Mermaid Fillet

       That day, everyone managed to get on Clara’s nerves. Not that it was particularly hard. For all her love of her quaint little East Coast town—wrapped in sea fog and gothic charm—she loathed its residents. They had all the aesthetic sense of a kindergarten finger-painting class. They kept slapping cheerful, nursery-school colors onto their wooden houses, and when the salty damp air inevitably won, they replaced the gloriously weathered boards with new ones. They stubbornly planted potted flowers instead of hanging shark jaws over their doors. They built a smooth, civilized boardwalk by the harbor and never once wandered the wild cliffs or abandoned coves under the full moon (Clara did, and found precisely zero kindred spirits). And as for hospitality? Her hometown was a goddamn anomaly. Sure, people say no one cares about anyone these days, but in this town, everyone cared deeply about Clara O’Leary. Every blessed soul felt compelled to share their valuable opinions on her appearance, career, and hobbies. “Darling, my scarecrow’s hat has more dignity than yours. Want a new one for Christmas?” “Clara, sweetie, I know you’re single, but must you dress like a Victorian ghost?” “Child, how long will you live alone? It’s time to marry!” “Enough moping over books, babe—come to the mayor’s dance!” “Miss O’Leary, your dissertation topic is fascinatingly hopeless. There’s no evidence the Miskaton tribe even existed! How… ambitious.” So Clara, rather than throttling the next well-meaning busybody, fled to the sea—to the jagged, fisherman-free cliffs where even the rocks had better judgment. Just slick black-green boulders, slick black-green crabs, slick black-green waves, and gulls (marginally whiter, marginally less annoying). True, the waves and gulls also never shut up—probably about her—but at least she couldn’t understand them. She exhaled, watching her breath curl into the fog. Maybe she’d dissolve into it. Become mist. Silence. Then: “Young squaw.” The voice was monotone, rasping, like a rusty hinge swinging in a drowned ship. Clara nearly toppled into the surf. “The curse rune at your charm. It is wrong. It shall have three notches on the top, and a bridge in the middle.” On the rock before her sat a woman. At first glance, maybe Native—jet-black hair, high cheekbones, a mouth wide enough to unhinge like a frog’s. Except she wore only her hair. And seawater dripped from her bare breasts. All three of them. Also, her legs were a moss-scaled tail. Clara’s hand flew to the handmade wooden brooch at her collar—a crude tribal sigil. The insult bubbled up before the awe could stop it: “I copied that symbol exactly from a stone south of Owl Creek. Blame the original carver.” The mermaid didn’t blink. She reached out, barely grazing Clara’s auburn hair with webbed fingers. “We’ve watched you. You write of us. But you’re wrong.” Her voice was the sound of kelp rotting in a tide pool. “When the Hollanders wrote ‘Gone to the sea,’ they didn’t mean sailed south. They meant gone under. And we will return. Put that in your dis-ser-ta-tion.” Clara’s face burned. Her chest heaved like a bulldog straining at its leash. This was her moment—interview a real fucking mermaid, trade artifacts, prove the Miskaton existed— But the leash snapped. “OH, SCREW ALL OF YOU!” Clara roared, leaping up. “Parents! Pastor! Aunt Maggie! Every nosy bastard in town! And NOW YOU?! I’M DONE!” By the time she finished, the rock was empty. Just a ripple fading into the waves. Clara glared at her own reflection in the lead-green water. The one person left who hadn’t criticized her today. “…Next time,” she muttered, “try not yelling at cryptids. Just a thought.”