“A Scale for a Scale” was inspired by the Kit Sora Flash Fiction Photgraphy Contest. You can view the skeletal mermaid that served as the prompt here.
We mermaids live an in-between life, part human, part fish. But it’s not an even split. Our heart lies in our warm-blooded chest, so we are more human; fish do not love so deeply they kill for it.
For such sins, we do not die an in-between death. Our tail goes first, scales flaking until it is naught but bone. We strike out for the shore with our arms as oars, drag ourselves upon a beach of stones, languish in purgatory until we atone.
A conch shell lies among the stones, a portal to the spirit of the sea. Men can hear its roar. But they do not speak the language of the waves.
Are you sorry? the spirit demands.
For the shipwreck I caused while lazing on that sun-warmed rock, dazzling the crew with my glittering scales until they drove their hull into its barnacled edges and drowned. They had caught my beloved Celeste in a net, dumped her in a glass tank for men on the mainland to ogle. Well, not them, but other men, and are not all men the same?
A scale for a scale, my mother taught me. They took one scale. I took thousands. It was never enough.
I press the conch shell to my lips. I murmur, I am sorry.
A lie. But I must go now, to be with my Celeste.
Wind blows through the slats in my bone white tail. The sea spirit roars in my ears.
You are not sorry.