The Siren

I shook my head.

“You can hear?”

I nodded.

“But you can’t speak … Umm, okay.” He started patting at his pockets as I tried to fight the dread creeping down my spine. We didn’t have many rules, but the ones we did have were absolute. Stay silent in the presence of others, until it was time to sing. When the time came to sing, do it without hesitation. When we weren’t singing, do nothing to expose our secret. Walking down the street was one thing, and so was sitting under a tree. But this? An attempt at an actual conversation? It landed me in a very dangerous realm.

“Here we go,” he announced, pulling out a pen. “I don’t have any paper, so you’ll have to write on my hand.”

I stared at his skin, debating. Which name should I use? The one on the driver’s license Miaka bought me online? The one I’d used to rent our current beach house? The one I’d used in the last town we’d stayed in? I had a hundred names to choose from.

Perhaps foolishly, I chose to tell him the truth.

“Kahlen?” he read off his skin.

I nodded, surprised by how freeing it felt to have one human on the planet know my birth name.

“That’s pretty. Nice to meet you.”

I gave him a thin smile, still uncomfortable. I didn’t know how to do small talk.

“That’s really cool that you’re going to a traditional school even though you use sign language. I thought I was brave just getting out of state.” He laughed at himself.

Even with how uneasy I was feeling, I admired his effort to keep the conversation going. It was more than most people would do in his situation. He pointed at the books again. “So, uh, if you ever have that party and need some help with your cake, I swear I could get my act together long enough not to ruin everything.”

I raised one eyebrow at him.

“I’m serious!” He laughed like I’d told a joke. “Anyway, good luck with that. See you around.”

He waved sheepishly, then continued pushing his cart down the aisle. I watched him go. I knew I’d remember his hair, a mess that looked windswept even in stillness, and the kindness in his eyes. And I’d hate myself for holding on to those details if he ever crossed my path on one of those dark days, like the days when Kerry or Warner had encountered me.

Still, I was grateful. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d felt so human.

3 (#uf00fb987-a2ff-569a-80e8-8a353270643b)

“What do you want to do tonight?” Elizabeth asked, flopping onto the couch. Outside the window behind her, the sky was fading from blue to pink to orange, and I mentally ticked off one more day of the thousands I had left. “I actually don’t feel like going to a club.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I threw my arms up. “Are you sick?” I teased.

“Ha-ha,” she retorted. “I’m just in the mood for something different.”

Miaka looked up from our shared laptop. “Where is it daytime? We could go to a museum.”

Elizabeth shook her head. “I will never understand how you are so into such quiet buildings. As if we aren’t silent enough.”

“Pssh!” I gave her a pointed look. “You, silent?”

Elizabeth stuck out her tongue at me and hopped over to Miaka. “What are you looking at?”

“Skydiving.”

“Oh, wow! Now that’s more like it!”

“Don’t get any big ideas. For now I’m just researching. I’ve been wondering what would happen with our adrenaline levels if we did something like this,” Miaka said, taking notes on a pad beside the computer. “Like, if we’d get an above-average spike.”

I chuckled. “Miaka, is this an adventure or a science experiment?”

“A little bit of both. I’ve read that adrenaline rushes can alter your perception, making things look blurry or causing a moment to look frozen. I think it’d be interesting to do something like this, see what I see, then try to capture it in art.”

I smiled. “I admit, it’s creative. But there has to be a better way to get a rush than jumping out of a plane.”

“Even if things went wrong, we’d survive, right?” Miaka questioned, and they both turned to me as if I was an authority figure on the topic.

“I think so. Either way, you can count me out for that particular adventure.”

“Scared?” Elizabeth made wiggly ghost fingers at me.

“No,” I protested. “Simply not interested.”

“She’s afraid she’ll get in trouble,” Miaka guessed. “That the Ocean wouldn’t like it.”

“As if She would ever get upset with you,” Elizabeth said, a tinge of bitterness in her voice. “She adores you.”

“She cares for all of us.” I tucked my hands in my lap.

“Then She wouldn’t mind if you went skydiving.”

“What if you’re terrified and start screaming?” I proposed. “What would that do?”

Elizabeth, who was preparing to pounce on my worry, backed down. “Fair point.”

“I have twenty years to go,” I said quietly. “If I mess up now, it’d make the last eighty years a waste. You know the stories about sirens who went wrong as well as I do. Miaka, you saw what happened to Ifama.”

Miaka shuddered. The Ocean had saved Ifama as she was drowning off the coast of South Africa in the fifties, and she had agreed to serve in exchange for being able to live. For the short season she was with us, she kept her distance, staying alone in her room, appearing to be in prayer most of the time. Later we wondered if her coldness was part of a plan to remain unattached to us. When she had to sing for the first time, she stood on the water, chin in the air, and refused. The Ocean pulled her under so fast, it was as if she’d never been there at all.

It was a warning to us all. We must sing, and we must keep the secret. It was a short list of commandments.

“And what about Catarina?” I continued. “Or Beth? Or Molly? What about the slew of girls in our position who failed?”

These girls’ stories were the cautionary tales that were passed down from one siren to the next. Beth had used her voice to make three girls who had teased her jump into a well. This was in the late 1600s when the idea of witches wasn’t that far-fetched. She’d put an entire town in an uproar, and the Ocean had silenced her to keep our secret. Catarina was another who had refused to sing and was taken. The strange thing about her was that she’d already been a siren for thirty years at that point. I nearly made myself crazy wondering about what could have made her give up on the promise of freedom that far in.

Molly’s story was different—and more disturbing. Her life as a siren had brought on some kind of mental breakdown. Four years in, she’d murdered a household of people in the night, including an infant, in an outburst she hadn’t realized she’d had until she was standing over an elderly woman who was facedown in a bathtub. From what I had heard, the Ocean tried to soothe her, but when she had a similar episode a few months later, the Ocean took her life. Molly was proof that there was grace when the Ocean knew your intentions, but she also showed that there was only so much room for that mercy.

These were the stories we carried, the guardrails that kept us in line. Forsaking the rules meant forsaking your life.

Exposing our secret would mean being taken away, maybe experimented on. When they couldn’t destroy us, and if we couldn’t escape, that could be a literal eternity of silent imprisonment. And if anyone guessed that the Ocean was purposefully consuming some of the people She also helped sustain, it wouldn’t take the humans very long to figure out how to get their water without ever touching Her. If no one went into the water … how would we all live?

Obedience was imperative.