(Content warnings: emotionally abusive family dynamics, family estrangement)
The first time I plucked one of my scales to sell, all the old guilt came roaring back like the gods had been holding back the tide.
It didn’t matter that I’d been living among humans for years now, or that my husband fully knew what I was and why I’d fled the merfolk to join him on land.
It didn’t matter that we had a daughter to feed, livestock to tend to, and a small cottage of our own whose roof needed re-thatching before winter. It didn’t matter that a raging forest fire threatened to push our entire village onto the mercy of the King’s Road. It only mattered that I was about to forever scar my own tail in exchange for “mere coin.” Even such a threat to my family’s safety was not enough to assuage the wave of fear that assaulted me, as if the very ocean wished to punish me for daring to leave home.
That day, Pieter was out surveying the fires to the west, to see if the smoke and char had advanced any closer. The flames were still thirty leagues away, but if the wind didn’t shift soon, our entire village would have to flee with only what we could cart or carry out on our backs.
My precious daughter, Pearl, was harvesting the last of the sea cucumbers from the small pool I had built behind our cottage before she herded the goats and chickens into our creaking, weather-worn cart. I yearned to be doing something, anything, to help. But instead I sat in a poor woman’s version of my beloved sea—chilled river water I’d salted myself, in a large wooden tub long enough that only my two amethyst tailfins poked above the surface.
It was the closest I let myself get to the sea anymore. Even years later. I still loved it—how could I not—but could it really still love me?
I had to set the thought aside. My bathtub soak wasn’t for relaxation—not as I stewed in the stench of smoke. I needed to retake my mermaid form once a week at least, especially now that the air crackled so dry that touching my lambswool dress gave me a shock. If we had to take refuge on the long road to the King’s capital, who knew when my next opportunity to bathe would be? For all our sakes, I needed to soak as much water into my skin as I could.
That day, with the far-off sounds of harried shouts and neighing horses ringing in my ears, I couldn’t help but consider how much easier it would be to carry scales to barter with at market than three goats, a dozen hens, a basket full of “foreign-looking” sea tubers no one liked except Pearl and I, and as much of the remaining grain as we could carry.
My scales gleamed iridescent, defying easy colour categorization like I’d once defied the expectations of my underwater city. I’d been taught the strictures against selling one’s own scales since I was old enough to blow bubbles—my family would talk about it as if it was equal to selling a limb. Or one’s soul.
But each scale was the size of a gold doubloon, and worth almost as much. Plucked mermaid scales hardened into semi-precious stone, which any wretch could sell even without revealing their true origin.
And if I chose to disclose what they truly were, city healers would pay dearly for mermaid scales, whose broth could bolster a weakening heart; rich ladies paid even more to dangle scales at either ear.
So I pressed my neck gills closed with one hand, to brace myself. Chose a scale down my tail with the other—and plucked it.
It had a rough edge already, like it might have sloughed off on its own—though dead, then, just a bit of worthless skin—in another few weeks. The gods only knew how many scales I’d rubbed off during my years cutting rock at the bottom of the sea, and those memories stung far worse. This pain was sharp, quick, and manageable.
The guilt, however, was not.
•••
Screeching hit my ears like a squid’s slap.
“You think you have a right to that copper?” It was my mother, the last day I ever saw her, dressed in a reed-green warden’s uniform that was sickeningly familiar. “You think you can just steal from our veins, mine the metal that isn’t yours, and sell it to the suckerfish?” She was in charge of this entire steam vent copper mine, which was owned by a powerful and well-positioned merfamily. She knew the industry’s worth better than anyone.
Now she brandished the long copper rods that moments before had burned against my forearms, where I’d hidden them behind thick shark-skin sleeves.
She had me cornered in a rocky sea tunnel that seemed to weave in and out with the undulations of the water. Although perhaps that was my own panicked hallucinations, as if even the slick basalt walls wouldn’t stand with me.
She kept on screaming; her gold teeth flashed as bright and cutting as her scales. They declared her luxury to some, yet remained coyly hidden behind tightly smiling lips to almost everyone else.
“How selfish,” sneered my sister, who appeared behind my mother as sharp and sudden as a pinprick. She had not been apprenticed into the mines—rock cutting, node sorting, or otherwise. Didn’t have “the talent for it,” according to my mother. All I knew was that while my scales were warped around the edges from unavoidable bursts of hot water and too many brushes with overzealous pumps, her tail was as slick and smooth as ambergris. She’d even had a dozen or so scales hand-coated in copper—a perk of my family’s status she would never have thought to pay for.
Now, in this horrible looping memory, she clicked the overlapping plates of her lobster-shell coat like a human would cluck their tongue. “And desperate. To stoop so low.”
Then I was thrown back, into something else. Another memory. Caught in the deepest crevices of the vents, gagging on sulfide and caged in on all sides by walls of furrowed rock. With only the faintest blue glimmer above.
My eyes throbbed from straining to seek out the tell-tale veins of metal from rock. My well-muscled tail ached from hard labour, and my gills could barely flop open and shut.
“They’re not fish,” I protested, to no one, since I was suddenly alone. My family gone. My fellow workers scattered. Even the sea slugs that normally clogged up our pumps had made scarce.
In the lonely distance, half a world away, a blue whale called for its mate.
“The humans, they’re not suckerfish!” I yelled again. Now I was struggling to oxygenate for real. I slapped my hands to my neck gills, prised my long, strong fingers into the seams I needed to breathe.
“They’re people! They’re good and bad, like merfolk, struggling to—”
But my gills wouldn’t open. My fingers—they trembled so badly now, from two years of dredging ore—
“I just wanted something—better—”
“How dare you want,” my mother’s voice echoed.
•••
“Mama? Maammaa!”
I snap back. Water sloshes over the edges of the wooden tub as I bolt upright. The salt burns my skin.
•••
It was my own sweet girl, her anxious face mirroring mine right down to the thin furrow between our eyebrows. That day, she took my face in her hands. They were lean and calloused, no longer the wonderfully pudgy child’s hands I remembered from only a few years ago.
She was already almost old enough to reclaim her own tail. The one that flashed a defiant orange and red, even in its dried out, snake-skin form. The one she should have grown up with, but instead I kept wrapped in our softest lace-edged tablecloth, gifted to Pieter and I at our wedding. Now that was something I would carry with me across molten lava if I needed to, to ensure that one day she can go home again.
I may have left the vents. I may have left my family. But I could never truly leave the sea.
My fizzing thoughts tangled like netting. They kept flashing forward to—
my daughter, one day meeting her underwater cousins—
the mines, where the heat of the copper vents nearly cooked me through—
home again, a future home, by the sea, one I hadn’t yet built—
“Mama, what did you do next?” my daughter asked. No, not asked. Prompted.
I’d finally made it out of the maze of my own memories, but she’d had to repeat herself several times.
“After your mother caught you,” Pearl said again. “You were scared, but then you kept going, right? What did you do?”
“I got out,” I said slowly, wonderingly. “I risked everything to steal more copper. I sold it for safe passage with the humans. …I got out.”
My shoulders dropped and my clenched tail relaxed. I even returned to the present enough to remember the scale I’d plucked off moments before, behind where my human knees would be. I still held it in my hand; now it had hardened into an iridescent gleam of pale purple, curving softly like a flower petal.
Only one made of semi-precious opal.
“You got out,” my daughter repeated, as she began helping me out of my tub. Things had clearly gotten worse: I had to squint at Pearl through dull grey smoke, and Pieter was back, crossing the front rooms of our cottage to and fro. Packing. He sent a quick, warm smile in my direction, but his booted heels struck our oak floors with a frightening force.
“You survived,” Pearl said firmly, watching me put the pieces of our imminent flight together. “Just like we will, too.”
How did my daughter get this wise?
I pressed the shining opal into the palm of her hand, and took my human form again: wide hips, scabby knees, ankles that liked to roll if I wasn’t careful. The comforting quirks that made my body my own.
Meanwhile, the slick skin of my tail fell heavy to the floor. I carefully began rolling it up in its linen cloth to protect it. I paused at the one small, sensitive spot that now marred it; touching there, I felt a brief sting on the back of my right thigh. A dull throb in my knee.
I carefully finished packing away my tail.
The pain would pass, or it wouldn’t. For now, there were more important things to take care of.
•••
My merfamily had fed me, housed me, even loved me in small moments when no one was looking—least of all, me. We were not rich, but we were certainly not poor. Then they used me—used my “artistry,” they called it, for telling rock from ore.
I gave everything they wanted from me, but had nothing of what I wanted for myself. I never saw any of the currency that must have traded hands after my mother co-signed my seven years’ contract with the mines, nor after I started using my “talents,” my “gifts,” to scrape abyssal plains around sea vents to separate out nodes of metal from rock and mud.
It had seemed easy enough, at first, almost fun, to spot vein after vein of copper. I had a cave to sleep in, and seaweed to eat. And monumental expectations to fulfill, while others prospered.
It wasn’t a job, my mother insisted, when sorting rock lost its glamour, and the grating work of life in the mines made my back ache so much I could barely swim. It was a privilege.
Trust us, my aunts said, as they polished their newly copper-coated scales and told me to be grateful. Don’t you have everything you need?
Only merfolk who’d lost all self-respect, they told me, sold their time, their labour, their own body parts—for money.
None of them saw their own hypocrisy, until it loomed so large it squeezed any love I had left for them right out of my chest.
I used to feel so incredibly guilty to ask for more than I was given. It took me years to push back against a mother who, I finally realized, had sold me. When it came to those pushy, prowling humans topshore, I used to think like so many other merpeople in my city—that they were nothing more than suckerfish, opportunistic graspers who suctioned on to other animals and contributed nothing of real value.
But I’d learned better before. And I’d learn better again.
“Take this to your father, then free the livestock,” I said quickly and pressed the opal into Pearl’s questioning palm. “They can find their own cover faster without us anyway.”
Pearl’s eyes widened when she saw what she held, but then the raised voices of our neighbours blew in with the wind. They were good people, coming to check on us, but they did not know all our secrets. She nodded quickly, and scampered off.
Yes, Mother. I would dare to want.
•••
I sold seven more scales that year, four the next, then one or two every year thereafter. Some buyers were greedy, opportunistic suckerfish. Others dealt me fair. Each barter was my choice, and each one kept my family safe and healthy and whole.
The plucked scales did not grow back. As for the pain, it was surprisingly short-lived. But even had it lasted, it would have been worth it.
Despite everything my family told me, scales are small things. What I refuse to do again is sell myself short. Trading this small by-product of my tail, for a more secure and interesting future, is nothing like that.
And when Pearl and I eventually return to the ocean, my shimmering tail a little less whole, I wear my scars proudly. The water kisses my skin no less gently, and the shallow-pool reeds embrace me no less fiercely.
It’s true. I am still a fugitive. I can never return to my city in the sea. But I’d been wrong to stay so long away from the salt water that birthed me.
As the waves gently lull me, the memory of my mother enters my mind—how could it not? But it, like the fear and guilt that so long plagued me, sloughs away like a crab sheds its shell. It simply no longer fits.
Beside me, Pearl gurgles water through her newly opened gills like a delighted toddler blowing bubbles in the bath. My own gills burble happily, and I do somersaults for the full-body joy of it. Pieter watches us from the shore, waving occasionally, content to be the anchor we return to.
Then a deep note sounds from half a world away.
Our great cousin, the blue whale.
“What—what was that?” Pearl asks, her eyes suddenly scrunching in concern.
She is right to be cautious in a new world, one whose dangers she is still a stranger to. But still, I can’t help but laugh. “Only the ocean, welcoming us home,” I say, and hug her close.
