Short Fiction
Contemporary Fiction - Mature Audience
2 min
The Build of a Siren
Andrea Eaker
Hear us sing of Odysseus! Gray eyes. Strong thighs. The one who got away. The only man who heard our song and didn't jump overboard. We weren't used to that. We sing, sailors jump, and they flail onto our shores. And then...there is no delicate way to say it.
We eat them.
Judge us not! We are Sirens and it is our nature to feast on sailors. You can fight your nature, but the fight cannot last for long. And if you lived an eternity on crab and lichen, you'd be craving meat too, wherever it hailed from.
The sad truth: we are lonely.
Our voices are lovely. But we do not look like human women. Good luck singing like us with a human body: stunty windpipe, weak diaphragm, interfering mammaries. Good luck making yourself heard above the wind and the waves. Sirens are built to project. Our faces curve in, making a sounding dish for our voices. Our diaphragms are packed with ridges of muscle.
We are different, but why does our appearance cause such alarm? Such thrashing when they see us! So insulting, watching them try to splash away, helpless against the tides we pull in with our songs. Once we see their panic and distaste, we must punish them. We break them open. We feast as their blood steams.
If they'd been kinder, we would have, too. But Odysseus was different. As he sailed past, we could hear him call out, screaming with pain. Like a song of desire. We could smell the blood raised in his struggle against the rope, his struggle to come to us. We sang even more beautifully when we heard the mast creak.
He did not succumb. He never saw us, he never had the opportunity to shun us the way other sailors did. Which made us think—it made us dream—maybe if he had swum to us, he would have been different.
He would have clambered onto our rocks, shaking saltwater from his curls. He would have put his fists on his hips and said: "I am blessed to meet you, fabled ladies. You certainly are lookers! Perhaps not what I expected, but elemental like the notes of your song." His words would be gilded with cleverness, straight from his Athena-blessed tongue. We would preen and sigh. We would share his affections. We would become the plundered, again and again, feeling desired at last.
Eventually his stamina would wane. Even in our fantasy, we cannot deny our nature for long. We would kill him, doing it slowly, gifting him with as many breaths as he could manage. We would take turns stroking his silver-shot curls and his lean legs. When he finally expired, there would be none of our usual bickering, no squabbling over whose were the thighbones, who got the rich sternum or the gristly spine. We would share solemnly, cracking his bones and sucking slow, slow, slow. Making the marrow last. Relishing the final taste of the only one who saw us as we saw ourselves.
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