in the eye after all those years and third to my natural instinct for wanting to protect him as I had done when I was human and we were younger. Only now did I actually begin to think of the fact that I was trapped, just like the other fish in the net, and seemingly at the mercy of the kind of men that would set upon Noah with a moment’s notice.
I remained silent, trying to appear as innocent and unthreatening as possible.
“Ah,” Mike sighed in resignation a moment later, “it’ll be up to the captain anyway, not me.”
I think the look of relief on my face must have been visible, as he fixed me with a cruel smile.
“But until then,” he said, “you can share quarters with good old Noah, since you and he seem to be old acquaintances. I’m sure you’ve got lots of catching up to do.”

I have to admit that I’d been lucky up to that point in my fairly short life not to have ever been subjected to the kind of physical humiliation that soon followed. It was not that anyone overstepped the boundaries of common decency and inflicted any serious molestation upon me, for which I was very thankful, but more the sense in which I was summarily removed from the confines of the net and manhandled below deck by Mike and his fellow crewmen. They seemed to view me more as a creature of the kind they regularly hauled up in their nets and sold on at wholesale markets than a sentient and sapient being with which they had some kind of kinship.
Before becoming a mermaid, I had only had the most brief and fleeting knowledge of physical intimacy with other human beings, mainly thanks to there being little time when I was not either caring for my brother, educating myself or working to pay the bills. It’s ironic that I probably felt more hands touching me and spent more time being held by the opposite sex in those first few moments of finding myself outside of the net than I had in my entire previous life as a human being.
But first they released the winch holding the net over the deck, sending me and all of its other contents spilling onto the soaking boards. Luckily I had been in the rough centre of the net, and so I landed atop a fairly generous cushion of fish, managing to keep from having the breath knocked out of me. Any hope of trying to make it to the side of the boat and back into the water was dashed by the fact that the remaining crewmen were on me almost the moment that the net opened, their rough, calloused hands seizing both the pale flesh of my torso and the contrastingly smooth and slick scales of my tail.
My instinct was to struggle, squirming desperately as I felt myself being easily lifted off of the deck, but in reality I knew that there was no way I could hope to escape the grasp of so many strong and determined men. I was also intent upon seeing what had happened to Noah, another factor that made my instincts impossible to follow, no matter how much I was afraid of being captured and left at the mercy of these fishermen. The same protective urges that had dominated my life when I had been able to care for Noah were fast returning to me, apparently not notably lessened by an absence of almost a decade and a change of species in the time since I saw him last.
The fishermen were neither deliberately rougher than they needed to be with me, nor did any of them take exceptional liberties thanks to my helpless position. But still there was more than one occasion on which I could feel a pair of hands stroking or caressing a part of my body with more intimacy or intent than was required. They pinched at my scales and sometimes tweaked my fins, understandably fascinated by being able to hold and feel a creature that was simply not supposed to exist. I was indignant and humiliated by this kind of treatment at the time, though looking back, I soon came to realise just how vulnerable I actually was and how easy it would have been for one or all of them to be more forceful with me.
That’s not to say I was okay with being occasionally groped, just glad it stayed at that.
As I’d always noticed with most men that are into women, they seemed most obsessed with my chest and backside, eyes lingering on the former when they thought no one else was watching, and the hands cupping the latter being very territorial in keeping others away from their charge. For a tiny moment I recalled the way a woman’s body could be such an effecting tool for manipulation, and I felt a small trill of the way in which my being a mermaid must have added to this greatly. No wonder the legends of sirens were so common, when a perfectly average woman could almost hypnotise those who desired her with her body, what hope was there of shaking off the same allure when it was being wielded by a mermaid?
Not that I was in any position to play the siren at that particular moment in time.
Even worse than the sensation of being manhandled and carried into the bowels of the ship against my will was the fact that I could already feel my skin and scales beginning to dry out now that I was effectively in-doors. Out on the deck of the ship there had been sufficient amounts of moisture in the air in the form of spray and the rain from the storm to keep me properly hydrated and make being out of the water bearable. But down here it was a different story, and my water-hungry mermaid’s body soon began to suck the moisture off of wherever it could be found in order to keep my essential organs functioning, meaning that I was becoming visibly dryer with each moment that passed.
I tried to make some feeble plea or protest, but the crewmen just took it as an attempt to ask for mercy, and laughed it off without hesitation.
Finally they stopped outside of a small doorway, opening it and casually tossing me into the similarly tiny room beyond. I cried out in pain as I landed in a heap upon the floor and then watched as the last sliver of light disappeared with the closing of the door behind me and the sound of a key being turned in the lock.
The darkness was no problem for me, my eyes working better in the absence of light as a mermaid than they ever had when I was human. But my dilemma was now whether to go straight to the slumped form of Noah, who lay in the corner of the room, or else to make straight for the tiny sink that was attached to the opposite wall and try to stave off the worsening dehydration.
In the end, the fact that I was already beginning to feel it becoming harder to breathe and the burning sensation around my gills, I was forced to make for the sink and leave Noah alone for the time being. But I soon discovered that the small sink was simply too high off of the floor for me to be able to easily reach the taps, and in addition there was no plug, which meant I could not have run enough water into the bowl to be of any use.
By this point I was beginning to seriously panic, as the past ten years I had spent in the sea, where there had been literally no chance of drying out at all, so the danger had become something for which I was simply not prepared. I can only compare it to a human suddenly finding themselves deprived of oxygen and struggling to discover a source of the same precious commodity before they suffocated in extreme pain and distress.
I desperately crawled over to where Noah lay, still and unmoving.
Rather than the caring words I had always hoped to exchange with him when we met once again, I was instead forced to almost scream at him to wake up, pushing and pulling at his shoulders in the vague hope of being able to bring him around. I have no recollection of how long I continued to plead with him in that manner, only a memory of the ever-increasing pain and discomfort that I was feeling as my voice became horse and my cries all the more desperate. In the end it came to the point where I was almost pounding upon him as hard as I could with balled fists, hoping that the feeble force of my weakening blows would be enough to bring him around.
When he finally showed signs of movement, it was to reach out suddenly and seize my fists, preventing them from delivering any more blows.
I was shocked at how easily his hands encircled my own and the lack of effort it required on his part to keep me from pulling away or breaking free of his grip. For a moment I expected him to use this grip to pull me closer, maybe even to embrace me fully after so much time had separated us. But I was shocked again when he instead pushed me firmly away from him, tossing me bodily into the far corner of the room, where I lay, curled into an almost foetal condition and paralysed with confusion and fear at his sudden and violent actions towards me.
“Don’t touch me,” Noah hissed, “don’t even look at me!”
My eyes were wide now as I cowered away from him in actual fear.
I could still see the echoes of the boy that I had been forced to leave behind in the much harder and more gaunt face of the young man that now gazed at me from across the tiny room. But the lines around his features seemed to have been etched from hard times and the youthful innocence burned away by what must have happened to him in my absence. The eyes were the worse, those same dark orbs that I had seen filled with happiness in the past were now reflective of resentment and so many unanswered questions that I almost forgot the fact that I was rapidly dehydrating as I felt guilt at what life must have done to my younger brother to leave him like this.
I raised a single hand to plead with him, a sound rasping from my lips that might have been an attempt to form his name or else a plea for his help, maybe both.
“Don’t ask me to help you,” Noah spat the words at me, “don’t ask me for anything – you don’t have the right!” He kept staring at me the whole time he spoke, his eyes boring into me. “You’re not my sister, you’re not even human anymore. My sister was always there for me, she wouldn’t have left me all alone like you did. I don’t know what you are. I used to think that you were still her, but you’re not – you’re some kind of thing that took over her body and made her into something else.”
I couldn’t tell which was causing me more pain, the dehydration or the accusations that I could still hear being thrown at me by Noah. All that I could do was keep on pleading with him, even as my movements became less pronounced and I began to feel my grip on consciousness slipping away, meaning that soon it would be he who was stuck in the cell with an unresponsive fellow prisoner, rather than me.
Eventually he fell silent, seeming to simply gaze on me with an expression on his face that was hard for me to read in my current state of confusion and pain. He remained still and impassive, and I almost believed that he was happy to sit there and watch as I faded away to nothing, that he was taking some perverse form of satisfaction or revenge in seeing me in such a state.
He stirred eventually, but not before my eyes closed and I fell into a stupor.
So it was that I had no idea of his intentions as I finally passed out.

I awoke to the sensation of water being drizzled over my head in irregular and yet very much welcome waves which came at random instances and never seemed to last long enough to provide more than momentary relief to my now badly parched anatomy. There was no way that I could have stirred to full wakefulness and been able to tell what was happening and where the water was coming from, and so I was forced to simply lie still and allow it to slowly pull me back from the brink and a little closer to full consciousness with each moment that passed.
After a little time I was able to fully open my eyes and begin to make sense of my surroundings again, recognising with disappointment the same small cell in which I had passed out. But there was no sign of Noah in the corner where he had been thrown, and I made to rise in search of him, my arms quaking with weakness even as I tried to crawl forwards.
“I’m right here,” said a voice by my head.
I glanced upwards, my vision still not yet cleared, but sure the voice was Noah’s.
He was gazing down at me as he nursed my head in his lap, dripping water from his shirt, which he had wadded up and soaked in the small sink nearby.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “for what I said to you before.”
I tried to speak, but my voice was still nothing more than a dry croak.
“It’s okay,” he shook his head to quiet me down. “I was just angry, and confused…you know?”
I nodded eagerly, desperate to show that I understood and to encourage this change in his attitude towards me.
“I was sure that I’d managed to convince myself that you weren’t coming back ever, and so when you showed up like that back there,” he paused to shrug, his words suddenly not seeming like enough to express the strangeness of our recent reunion.
“I would have…come back,” the words were weak and scratchy in my throat, “but I thought…you were better off…without me.”
Noah offered me the sodden shirt to drink from, and I sucked the water from it greedily.
“You were young,” I coughed as my voice regained a measure of its former strength, “had your whole life ahead of you. If I’d stayed, the best we could have managed was for me to live my life like someone with a serious disability. And you’d have been roped into staying to care for me. Even without me, you had a better chance of living a full life of your own.”
He laughed ruefully at the last point and shook his head.
“I guess that you did all you could to let me have the freedom to make my own decisions,” he chuckled, “and the real irony is that I took that chance and made a godawful mess of it all!”
His words filled me with questions and worries, but I sensed that it would be better to let him volunteer all that we was ready to tell me, without badgering him solely for the sake of my own conscience.
“I started out filled with the notion that I was going to go it alone and really make something of myself, become someone that you and Mom and Dad would have been proud of. You know, really live up to the sacrifices that you’d all made for me over the years. I pushed myself all of the time to be good at whatever I did, and if I failed or even fell short, I started beating myself up over it and thinking that I was letting you all down. I told myself that I’d been given so much help that I’d have to be worthless to screw it up, but it was only much later I realised I’d been pushing myself too much and setting myself up to fail like that.”
He sighed and then continued.
“I went off the rails in the end, thought I was just being a loser at the time, but looking back, I think it was more like some kind of breakdown, if I’m honest. I started drinking too much and hanging out with the same kind of losers and lowlifes that I thought I was supposed to belong with. I signed up to sail with this boat half out of desperation for the money and half out of the hope that it might give me a chance to find you again.”
Noah laughed at the irony of the situation in which he found himself.
“I guess that I got my wish, eh?” he added.
“It’s weird,” I croaked, “almost too much of a coincidence to believe.”
“Yeah,” Noah agreed, “and I always thought that if we did meet up again, you’d still be the only one that had changed any.”
“I am still sorry,” I offered, “if that means anything after this long.”
“I know,” Noah replied, “and so am I.”
I could feel his eyes on my body as the silence grew between us, imagine him taking in the scales that covered my small breasts almost completely, the fins on my forearms and hips, gill-slits beneath my arms, and of course the snaking and sinuous tail which completed by mermaid’s body in the place of legs. He could also not fail to see the fact that I now possessed almost literally no fat on my body, with only sinewy and sleek muscles characterising its shape, so that I was more akin in appearance to an Olympic swimmer than a curvaceous siren of myth and legend. There were scars to be seen as well, places where my time living in the seas and oceans had not been kind to me physically, and I bore the mark of both fighting for my life against predators and the very elements themselves for survival.
“We both changed since we saw each other last,” I said, “but I think that there’s enough of who we were back then left to make it worth getting to know who we’ve become now.”

We spent the rest of the unpleasant voyage whilst trapped in the makeshift cell talking when one of us was taken by the mood and in silence when we were not, with Noah frequently returning to the sink to once more soak his shirt and keep me from drying out. It was not much like a joyous family reunion where a person found out that their next of kin was actually alive after an enforced absence of many years, but more akin to a couple of trauma victims trying to find the will to speak openly and honestly about that they had been through to get to this point still alive and relatively sane.
Nothing changed in terms of that same routine until Noah’s head suddenly snapped up and he began to look around, as if noticing something that I had not. While it might sound preposterous that a human would be more sensitive to such subtle nuances while on the water than a mermaid, it was also true to say that, while I had spent a far greater time living in the actual sea itself, I had not spent anywhere near as much time as Noah had on boats of any kind. Because of this, I took his actions to be on account of noticing some subtle change in the sounds and vibrations that he could recognise through the hull of the fishing boat.
Noah rose then, and stole quickly across the small room to where there was a tiny ventilation port set into the wall that curved with the outer shape of the hull. He pressed an eye to it and strained to make out something beyond for perhaps a minute, before returning to my side again.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“We’re slowing down,” Noah answered, “like we’re coming in to port.”
“But you don’t sound too happy about that,” I could hear the anxiety in his voice.
“It’s more where we’re coming in,” Noah explained. “This boat’s not always doing things that are strictly legal, if you know what I mean? And so it has more than one place to put in. Let’s just say that from what I could make out, it’s not one that I recognise as one of the legal ones.”
“I don’t think I like the sound of where this is going,” I frowned, “or where we are!”
“No,” Noah agreed, “neither do I. This is where we’ve put in whenever the ship was carrying something illegal and the captain needed to get it into the hands of whoever wanted it really quickly. So I think we can guess that they’re going to treat you in the same way.”
Suddenly there was a sound from the door, a key being turned in the lock.
Before I could say a word, Noah tensed as two crewmen stepped into the room with us and then threw himself at them in the hope that the element of surprise would work in his favour. He caught the first one with a lucky punch to the gut, which sent him sprawling into the floor of the already crowded room. But the confined space meant that he could not then step forwards and make use of the advantage he had gained, so the second crewman was ready when they faced off, not taking long to smash a meaty fist into the side of Noah’s head which sent him reeling and stumbling backwards.
All I could think to do was throw my arms around the legs of the second crewman so that he stumbled and fell onto the prostrate form of his fellow, but I was not able to do any more thanks to the impracticality of my tail on land, and Noah was still stunned from the punch which had brought him down. It took the other crewmen behind the first pair only a matter of seconds to wade in and subdue us both, using plastic ties to bind Noah’s wrists and ankles, then the same to bind my own wrists before putting one around the bottom of my tail and looping another through that and the one upon my wrists so that I was trussed up and unable to move.
As we were then manhandled out of the cell and back up onto the deck of the boat, it occurred to me that the reason they had not bothered to gag us or otherwise prevent anyone crying out for help must be that we were sufficiently isolated for them to be sure there was no one around to hear. And so I resolved to keep as calm and quiet as I could in the hope of taking in the details of our surroundings in case the knowledge might become useful further down the line.
The reason they had not bothered to blindfold either of us hinted that they did not anticipate us laying eyes on the location again, and lead to rather more disturbing possibilities as to just what lay ahead.
With Mike bellowing orders at his subordinates, we were taken onto the deck. I was carried as before, and Noah was pushed resentfully in the direction that his former crewmates dictated, until we descended a gang-plank and found that we were on a small dock. The lack of other boats present and the overall lack of sound coming from anywhere other than the boat and its crew suggested that it was a private affair, all the better to conduct illegal matters well away from prying eyes. The only visible buildings were a few sorry-looking sheds that flanked a dirt and gravel track leading away into the woods that began away from the shoreline, and on this stood a nondescript and unmarked box truck, its back open and waiting.
I was carried to the back of the truck first and tossed inside, with Noah following a few moments later, both of us sent sprawling on the hard bed of the floor. Mike stepped forwards with a knife that looked well-used in one hand and cut the tie around Noah’s wrists, then signalled for one of the other crewmen, who shoved a cardboard pallet of water-bottles into the back of the truck with us.
“Don’t worry about precious little Ariel back there,” he gestured to me with a cruel chuckle. “We were listening in to most of what you chattered about back on the boat, and we heard her whining for water so she wouldn’t dry out. Your job’s to use that to keep her in shape until we get to where we’re going, as we don’t want the merchandise ruined before we have a chance to sell it now, do we?”
He pulled down the folding door and sealed us in the back of the truck before either of us could react, clearly relishing the chance to hint at the fact they were planning to use me as a commodity, effectively sell me into slavery as soon as the chance arose and they could find an interested buyer.
In the gloom of the truck’s rear, I could just make out the look of desperate rage building on Noah’s face as he realised the predicament that we were now in. But as there was nothing at all we could hope to do in that moment, I felt that he needed to be distracted from his anger so that he would not do something rash again when the chance presented itself, and also because I wanted to preserve what energy and clarity of thought we both still possessed in the hope of using it to make plans when the time came to do so.
My gaze fell upon the pallet of water-bottles, and though I was not yet badly dehydrated by any means, I hit upon a means to keep Noah both distracted and occupied at the same time.
“Noah,” I gasped in an exaggerated manner intended to gain his full attention, “I’m drying out again…help me!”
I felt guilty as I held up my bound wrists and flapped my caudal fin in what I hoped was a pathetic-looking show of need, but no matter how bad my acting was, it had the desired effect. The angry expression melted from Noah’s face almost instantly, and he set to tearing at the plastic wrapping around the pallet until he could wrench out the first bottle and begin to pour it over my scales in the belief that he was relieving my suffering just as he had back in the cell on the boat.
Twice now he had tried to tackle the situation head-on and with physical force and twice he had been overwhelmed by sheer numbers. The obvious conclusion was that, if he tried it again, the results would be the same or worse for him, and I could not handle to idea of him getting permanently hurt or even killed on my account. Where brawn had failed, we would now have to instead rely upon brains and waiting for an opportunity to present itself, and if Noah could not restrain himself, then it logically fell to me as the elder sibling to take measures to see that he did so, whether he liked it or not.
For the rest of the journey I spoke to him on the subject, trying to keep my words from sounding like a direct criticism of his previous efforts, but at the same time constantly emphasizing the fact that we were hopelessly outnumbered and he could not hope to fight his former crewmates and whoever else was in league with them off whilst also aiding someone as helpless as I was on land. He did not like the sound of it, but eventually I could see his mind coming round to the same inevitable conclusion as I had myself, and the only reason I had done so more quickly was the reality of my mermaid’s body on all the decisions that I now made.
It felt strange to me how easily I had now slipped naturally back into my former role of the elder sibling and the one that was required to take a step back from their emotions and use judgement to decide what was best for the both of us. But for better or worse, that was where I now found myself, and with Noah seeming to accept it as well, I would have to step up and continue to fill that role for the foreseeable future.

The truck continued to drive on for what felt like almost an hour, and I was hard-pressed to keep my cool and not begin to panic at the fact that it was most likely we were driving inland, rather than following the coastline as we went. One of the peculiar senses that I had developed after my transformation into a mermaid was an unerring ability to gauge how far away I was from major sources of water at any given time. It was not an accurate skill down to miles, feet and inches by any means, more an instinctive notion of how long I would need to travel and in what direction in order to find it. I had not had recourse to make use of it for the entirety of the time that I was living alone in the ocean, but now it came back to me almost in the same manner as a person remembers how to ride a bike, and I was keenly aware of the ever growing distance between us and the ocean itself.
By the time the truck finally began to slow and then came to a halt, I was visibly struggling to keep a handle on myself as I tried to balance the need to keep hydrated, push down the panic inspired by knowledge of the sea being so far away and having to remain strong for Noah’s sake as well. I felt as though my reserves of energy had already been long depleted and every moment of effort that I exerted over myself was somehow sapping my very being and leaving me lessened with the loss.
As the door at the rear of the truck could be heard unlocking and then opening, I saw Noah tense bodily, much as he had done when the door of the cell on the boat likewise opened. I shot him a warning glance and did not lighten my stern expression until I could see that he had visibly backed off and was not about to make some rash move as soon as the crewmen came in to seize us both.
“Last stop, everybody out!” roared Mike as he ordered others forward to get us out.
It was dark by now, and I was able to use my superior night-vision only to discern that we were somewhere in a heavily-wooded area serviced only by a dirt road that terminated in front of a small and rather dilapidated warehouse of some kind. The land was pretty flat and even, allowing me to guess that we were not far enough inland to have reached any kind of hills or mountains, meaning that were I to locate a river nearby, it would likely flow pretty much directly to the sea with little in the way. This thought comforted me immensely, though I had to admit that it did not offer much hope of escape for Noah.
Where we had been kept in a makeshift cell while aboard the boat, there was no mistaking the fact that what we were now transferred into inside the warehouse was an actual space designed and constructed for the sole purpose of keeping an individual held as a prisoner. It stood in the very back of the building, off of a narrow corridor and was accessed solely be a barred metal door, with similar bars across the one small window. Inside was a bare mattress upon the floor and a single bucket in the corner for the most obvious purpose, and in addition, someone had possessed the forethought to add to these and fill with water a metal tub of the kind that someone from a bygone century might have used to clean their laundry.
What the presence of this cell said about the people who were holding us and with whom Noah had been associating for so long, I tried not to dwell on too greatly. Instead I was almost grateful to find that the ties on my wrists and tail were cut before we were locked into the cell and left to contemplate what would be done with us next. Noah too had been cut loose, and he crawled onto the mattress, trying to rub the feeling back into his ankles and feet as I eagerly wormed my way across the bare concrete floor and climbed into the tub of water, feeling the incomparable relief that always came with sinking my scales into liquid after being so long out of it.
Rather than sitting with my backside in the tub and the rest of me flopping out over the edge as a human might have done, my suppleness and flexibility meant that I could comfortably curl my tail tightly around as I lay in the water and so submerge my entire body beneath the surface. The chance to breathe with my gills for the first time in almost twenty four hours was perhaps better than that of being in the water itself, and I finally began to feel myself returning to what had become my sense of normality as a mermaid.
I could not hear Noah as he lay on the mattress, and while I first thought he was remaining silent out of sullen defeat, I soon heard the sound of his snoring, and realised that he had fallen into a deep and well-needed sleep. This made me thankful for that small mercy, as I had anticipated the need to come up with new and insightful schemes that might see us released in order to keep his hopes up, but the bleakness of the cell and the nature of our predicament had wholly failed to inspire me to think of anything of the kind. I chose to take his falling asleep as both a boon and a sign, closing my eyes and not taking long to follow his lead.
I don’t know how long we had been sleeping before I awoke and reclined in the tub for a time, enjoying the experience of being alone with only my own thoughts for company. Perhaps one of the few true joys of my much-changed life as a mermaid had been the loss of the many stresses and strains of life that humans assume are necessary and unavoidable, but I soon discovered were utterly manufactured and thus absent from the non-human world, or the real world, as I now like to call it. I can’t stress how much my continued survival in the ocean and seas was made possible by the fact that I truly had the time to focus my mind and learn what I needed in order to survive, to make myself mentally strong enough.
So it was that when I looked up and saw a figure standing silently on the other side of the bars, I was able to use that same mental strength to keep from making an alarmed sound and stare back defiantly. In truth it was nothing more real than a cat arching its back and raising its fur in an attempt to appear more intimidating, but it had often served me well in the past, giving humans enough pause for me to dive underwater and swim swiftly to safety before they could react.
From what I could make out, the man was one of the fishermen, still clad in his begrimed overalls and a woollen hat that covered most of his head. He appeared old on account of the fact that a bedraggled white beard and moustaches hid most of his face, but his sleeves were rolled up to the elbows, revealing arms of knotted muscles and gnarled hands, all covered in weathered tattoos. In the shadows of the corridor beyond the bars, his eyes were nothing more than glittering gimlets of black beneath furrowed brows.
It took me a short while to guess as to why he was staring at me in silence, holding my eye without moving or blinking. But then it dawned on me that this must be a man who had spent his life on the sea, and who was now standing in front of what seemed to be a genuine mermaid. He must have heard all of the old tales from previous generations and scoffed at such superstitious nonsense whilst living in the modern age. Now he was seeing something that was supposed to be a myth with his own eyes, and who could say what kind of conflicts it was stirring inside of his head. For my part the effect was somewhat the same, as I saw this was about as close as I was ever going to come to meeting the kind of hoary old seadogs that mermaids were supposed to encounter in old legends, so we seemed to be regarding each other across a gulf of weird legend and folklore.
But then he moved for the first time, revealing that he held a bunch of keys in one hand.
The other he raised to his lips and made a gesture for me to remain silent.
Was he about to unlock the cell door?
What were his intentions towards me once he had done so?
It was then that Noah stirred and sat up on the mattress, rubbing his eyes as he strained to discern the identity of the figure with his inferior human vision.
“Eli?!?” he hissed.
“Yes,” the old fisherman shook his head in apparent exasperation, “it is – no need to shout it out loud!”
I felt a wave of relief at that exchange, initially just because Noah was awake and it meant that I was no longer alone with the stranger. But then I recognised the ease with which Noah seemed to accept the older man’s presence and show none of the antipathy he had towards the other crewmates I had seen and interacted with. Perhaps this man he called Eli had merely been regarding me as I first thought, giving himself a little time to see the mermaid before he did something about the situation.
“Now shut the hell up,” Eli said as he unlocked the cell door and handed my brother what, in the dim light of the room, to be the key to a vehicle of some kind, “and let’s see about getting the two of you away from here.”
Noah stared down at the keys now in his hand as if unsure as to just what they actually were.
“Keys to an old pickup truck that’s around the back of this place,” Eli explained as if to a simpleton while he rolled his eyes. “If you start out now, you can be well away before morning comes. I’ll make sure the rest of them are distracted long enough, so don’t worry about that.” He then turned to address me directly for the first time. “And you,” he nodded, “are going to have to beg my pardon and let me carry you out there.” Noah made to protest, but Eli cut him off in short order. “Don’t be stupid, lad,” he said, “you’ve been kicked senseless twice in the space of a day – you’d collapse before you were a foot or so out of the door!”

The fear that I felt as we made that short dash out of the warehouse and towards the pickup truck that was supposed to be our salvation was very different to the kind which had characterised my capture and confinement beforehand. The latter had been a deep and sickening dread at what might lie ahead, but now the former took shape as an eager and very nervous anticipation of sneaking away from great danger and fearing to glance back over my shoulder in case we had been noticed and might have to flee for all we were worth.
For me this was mixed with a strange emotion which came from the experience of being carried out of there by Eli, as this was the very first time that a human being had carried me anywhere with my explicit permission and had not been my own brother. I’m not trying to suggest that I was attracted to the older man in any real sense, but this was a rare occasion in my life as a mermaid when I had received human contact that was both positive and welcome in nature. It surprised me, as I had previously been opposed to the idea, feeling that it would be belittling to me as a woman and a mermaid, but now I found that it actually filled me with more than a little confidence and hope.
We could hear vague sounds of a television turned up to a ludicrous level and raucous male laughter that told us the other members of the crew were never far away, and more than once there was a terrifying moment when a shadow or opening door made us freeze or go dashing down an alternate route. But in the end we opened one final door and were able to plunge out and into the night, leaving the warehouse and the men inside of it behind.
As Noah climbed into the driver’s seat of the pickup and Eli helped me into the passenger side, pointing out where he had put as much water as he was able to find bottles for in the foot-well beneath where my caudal fin waved, I managed to ask him a question which had been bothering me since he let us out of the cell.
“Tell me one thing, Eli,” I said, “why are you helping us?”
He did not reply immediately, instead looking at me as though I had just asked him why the sky was blue or the sea was green.
“You need to ask?” he said in an exasperated tone.
“You’re one of the crew,” I replied, still not satisfied with his answer, “what makes you go against them on this one?”
“So is your brother,” he retorted, but then shook his head. “I may not be the most upstanding of people, but this,” he made a vague gesture to encompass the whole affair of my kidnapping and being held prisoner, “whatever you want to call it – this isn’t who I am. I can’t put it more simply or explain any more to you than that, so you’ll just have to trust me.”
He pushed my door closed and leaned in closer so that Noah could hear him clearly.
“Here are the directions back to the coast,” he handed a note to Noah. “Follow them and you should be there in about an hour if you get going now.”
Noah wasted no time in turning the key to start the engine and pulling away down the dirt track.

While I was very grateful for the thought Eli had put into loading the truck with as much water as he could find before helping us to escape the warehouse, there never seemed to be enough of it around to keep me from suffering whilst on land and not actually sitting in a bathtub or pool of some kind. Noah’s attention had been on the task of driving fast enough to get us well away from our former captors and yet not so fast that we ended up attracting attention or getting pulled over by the police, and so he had failed to notice just how quickly I’d managed to deplete the stock of water in the foot-well by pouring it over my parched gills and rapidly drying tail.
Only when the last drop was gone and I was beginning to feel the effects of the deprivation did he finally glance over and notice the state that I was now in. He looked both surprised and not a little annoyed, most likely guessing quickly and correctly that I had been keeping deliberately silent so as not to distract him from the road.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll stop at the next gas station we see.”
“No,” I shook my head vehemently, “we need to keep on going, and we can’t risk someone seeing me and realising what I am!”
“There’s a blanket over the seats,” Noah countered, “wrap yourself up in it and pretend to be asleep or something.”
“I said no!” I almost shouted at him.
“We’re stopping, and that’s that,” Noah shut down the argument. “I know how you get when you’ve got no water,” he explained a moment later, his voice more reasonable than before. “You’ll never make it to the sea at this rate, and even if you do, you’ll be too weak to even think about swimming.”
I said nothing, knowing that he was right, but not wanting to admit as much.
“Stop trying to be selfless for once,” Noah said. “I know you’re the eldest and you feel like you’ve always got to be the one making the sacrifices for my sake. But we’re both adults now, and don’t you think it’s time that we started to do what’s best for the pair of us, instead of just what you think’s best for me?”
I nodded, catching his eye in the rear-view mirror and seeing him return the gesture.
He was right to think that I was still acting as though he was a child and I the only adult in his life to care for him, not willing to allow him to make a decision or choose the course of our actions, even when it was plainly obvious that he was in the right and I was very much wrong. Even seeing him as a grown man and hearing his voice deepened by the passage of the years hadn’t made me change my attitude, and I was still prepared to put myself in unnecessary danger simply for the sake of appearing to be the responsible adult.
As much as I had been forced to change after becoming a mermaid, adjusting to a life of virtual solitude in the ocean, it had also frozen my attitudes towards the aspects of my former human life right where I left them when I first departed for the sea. Upon coming back I had simply resumed my role as the struggling replacement parent out of sheer lack of any other role to assume, perhaps for fear of admitting that I was now a mermaid, effectively helpless on land, and so might need to allow Noah to take the lead and make the important decisions for the both of us.
As he pulled into a small gas station perhaps five minutes later and set about buying the water I would need to make it the rest of the way to the coast, I pulled the blanket around me and did as I had been told, ruminating on just those same kind of thoughts and realising that I had been so afraid of what my being a mermaid would mean once I came back into contact with the wider human world. I had battled all of my life against adversity, and becoming a mermaid always felt like just one more chapter in an already fraught and challenging story, no matter how strange and impossible it seemed.
But maybe that attitude had made me too hard, too unwilling to accept help when it was offered and look a proverbial gift horse in the mouth. I recalled suddenly questioning Eli’s motives and the surprise my suspicion had elicited from him, and knew then that I was in danger of becoming too guarded and swift to see the worst in the world.
As Noah returned to the truck and we started towards the coast, I began to wonder if my return to the sea had to be as permanent and distant a thing as I first imagined it to be.
“Noah,” I asked as we drove, “how good are you at carpentry?”

The answer, I discovered in the course of the next few weeks, was not only very good, but also extremely innovative and full of new ideas that would never have occurred to me in the space of a hundred years. I may have returned to the sea as soon as possible, but I did not return to the solitary life I had lead before, and now I did not intend to do so, as Noah and I had begun to labour over what we hoped would become a suitable home for the both of us.
My initial proposal had been a houseboat of some kind, but Noah was not keen on returning to the life of a sailor for fear of his former crewmates, even after we heard on the radio that most of them had been arrested in an undercover police operation against people-trafficking. They received long spells in prison, as was happily explained in an interview with the undercover officer behind the operation, a man with a voice that sounded oddly similar to that of an elderly sailor I recalled from my recent past.
Noah’s counter proposal was based on the notion of something we could build out of readily available materials, even stuff that I could easily gather from the man-made detritus that was then clogging the waters of the ocean and washing up on shorelines the world over. So he built a platform of driftwood and filled the underside with great nets woven from ropes and fishing nets that we found in the water, and these last he filled with the empty plastic bottles that I scavenged from the sea so that the entire thing would float upon them. Atop this we began to build shacks and small buildings for shelter, adding to and expanding the size of the raft as we required, eventually accommodating a garden and vegetable plot, requisitioned solar panels and other bits of unwanted stuff which we put brought back from the dead and used to make this new home ever more comfortable for ourselves.
Our floating home grew organically, and though I was still given to taking long jaunts out into the deeper ocean alone, I was never away from the place for more than a few weeks at a time. It pleased me greatly to be able to return and see that Noah had not suffered from my absence, indeed he seemed to grow ever more surer and settled each time that I came back to what was now our home.
He began to use the same skills which had built that home for others, working as a carpenter, joiner and builder with a reputation for hard work and unconventional approaches to common problems that made him both popular and something of a minor celebrity when he gained a presence on the internet and began recording his projects for a small, but growing audience. I was careful to keep out of the way when he did this, and he never mentioned either his sister or the odd housemate with whom he shared his home, simply making the odd joke about her peculiar habits and the strange hours that she kept.
I wish that I could add my own similarly positive story of finding a new life and carving out a happy new career for myself in some fashionable area, but the truth is that while I’m living a more balanced life than I did before and I have company to keep me in touch with the human world, I still don’t know just what I want from life or where I hope that it’ll take me in the future. For all that I’m reconciled with both my brother and the world that I thought I’d left behind, I’m not really a part of it in the same way that he is, and I never will be either. Perhaps my destiny is to be just that, a being trapped between two worlds, never finding true happiness and fulfilment in either of them.
I’m not sad or sitting here cutting my wrists with a razor, just happy and cheerful on the surface while the deeper emotions roil and roll beneath the surface.
Sorry about the sea metaphor there, it kind of comes with the territory when you’re a mermaid.
I know that I’m far from unique in feeling like that, and that there are literally millions of human beings out there right now, feeling just the same as I do.
But I think what makes me maybe just a little different is the path that I took to get here, the fact that I thought becoming a mermaid would change everything about my life.
And in a way it did just that.
But what’s really funny is the sheer amount of stuff that it doesn’t change in the slightest.
So the next time you watch a film or read a book with a mermaid in, maybe don’t think of her as being so different from you.
And if you ever see one, sitting on a rock and gazing out to sea, remember that she’s probably thinking about the same stuff as you.

Description
Sometimes it really sucks to be proven right, more for the sake of the people around me than specifically my own, and it’s no consolation when you see evidence of just how right you were being played out before your eyes when you’re pretty much helpless. For me it was the conviction that, as much as I didn’t want to leave my old life behind or abandon my little brother either, there really was no way that a mermaid could ever hope to live in the human world, that it’d be bad for all concerned. That was why I made the torturous journey to the sea all those years ago, why I left everything and everyone behind to start over and carve out a new existence beneath the waves.
My best guess is that I’d been back in contact with human beings for no more than ten minutes at the most before things started to turn bad, what should have been a routine and mundane day for everyone involved turning into a chaotic mess. I don’t know if it was because the sight of me was enough to scare those that saw me deep down, to undermine their belief in the stability of the world as they imagined it to be. Or maybe it was just because they were a bunch of unprincipled pricks that laid eyes on a genuine, living and breathing mermaid and saw an opportunity to cash in. Whatever the reason, harsh words were exchanged, and in the blink of an eye, punches were being thrown over me.
And all that I could do was to hang there and watch in horror.

“Caroline,” Noah asked me with a shocked look on his face, “is that you?”
“Erm, yeah, Noah,” I answered. “I guess that it is!”
Before he could utter another word, Noah was elbowed savagely out of the way by what must have been one of his crewmates, a man that was, despite how much my little brother seemed to have grown since I saw him last, still a good foot taller than him. Stubble covered the majority of his leering face, and he kept Noah held back with not much more effort than it had taken for him to shove him aside in the first instance.
“What is this, man?” asked the newcomer. “In all of the years I’ve been at sea, I ain’t never seen a body hauled up in a net that wasn’t dead and drowned, let alone one dressed up as a mermaid.” He eyed Noah suspiciously. “Add to that the fact that you’re talking to her like you’re a couple of old friends and I smell something pretty bad brewing here.” The crewman poked Noah square in the chest with a finger that looked more like a sausage than a normal digit. “Is this some kind of joke maybe…like one of those pranks that they film for those compilation shows?”
“No,” Noah shook his head, “it’s not like that, Mike!”
“What is it like then,” Mike rounded on him, “tell me?”
“She’s a real…” Noah began to speak, but then realised what he was about to say and stopped.
“Jesus Christ,” said one of the other crewmen standing on the opposite side of the net, “look at the bit where her tail starts!”
Mike leaned in as close as he could, allowing me a chance to smell the combination of fish grease and body odour that clung to him like a second skin.
“That’s no bloody costume,” he bellowed, as if taking personal offence at the revelation that I was actually a real mermaid and not someone intent on pulling some kind of bizarre prank at his expense, “she’s a real one!”
“How can she be,” said one of the crewmen who hadn’t chimed in up until that point, “they don’t really exist, you stupid bastard!”
“She is,” Mike yelled at him, “I can see it with my own eyes!”
At that he reached into the net and began grasping at the portions of my tail that were within his reach, squeezing and pinching at the scales as though he was somehow challenging me to prove him wrong by doing nothing other than simply hanging there and allowing him to eagerly molest me.
“Hey,” Noah placed a hand on Mike’s shoulder, “take your damn hands off of her!”
I made a gesture for him to back off, almost pleading with him to stop what he was doing, as I had already sensed the course down which this encounter was going, and there was no way that he was capable of changing it on his own.
“Take your own advice,” Mike cried as he turned and punched Noah full on the jaw in one sudden movement.
The blow connected with a sickening sound, twisting Noah’s head around like a top and sending him crashing to the deck as his legs buckled and gave way beneath him. Mike turned back to me as the other three crewmen fell upon Noah, his bulk effectively blocking my view and meaning that I could not tell if they were setting on him to continue their colleagues work, or to see if he was in need of help.
“Take that arsehole below deck and let him cool off in the cell for a while,” Mike didn’t even bother to turn round as he dished out order for how Noah was to be dealt with.
He smiled unpleasantly as he noted my apparent concern for my brother’s fate.
“Now,” he stroked his chin, “what are we going to do with you?”
Perhaps for the first time the enormity of the situation and just what a mess I was in began to hit home. Before I had been instinctively driven to devote all of my attention first to the shock of being hauled up in the net, second to the surprise of looking Noah in the eye after all those years and third to my natural instinct for wanting to protect him as I had done when I was human and we were younger. Only now did I actually begin to think of the fact that I was trapped, just like the other fish in the net, and seemingly at the mercy of the kind of men that would set upon Noah with a moment’s notice.
I remained silent, trying to appear as innocent and unthreatening as possible.
“Ah,” Mike sighed in resignation a moment later, “it’ll be up to the captain anyway, not me.”
I think the look of relief on my face must have been visible, as he fixed me with a cruel smile.
“But until then,” he said, “you can share quarters with good old Noah, since you and he seem to be old acquaintances. I’m sure you’ve got lots of catching up to do.”

I have to admit that I’d been lucky up to that point in my fairly short life not to have ever been subjected to the kind of physical humiliation that soon followed. It was not that anyone overstepped the boundaries of common decency and inflicted any serious molestation upon me, for which I was very thankful, but more the sense in which I was summarily removed from the confines of the net and manhandled below deck by Mike and his fellow crewmen. They seemed to view me more as a creature of the kind they regularly hauled up in their nets and sold on at wholesale markets than a sentient and sapient being with which they had some kind of kinship.
Before becoming a mermaid, I had only had the most brief and fleeting knowledge of physical intimacy with other human beings, mainly thanks to there being little time when I was not either caring for my brother, educating myself or working to pay the bills. It’s ironic that I probably felt more hands touching me and spent more time being held by the opposite sex in those first few moments of finding myself outside of the net than I had in my entire previous life as a human being.
But first they released the winch holding the net over the deck, sending me and all of its other contents spilling onto the soaking boards. Luckily I had been in the rough centre of the net, and so I landed atop a fairly generous cushion of fish, managing to keep from having the breath knocked out of me. Any hope of trying to make it to the side of the boat and back into the water was dashed by the fact that the remaining crewmen were on me almost the moment that the net opened, their rough, calloused hands seizing both the pale flesh of my torso and the contrastingly smooth and slick scales of my tail.
My instinct was to struggle, squirming desperately as I felt myself being easily lifted off of the deck, but in reality I knew that there was no way I could hope to escape the grasp of so many strong and determined men. I was also intent upon seeing what had happened to Noah, another factor that made my instincts impossible to follow, no matter how much I was afraid of being captured and left at the mercy of these fishermen. The same protective urges that had dominated my life when I had been able to care for Noah were fast returning to me, apparently not notably lessened by an absence of almost a decade and a change of species in the time since I saw him last.
The fishermen were neither deliberately rougher than they needed to be with me, nor did any of them take exceptional liberties thanks to my helpless position. But still there was more than one occasion on which I could feel a pair of hands stroking or caressing a part of my body with more intimacy or intent than was required. They pinched at my scales and sometimes tweaked my fins, understandably fascinated by being able to hold and feel a creature that was simply not supposed to exist. I was indignant and humiliated by this kind of treatment at the time, though looking back, I soon came to realise just how vulnerable I actually was and how easy it would have been for one or all of them to be more forceful with me.
That’s not to say I was okay with being occasionally groped, just glad it stayed at that.
As I’d always noticed with most men that are into women, they seemed most obsessed with my chest and backside, eyes lingering on the former when they thought no one else was watching, and the hands cupping the latter being very territorial in keeping others away from their charge. For a tiny moment I recalled the way a woman’s body could be such an effecting tool for manipulation, and I felt a small trill of the way in which my being a mermaid must have added to this greatly. No wonder the legends of sirens were so common, when a perfectly average woman could almost hypnotise those who desired her with her body, what hope was there of shaking off the same allure when it was being wielded by a mermaid?
Not that I was in any position to play the siren at that particular moment in time.
Even worse than the sensation of being manhandled and carried into the bowels of the ship against my will was the fact that I could already feel my skin and scales beginning to dry out now that I was effectively in-doors. Out on the deck of the ship there had been sufficient amounts of moisture in the air in the form of spray and the rain from the storm to keep me properly hydrated and make being out of the water bearable. But down here it was a different story, and my water-hungry mermaid’s body soon began to suck the moisture off of wherever it could be found in order to keep my essential organs functioning, meaning that I was becoming visibly dryer with each moment that passed.
I tried to make some feeble plea or protest, but the crewmen just took it as an attempt to ask for mercy, and laughed it off without hesitation.
Finally they stopped outside of a small doorway, opening it and casually tossing me into the similarly tiny room beyond. I cried out in pain as I landed in a heap upon the floor and then watched as the last sliver of light disappeared with the closing of the door behind me and the sound of a key being turned in the lock.
The darkness was no problem for me, my eyes working better in the absence of light as a mermaid than they ever had when I was human. But my dilemma was now whether to go straight to the slumped form of Noah, who lay in the corner of the room, or else to make straight for the tiny sink that was attached to the opposite wall and try to stave off the worsening dehydration.
In the end, the fact that I was already beginning to feel it becoming harder to breathe and the burning sensation around my gills, I was forced to make for the sink and leave Noah alone for the time being. But I soon discovered that the small sink was simply too high off of the floor for me to be able to easily reach the taps, and in addition there was no plug, which meant I could not have run enough water into the bowl to be of any use.
By this point I was beginning to seriously panic, as the past ten years I had spent in the sea, where there had been literally no chance of drying out at all, so the danger had become something for which I was simply not prepared. I can only compare it to a human suddenly finding themselves deprived of oxygen and struggling to discover a source of the same precious commodity before they suffocated in extreme pain and distress.
I desperately crawled over to where Noah lay, still and unmoving.
Rather than the caring words I had always hoped to exchange with him when we met once again, I was instead forced to almost scream at him to wake up, pushing and pulling at his shoulders in the vague hope of being able to bring him around. I have no recollection of how long I continued to plead with him in that manner, only a memory of the ever-increasing pain and discomfort that I was feeling as my voice became horse and my cries all the more desperate. In the end it came to the point where I was almost pounding upon him as hard as I could with balled fists, hoping that the feeble force of my weakening blows would be enough to bring him around.
When he finally showed signs of movement, it was to reach out suddenly and seize my fists, preventing them from delivering any more blows.
I was shocked at how easily his hands encircled my own and the lack of effort it required on his part to keep me from pulling away or breaking free of his grip. For a moment I expected him to use this grip to pull me closer, maybe even to embrace me fully after so much time had separated us. But I was shocked again when he instead pushed me firmly away from him, tossing me bodily into the far corner of the room, where I lay, curled into an almost foetal condition and paralysed with confusion and fear at his sudden and violent actions towards me.
“Don’t touch me,” Noah hissed, “don’t even look at me!”
My eyes were wide now as I cowered away from him in actual fear.
I could still see the echoes of the boy that I had been forced to leave behind in the much harder and more gaunt face of the young man that now gazed at me from across the tiny room. But the lines around his features seemed to have been etched from hard times and the youthful innocence burned away by what must have happened to him in my absence. The eyes were the worse, those same dark orbs that I had seen filled with happiness in the past were now reflective of resentment and so many unanswered questions that I almost forgot the fact that I was rapidly dehydrating as I felt guilt at what life must have done to my younger brother to leave him like this.
I raised a single hand to plead with him, a sound rasping from my lips that might have been an attempt to form his name or else a plea for his help, maybe both.
“Don’t ask me to help you,” Noah spat the words at me, “don’t ask me for anything – you don’t have the right!” He kept staring at me the whole time he spoke, his eyes boring into me. “You’re not my sister, you’re not even human anymore. My sister was always there for me, she wouldn’t have left me all alone like you did. I don’t know what you are. I used to think that you were still her, but you’re not – you’re some kind of thing that took over her body and made her into something else.”
I couldn’t tell which was causing me more pain, the dehydration or the accusations that I could still hear being thrown at me by Noah. All that I could do was keep on pleading with him, even as my movements became less pronounced and I began to feel my grip on consciousness slipping away, meaning that soon it would be he who was stuck in the cell with an unresponsive fellow prisoner, rather than me.
Eventually he fell silent, seeming to simply gaze on me with an expression on his face that was hard for me to read in my current state of confusion and pain. He remained still and impassive, and I almost believed that he was happy to sit there and watch as I faded away to nothing, that he was taking some perverse form of satisfaction or revenge in seeing me in such a state.
He stirred eventually, but not before my eyes closed and I fell into a stupor.
So it was that I had no idea of his intentions as I finally passed out.

I awoke to the sensation of water being drizzled over my head in irregular and yet very much welcome waves which came at random instances and never seemed to last long enough to provide more than momentary relief to my now badly parched anatomy. There was no way that I could have stirred to full wakefulness and been able to tell what was happening and where the water was coming from, and so I was forced to simply lie still and allow it to slowly pull me back from the brink and a little closer to full consciousness with each moment that passed.
After a little time I was able to fully open my eyes and begin to make sense of my surroundings again, recognising with disappointment the same small cell in which I had passed out. But there was no sign of Noah in the corner where he had been thrown, and I made to rise in search of him, my arms quaking with weakness even as I tried to crawl forwards.
“I’m right here,” said a voice by my head.
I glanced upwards, my vision still not yet cleared, but sure the voice was Noah’s.
He was gazing down at me as he nursed my head in his lap, dripping water from his shirt, which he had wadded up and soaked in the small sink nearby.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “for what I said to you before.”
I tried to speak, but my voice was still nothing more than a dry croak.
“It’s okay,” he shook his head to quiet me down. “I was just angry, and confused…you know?”
I nodded eagerly, desperate to show that I understood and to encourage this change in his attitude towards me.
“I was sure that I’d managed to convince myself that you weren’t coming back ever, and so when you showed up like that back there,” he paused to shrug, his words suddenly not seeming like enough to express the strangeness of our recent reunion.
“I would have…come back,” the words were weak and scratchy in my throat, “but I thought…you were better off…without me.”
Noah offered me the sodden shirt to drink from, and I sucked the water from it greedily.
“You were young,” I coughed as my voice regained a measure of its former strength, “had your whole life ahead of you. If I’d stayed, the best we could have managed was for me to live my life like someone with a serious disability. And you’d have been roped into staying to care for me. Even without me, you had a better chance of living a full life of your own.”
He laughed ruefully at the last point and shook his head.
“I guess that you did all you could to let me have the freedom to make my own decisions,” he chuckled, “and the real irony is that I took that chance and made a godawful mess of it all!”
His words filled me with questions and worries, but I sensed that it would be better to let him volunteer all that we was ready to tell me, without badgering him solely for the sake of my own conscience.
“I started out filled with the notion that I was going to go it alone and really make something of myself, become someone that you and Mom and Dad would have been proud of. You know, really live up to the sacrifices that you’d all made for me over the years. I pushed myself all of the time to be good at whatever I did, and if I failed or even fell short, I started beating myself up over it and thinking that I was letting you all down. I told myself that I’d been given so much help that I’d have to be worthless to screw it up, but it was only much later I realised I’d been pushing myself too much and setting myself up to fail like that.”
He sighed and then continued.
“I went off the rails in the end, thought I was just being a loser at the time, but looking back, I think it was more like some kind of breakdown, if I’m honest. I started drinking too much and hanging out with the same kind of losers and lowlifes that I thought I was supposed to belong with. I signed up to sail with this boat half out of desperation for the money and half out of the hope that it might give me a chance to find you again.”
Noah laughed at the irony of the situation in which he found himself.
“I guess that I got my wish, eh?” he added.
“It’s weird,” I croaked, “almost too much of a coincidence to believe.”
“Yeah,” Noah agreed, “and I always thought that if we did meet up again, you’d still be the only one that had changed any.”
“I am still sorry,” I offered, “if that means anything after this long.”
“I know,” Noah replied, “and so am I.”
I could feel his eyes on my body as the silence grew between us, imagine him taking in the scales that covered my small breasts almost completely, the fins on my forearms and hips, gill-slits beneath my arms, and of course the snaking and sinuous tail which completed by mermaid’s body in the place of legs. He could also not fail to see the fact that I now possessed almost literally no fat on my body, with only sinewy and sleek muscles characterising its shape, so that I was more akin in appearance to an Olympic swimmer than a curvaceous siren of myth and legend. There were scars to be seen as well, places where my time living in the seas and oceans had not been kind to me physically, and I bore the mark of both fighting for my life against predators and the very elements themselves for survival.
“We both changed since we saw each other last,” I said, “but I think that there’s enough of who we were back then left to make it worth getting to know who we’ve become now.”

We spent the rest of the unpleasant voyage whilst trapped in the makeshift cell talking when one of us was taken by the mood and in silence when we were not, with Noah frequently returning to the sink to once more soak his shirt and keep me from drying out. It was not much like a joyous family reunion where a person found out that their next of kin was actually alive after an enforced absence of many years, but more akin to a couple of trauma victims trying to find the will to speak openly and honestly about that they had been through to get to this point still alive and relatively sane.
Nothing changed in terms of that same routine until Noah’s head suddenly snapped up and he began to look around, as if noticing something that I had not. While it might sound preposterous that a human would be more sensitive to such subtle nuances while on the water than a mermaid, it was also true to say that, while I had spent a far greater time living in the actual sea itself, I had not spent anywhere near as much time as Noah had on boats of any kind. Because of this, I took his actions to be on account of noticing some subtle change in the sounds and vibrations that he could recognise through the hull of the fishing boat.
Noah rose then, and stole quickly across the small room to where there was a tiny ventilation port set into the wall that curved with the outer shape of the hull. He pressed an eye to it and strained to make out something beyond for perhaps a minute, before returning to my side again.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“We’re slowing down,” Noah answered, “like we’re coming in to port.”
“But you don’t sound too happy about that,” I could hear the anxiety in his voice.
“It’s more where we’re coming in,” Noah explained. “This boat’s not always doing things that are strictly legal, if you know what I mean? And so it has more than one place to put in. Let’s just say that from what I could make out, it’s not one that I recognise as one of the legal ones.”
“I don’t think I like the sound of where this is going,” I frowned, “or where we are!”
“No,” Noah agreed, “neither do I. This is where we’ve put in whenever the ship was carrying something illegal and the captain needed to get it into the hands of whoever wanted it really quickly. So I think we can guess that they’re going to treat you in the same way.”
Suddenly there was a sound from the door, a key being turned in the lock.
Before I could say a word, Noah tensed as two crewmen stepped into the room with us and then threw himself at them in the hope that the element of surprise would work in his favour. He caught the first one with a lucky punch to the gut, which sent him sprawling into the floor of the already crowded room. But the confined space meant that he could not then step forwards and make use of the advantage he had gained, so the second crewman was ready when they faced off, not taking long to smash a meaty fist into the side of Noah’s head which sent him reeling and stumbling backwards.
All I could think to do was throw my arms around the legs of the second crewman so that he stumbled and fell onto the prostrate form of his fellow, but I was not able to do any more thanks to the impracticality of my tail on land, and Noah was still stunned from the punch which had brought him down. It took the other crewmen behind the first pair only a matter of seconds to wade in and subdue us both, using plastic ties to bind Noah’s wrists and ankles, then the same to bind my own wrists before putting one around the bottom of my tail and looping another through that and the one upon my wrists so that I was trussed up and unable to move.
As we were then manhandled out of the cell and back up onto the deck of the boat, it occurred to me that the reason they had not bothered to gag us or otherwise prevent anyone crying out for help must be that we were sufficiently isolated for them to be sure there was no one around to hear. And so I resolved to keep as calm and quiet as I could in the hope of taking in the details of our surroundings in case the knowledge might become useful further down the line.
The reason they had not bothered to blindfold either of us hinted that they did not anticipate us laying eyes on the location again, and lead to rather more disturbing possibilities as to just what lay ahead.
With Mike bellowing orders at his subordinates, we were taken onto the deck. I was carried as before, and Noah was pushed resentfully in the direction that his former crewmates dictated, until we descended a gang-plank and found that we were on a small dock. The lack of other boats present and the overall lack of sound coming from anywhere other than the boat and its crew suggested that it was a private affair, all the better to conduct illegal matters well away from prying eyes. The only visible buildings were a few sorry-looking sheds that flanked a dirt and gravel track leading away into the woods that began away from the shoreline, and on this stood a nondescript and unmarked box truck, its back open and waiting.
I was carried to the back of the truck first and tossed inside, with Noah following a few moments later, both of us sent sprawling on the hard bed of the floor. Mike stepped forwards with a knife that looked well-used in one hand and cut the tie around Noah’s wrists, then signalled for one of the other crewmen, who shoved a cardboard pallet of water-bottles into the back of the truck with us.
“Don’t worry about precious little Ariel back there,” he gestured to me with a cruel chuckle. “We were listening in to most of what you chattered about back on the boat, and we heard her whining for water so she wouldn’t dry out. Your job’s to use that to keep her in shape until we get to where we’re going, as we don’t want the merchandise ruined before we have a chance to sell it now, do we?”
He pulled down the folding door and sealed us in the back of the truck before either of us could react, clearly relishing the chance to hint at the fact they were planning to use me as a commodity, effectively sell me into slavery as soon as the chance arose and they could find an interested buyer.
In the gloom of the truck’s rear, I could just make out the look of desperate rage building on Noah’s face as he realised the predicament that we were now in. But as there was nothing at all we could hope to do in that moment, I felt that he needed to be distracted from his anger so that he would not do something rash again when the chance presented itself, and also because I wanted to preserve what energy and clarity of thought we both still possessed in the hope of using it to make plans when the time came to do so.
My gaze fell upon the pallet of water-bottles, and though I was not yet badly dehydrated by any means, I hit upon a means to keep Noah both distracted and occupied at the same time.
“Noah,” I gasped in an exaggerated manner intended to gain his full attention, “I’m drying out again…help me!”
I felt guilty as I held up my bound wrists and flapped my caudal fin in what I hoped was a pathetic-looking show of need, but no matter how bad my acting was, it had the desired effect. The angry expression melted from Noah’s face almost instantly, and he set to tearing at the plastic wrapping around the pallet until he could wrench out the first bottle and begin to pour it over my scales in the belief that he was relieving my suffering just as he had back in the cell on the boat.
Twice now he had tried to tackle the situation head-on and with physical force and twice he had been overwhelmed by sheer numbers. The obvious conclusion was that, if he tried it again, the results would be the same or worse for him, and I could not handle to idea of him getting permanently hurt or even killed on my account. Where brawn had failed, we would now have to instead rely upon brains and waiting for an opportunity to present itself, and if Noah could not restrain himself, then it logically fell to me as the elder sibling to take measures to see that he did so, whether he liked it or not.
For the rest of the journey I spoke to him on the subject, trying to keep my words from sounding like a direct criticism of his previous efforts, but at the same time constantly emphasizing the fact that we were hopelessly outnumbered and he could not hope to fight his former crewmates and whoever else was in league with them off whilst also aiding someone as helpless as I was on land. He did not like the sound of it, but eventually I could see his mind coming round to the same inevitable conclusion as I had myself, and the only reason I had done so more quickly was the reality of my mermaid’s body on all the decisions that I now made.
It felt strange to me how easily I had now slipped naturally back into my former role of the elder sibling and the one that was required to take a step back from their emotions and use judgement to decide what was best for the both of us. But for better or worse, that was where I now found myself, and with Noah seeming to accept it as well, I would have to step up and continue to fill that role for the foreseeable future.

The truck continued to drive on for what felt like almost an hour, and I was hard-pressed to keep my cool and not begin to panic at the fact that it was most likely we were driving inland, rather than following the coastline as we went. One of the peculiar senses that I had developed after my transformation into a mermaid was an unerring ability to gauge how far away I was from major sources of water at any given time. It was not an accurate skill down to miles, feet and inches by any means, more an instinctive notion of how long I would need to travel and in what direction in order to find it. I had not had recourse to make use of it for the entirety of the time that I was living alone in the ocean, but now it came back to me almost in the same manner as a person remembers how to ride a bike, and I was keenly aware of the ever growing distance between us and the ocean itself.
By the time the truck finally began to slow and then came to a halt, I was visibly struggling to keep a handle on myself as I tried to balance the need to keep hydrated, push down the panic inspired by knowledge of the sea being so far away and having to remain strong for Noah’s sake as well. I felt as though my reserves of energy had already been long depleted and every moment of effort that I exerted over myself was somehow sapping my very being and leaving me lessened with the loss.
As the door at the rear of the truck could be heard unlocking and then opening, I saw Noah tense bodily, much as he had done when the door of the cell on the boat likewise opened. I shot him a warning glance and did not lighten my stern expression until I could see that he had visibly backed off and was not about to make some rash move as soon as the crewmen came in to seize us both.
“Last stop, everybody out!” roared Mike as he ordered others forward to get us out.
It was dark by now, and I was able to use my superior night-vision only to discern that we were somewhere in a heavily-wooded area serviced only by a dirt road that terminated in front of a small and rather dilapidated warehouse of some kind. The land was pretty flat and even, allowing me to guess that we were not far enough inland to have reached any kind of hills or mountains, meaning that were I to locate a river nearby, it would likely flow pretty much directly to the sea with little in the way. This thought comforted me immensely, though I had to admit that it did not offer much hope of escape for Noah.
Where we had been kept in a makeshift cell while aboard the boat, there was no mistaking the fact that what we were now transferred into inside the warehouse was an actual space designed and constructed for the sole purpose of keeping an individual held as a prisoner. It stood in the very back of the building, off of a narrow corridor and was accessed solely be a barred metal door, with similar bars across the one small window. Inside was a bare mattress upon the floor and a single bucket in the corner for the most obvious purpose, and in addition, someone had possessed the forethought to add to these and fill with water a metal tub of the kind that someone from a bygone century might have used to clean their laundry.
What the presence of this cell said about the people who were holding us and with whom Noah had been associating for so long, I tried not to dwell on too greatly. Instead I was almost grateful to find that the ties on my wrists and tail were cut before we were locked into the cell and left to contemplate what would be done with us next. Noah too had been cut loose, and he crawled onto the mattress, trying to rub the feeling back into his ankles and feet as I eagerly wormed my way across the bare concrete floor and climbed into the tub of water, feeling the incomparable relief that always came with sinking my scales into liquid after being so long out of it.
Rather than sitting with my backside in the tub and the rest of me flopping out over the edge as a human might have done, my suppleness and flexibility meant that I could comfortably curl my tail tightly around as I lay in the water and so submerge my entire body beneath the surface. The chance to breathe with my gills for the first time in almost twenty four hours was perhaps better than that of being in the water itself, and I finally began to feel myself returning to what had become my sense of normality as a mermaid.
I could not hear Noah as he lay on the mattress, and while I first thought he was remaining silent out of sullen defeat, I soon heard the sound of his snoring, and realised that he had fallen into a deep and well-needed sleep. This made me thankful for that small mercy, as I had anticipated the need to come up with new and insightful schemes that might see us released in order to keep his hopes up, but the bleakness of the cell and the nature of our predicament had wholly failed to inspire me to think of anything of the kind. I chose to take his falling asleep as both a boon and a sign, closing my eyes and not taking long to follow his lead.
I don’t know how long we had been sleeping before I awoke and reclined in the tub for a time, enjoying the experience of being alone with only my own thoughts for company. Perhaps one of the few true joys of my much-changed life as a mermaid had been the loss of the many stresses and strains of life that humans assume are necessary and unavoidable, but I soon discovered were utterly manufactured and thus absent from the non-human world, or the real world, as I now like to call it. I can’t stress how much my continued survival in the ocean and seas was made possible by the fact that I truly had the time to focus my mind and learn what I needed in order to survive, to make myself mentally strong enough.
So it was that when I looked up and saw a figure standing silently on the other side of the bars, I was able to use that same mental strength to keep from making an alarmed sound and stare back defiantly. In truth it was nothing more real than a cat arching its back and raising its fur in an attempt to appear more intimidating, but it had often served me well in the past, giving humans enough pause for me to dive underwater and swim swiftly to safety before they could react.
From what I could make out, the man was one of the fishermen, still clad in his begrimed overalls and a woollen hat that covered most of his head. He appeared old on account of the fact that a bedraggled white beard and moustaches hid most of his face, but his sleeves were rolled up to the elbows, revealing arms of knotted muscles and gnarled hands, all covered in weathered tattoos. In the shadows of the corridor beyond the bars, his eyes were nothing more than glittering gimlets of black beneath furrowed brows.
It took me a short while to guess as to why he was staring at me in silence, holding my eye without moving or blinking. But then it dawned on me that this must be a man who had spent his life on the sea, and who was now standing in front of what seemed to be a genuine mermaid. He must have heard all of the old tales from previous generations and scoffed at such superstitious nonsense whilst living in the modern age. Now he was seeing something that was supposed to be a myth with his own eyes, and who could say what kind of conflicts it was stirring inside of his head. For my part the effect was somewhat the same, as I saw this was about as close as I was ever going to come to meeting the kind of hoary old seadogs that mermaids were supposed to encounter in old legends, so we seemed to be regarding each other across a gulf of weird legend and folklore.
But then he moved for the first time, revealing that he held a bunch of keys in one hand.
The other he raised to his lips and made a gesture for me to remain silent.
Was he about to unlock the cell door?
What were his intentions towards me once he had done so?
It was then that Noah stirred and sat up on the mattress, rubbing his eyes as he strained to discern the identity of the figure with his inferior human vision.
“Eli?!?” he hissed.
“Yes,” the old fisherman shook his head in apparent exasperation, “it is – no need to shout it out loud!”
I felt a wave of relief at that exchange, initially just because Noah was awake and it meant that I was no longer alone with the stranger. But then I recognised the ease with which Noah seemed to accept the older man’s presence and show none of the antipathy he had towards the other crewmates I had seen and interacted with. Perhaps this man he called Eli had merely been regarding me as I first thought, giving himself a little time to see the mermaid before he did something about the situation.
“Now shut the hell up,” Eli said as he unlocked the cell door and handed my brother what, in the dim light of the room, to be the key to a vehicle of some kind, “and let’s see about getting the two of you away from here.”
Noah stared down at the keys now in his hand as if unsure as to just what they actually were.
“Keys to an old pickup truck that’s around the back of this place,” Eli explained as if to a simpleton while he rolled his eyes. “If you start out now, you can be well away before morning comes. I’ll make sure the rest of them are distracted long enough, so don’t worry about that.” He then turned to address me directly for the first time. “And you,” he nodded, “are going to have to beg my pardon and let me carry you out there.” Noah made to protest, but Eli cut him off in short order. “Don’t be stupid, lad,” he said, “you’ve been kicked senseless twice in the space of a day – you’d collapse before you were a foot or so out of the door!”

The fear that I felt as we made that short dash out of the warehouse and towards the pickup truck that was supposed to be our salvation was very different to the kind which had characterised my capture and confinement beforehand. The latter had been a deep and sickening dread at what might lie ahead, but now the former took shape as an eager and very nervous anticipation of sneaking away from great danger and fearing to glance back over my shoulder in case we had been noticed and might have to flee for all we were worth.
For me this was mixed with a strange emotion which came from the experience of being carried out of there by Eli, as this was the very first time that a human being had carried me anywhere with my explicit permission and had not been my own brother. I’m not trying to suggest that I was attracted to the older man in any real sense, but this was a rare occasion in my life as a mermaid when I had received human contact that was both positive and welcome in nature. It surprised me, as I had previously been opposed to the idea, feeling that it would be belittling to me as a woman and a mermaid, but now I found that it actually filled me with more than a little confidence and hope.
We could hear vague sounds of a television turned up to a ludicrous level and raucous male laughter that told us the other members of the crew were never far away, and more than once there was a terrifying moment when a shadow or opening door made us freeze or go dashing down an alternate route. But in the end we opened one final door and were able to plunge out and into the night, leaving the warehouse and the men inside of it behind.
As Noah climbed into the driver’s seat of the pickup and Eli helped me into the passenger side, pointing out where he had put as much water as he was able to find bottles for in the foot-well beneath where my caudal fin waved, I managed to ask him a question which had been bothering me since he let us out of the cell.
“Tell me one thing, Eli,” I said, “why are you helping us?”
He did not reply immediately, instead looking at me as though I had just asked him why the sky was blue or the sea was green.
“You need to ask?” he said in an exasperated tone.
“You’re one of the crew,” I replied, still not satisfied with his answer, “what makes you go against them on this one?”
“So is your brother,” he retorted, but then shook his head. “I may not be the most upstanding of people, but this,” he made a vague gesture to encompass the whole affair of my kidnapping and being held prisoner, “whatever you want to call it – this isn’t who I am. I can’t put it more simply or explain any more to you than that, so you’ll just have to trust me.”
He pushed my door closed and leaned in closer so that Noah could hear him clearly.
“Here are the directions back to the coast,” he handed a note to Noah. “Follow them and you should be there in about an hour if you get going now.”
Noah wasted no time in turning the key to start the engine and pulling away down the dirt track.

While I was very grateful for the thought Eli had put into loading the truck with as much water as he could find before helping us to escape the warehouse, there never seemed to be enough of it around to keep me from suffering whilst on land and not actually sitting in a bathtub or pool of some kind. Noah’s attention had been on the task of driving fast enough to get us well away from our former captors and yet not so fast that we ended up attracting attention or getting pulled over by the police, and so he had failed to notice just how quickly I’d managed to deplete the stock of water in the foot-well by pouring it over my parched gills and rapidly drying tail.
Only when the last drop was gone and I was beginning to feel the effects of the deprivation did he finally glance over and notice the state that I was now in. He looked both surprised and not a little annoyed, most likely guessing quickly and correctly that I had been keeping deliberately silent so as not to distract him from the road.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll stop at the next gas station we see.”
“No,” I shook my head vehemently, “we need to keep on going, and we can’t risk someone seeing me and realising what I am!”
“There’s a blanket over the seats,” Noah countered, “wrap yourself up in it and pretend to be asleep or something.”
“I said no!” I almost shouted at him.
“We’re stopping, and that’s that,” Noah shut down the argument. “I know how you get when you’ve got no water,” he explained a moment later, his voice more reasonable than before. “You’ll never make it to the sea at this rate, and even if you do, you’ll be too weak to even think about swimming.”
I said nothing, knowing that he was right, but not wanting to admit as much.
“Stop trying to be selfless for once,” Noah said. “I know you’re the eldest and you feel like you’ve always got to be the one making the sacrifices for my sake. But we’re both adults now, and don’t you think it’s time that we started to do what’s best for the pair of us, instead of just what you think’s best for me?”
I nodded, catching his eye in the rear-view mirror and seeing him return the gesture.
He was right to think that I was still acting as though he was a child and I the only adult in his life to care for him, not willing to allow him to make a decision or choose the course of our actions, even when it was plainly obvious that he was in the right and I was very much wrong. Even seeing him as a grown man and hearing his voice deepened by the passage of the years hadn’t made me change my attitude, and I was still prepared to put myself in unnecessary danger simply for the sake of appearing to be the responsible adult.
As much as I had been forced to change after becoming a mermaid, adjusting to a life of virtual solitude in the ocean, it had also frozen my attitudes towards the aspects of my former human life right where I left them when I first departed for the sea. Upon coming back I had simply resumed my role as the struggling replacement parent out of sheer lack of any other role to assume, perhaps for fear of admitting that I was now a mermaid, effectively helpless on land, and so might need to allow Noah to take the lead and make the important decisions for the both of us.
As he pulled into a small gas station perhaps five minutes later and set about buying the water I would need to make it the rest of the way to the coast, I pulled the blanket around me and did as I had been told, ruminating on just those same kind of thoughts and realising that I had been so afraid of what my being a mermaid would mean once I came back into contact with the wider human world. I had battled all of my life against adversity, and becoming a mermaid always felt like just one more chapter in an already fraught and challenging story, no matter how strange and impossible it seemed.
But maybe that attitude had made me too hard, too unwilling to accept help when it was offered and look a proverbial gift horse in the mouth. I recalled suddenly questioning Eli’s motives and the surprise my suspicion had elicited from him, and knew then that I was in danger of becoming too guarded and swift to see the worst in the world.
As Noah returned to the truck and we started towards the coast, I began to wonder if my return to the sea had to be as permanent and distant a thing as I first imagined it to be.
“Noah,” I asked as we drove, “how good are you at carpentry?”

The answer, I discovered in the course of the next few weeks, was not only very good, but also extremely innovative and full of new ideas that would never have occurred to me in the space of a hundred years. I may have returned to the sea as soon as possible, but I did not return to the solitary life I had lead before, and now I did not intend to do so, as Noah and I had begun to labour over what we hoped would become a suitable home for the both of us.
My initial proposal had been a houseboat of some kind, but Noah was not keen on returning to the life of a sailor for fear of his former crewmates, even after we heard on the radio that most of them had been arrested in an undercover police operation against people-trafficking. They received long spells in prison, as was happily explained in an interview with the undercover officer behind the operation, a man with a voice that sounded oddly similar to that of an elderly sailor I recalled from my recent past.
Noah’s counter proposal was based on the notion of something we could build out of readily available materials, even stuff that I could easily gather from the man-made detritus that was then clogging the waters of the ocean and washing up on shorelines the world over. So he built a platform of driftwood and filled the underside with great nets woven from ropes and fishing nets that we found in the water, and these last he filled with the empty plastic bottles that I scavenged from the sea so that the entire thing would float upon them. Atop this we began to build shacks and small buildings for shelter, adding to and expanding the size of the raft as we required, eventually accommodating a garden and vegetable plot, requisitioned solar panels and other bits of unwanted stuff which we put brought back from the dead and used to make this new home ever more comfortable for ourselves.
Our floating home grew organically, and though I was still given to taking long jaunts out into the deeper ocean alone, I was never away from the place for more than a few weeks at a time. It pleased me greatly to be able to return and see that Noah had not suffered from my absence, indeed he seemed to grow ever more surer and settled each time that I came back to what was now our home.
He began to use the same skills which had built that home for others, working as a carpenter, joiner and builder with a reputation for hard work and unconventional approaches to common problems that made him both popular and something of a minor celebrity when he gained a presence on the internet and began recording his projects for a small, but growing audience. I was careful to keep out of the way when he did this, and he never mentioned either his sister or the odd housemate with whom he shared his home, simply making the odd joke about her peculiar habits and the strange hours that she kept.
I wish that I could add my own similarly positive story of finding a new life and carving out a happy new career for myself in some fashionable area, but the truth is that while I’m living a more balanced life than I did before and I have company to keep me in touch with the human world, I still don’t know just what I want from life or where I hope that it’ll take me in the future. For all that I’m reconciled with both my brother and the world that I thought I’d left behind, I’m not really a part of it in the same way that he is, and I never will be either. Perhaps my destiny is to be just that, a being trapped between two worlds, never finding true happiness and fulfilment in either of them.
I’m not sad or sitting here cutting my wrists with a razor, just happy and cheerful on the surface while the deeper emotions roil and roll beneath the surface.
Sorry about the sea metaphor there, it kind of comes with the territory when you’re a mermaid.
I know that I’m far from unique in feeling like that, and that there are literally millions of human beings out there right now, feeling just the same as I do.
But I think what makes me maybe just a little different is the path that I took to get here, the fact that I thought becoming a mermaid would change everything about my life.
And in a way it did just that.
But what’s really funny is the sheer amount of stuff that it doesn’t change in the slightest.
So the next time you watch a film or read a book with a mermaid in, maybe don’t think of her as being so different from you.
And if you ever see one, sitting on a rock and gazing out to sea, remember that she’s probably thinking about the same stuff as you.