Mermaid Fillet

       Above the tattered, foam-flecked waves, where the sea yawned wide and grey, there fluttered a most pitiful sight—a winged male Muse, sodden and sputtering, more akin to a half-drowned chicken than a celestial harbinger of art. Oh, how he longed to soar with the haughty grace of the storm-petrel, that famed avian bard of tempests! But alas, enacting a proud albatross, he had taken a sweep flight too close to the wuthering waves, and instantly the merfolk had attacked him. Nay, they snatched at his feathers with covetous claws, for in their briny superstitions, it was whispered that each plume held the essence of poetic inspiration, plucked straight from the very ether of verse. And writing was very in fashion in the Poseidon’s realm those days. One particularly enterprising mermaid—a lass with kelp-strewn hair and a penchant for melodrama—managed to seize a single quill. She clenched it in her webbed fist and, lo! No sooner had she tested it on a laminaria scroll than she let out a wail worthy of her distant land cousin the banshee! For in her grasp was no ordinary feather, but one steeped in angst and dark academia, dooming her henceforth to scribble tear-stained sonnets of unbearable sorrow, thus increasing both the salinity of the sea and the pretentiousness of underwater self-publishing media. Now, the trouble with a Muse’s plumage is that you never quite know which genre you’ll yank out. One feather might birth rollicking pirate adventures or hymns to the dawn; another could conjure philosophical treatises or innocent romance. Somewhere in that bedraggled wingspan lie the sacred filaments of fantasy ballads, and—ah yes—the particularly ruffled covert feathers responsible for bawdy limericks and NSFW drabbles. (As for the precise location of the latter, the mer-sisters had their suspicions, but let us not dwell on where the Muse was now… conspicuously bare.) And so, the poor siren was left to weep great, glistening tears into the brine, dipping her stolen quill into an ink-bearing squid and composing odes to woe. For example, about the Muse, who was meanwhile sulking upon a rock, resembling nothing so much as a plucked turkey with delusions of grandeur. Thus concluded the tragicomedy of artistic theft—where even the ocean’s depths cannot escape the scourge of bad poetry.