Mermaid Fillet

       Jeremy had always dreamed of drowning in love. Each evening, as the sun bled into the sea, he would come to the sea outside the town with his offering of penny buns clutched in trembling fingers to give them to his mysterious, otherworldly love. A mermaid of the Cliff of the Lonely Heart. Legends, as usually, ascribed this pretentious name of a rock to some old-time maiden throwing herself from that very cliff for unrequited love. Or unwanted marriage. Or anything. But Jeremy was not a damsel (though he regularly was in distress during business hours). In his heart, he called the place a Cliff of the One Heart now, meaning that though the two were from different worlds—she, a creature of weeds and water, and he, of air and height—they shared one heart. She would rise from the foam, her emerald hair clinging to alabaster shoulders, her eyes black and depthless as the trenches where sailors’ bones lay picked clean. How she devoured his meager gifts! How hungrily she lapped the crumbs from the rocks, her webbed fingers scraping stone! After the sacred meal, he spoke of his wretched life—the ledger books, the sneering clerks, the city’s soot-choked streets—and her breasts heaved in perfect sympathy, her lips parting in silent adoration, diamond-clear tears running from obsidian eyes. If only I could touch her, he thought, staring at the hundred-foot drop between them. Then the storm came. For three nights, the gales howled like a jilted bride, tearing at Jeremy’s shutters and soul. When at last he returned to the cliff, his heart leapt—the tempest had shattered the rockface, carving a jagged stairway to the sea. There she waited, her arms outstretched, her smile beckoning. He scrambled down, the salt spray soaking his trousers, his pulse hammering like a dying man’s fist against a coffin lid. Her hands—cool as a corpse’s—cupped his face. For one delirious moment, he imagined a kiss. Then she yanked. The pain was exquisite—her teeth in his throat, the icy water flooding his lungs, the last bubbles of his breath rising toward a surface that shrank to a coin, then a pinprick, then nothing. As the darkness took him, he felt her fingers entwine with his, her tail coiling around his legs in a lover’s embrace. No one ever came to know what he thought at that last moment. When the fishermen found his body days later, his ribcage yawned empty, the organ neatly excised. As for the mermaid? She lounged on her rock, licking her claws, her belly round with stolen devotion. There was one heart between the two of them, indeed—and it was not hers. Instead of a heart the mermaids have a two-chambered stomach.