A House On A Cliff

A terrible terrible storm swept through that night, and in the morning when the fisherman went down to the sea to take his boat out on the newly-calm waters, he found a fish-woman stranded like a beached whale.

Her hair was the dark brown of kelp, her skin was tinged grey, her tail reflected the sky as though it were made of waves: she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. So what else could he do besides pick her up and carry her back up the cliffside to his house?

She woke at his fireside, looking lost. When he spoke to her, she tilted her head and responded in a language of sharp vocalisations and extensive hand signs. But slowly he taught her his language and he had the village carpenter make her a chair on wheels so she could get around their house and he learned a couple of her hand-signs and since she couldn't exactly climb back down the steep path to the sea, she had no choice but to fall in love.

They had two children, a beautiful ordinary son and daughter, and unless you pulled back the girl's hair to see the scales on the back of her neck, unless you looked too closely into the boy's watery eyes, you could never tell that their mother was a fish-woman. And then the woman had her third child, a beautiful girl who looked just like her mother, down to the blue-grey tail where her legs should have been.

Her father took her into his arms before her mother could, and he said to his wife, she's dead, I'm so sorry, and when she fell asleep to recover from giving birth, he slipped out of the house and down the rocky path to the sea and left his newborn daughter on a large, flat rock to be washed away when the tide came in. She cried when he walked away, and he did not look back.

The fish-woman felt her daughter's loss as a deep ache inside her ribs; she had carried the child for nine months and yet never had the chance to hold her, and the daughter had never taken a single breath and never seen the sea. When she sobbed about this to her husband, he pressed his lips together and said, at least we have our two beautiful children.

We could have three, said the woman. We should.

The man said nothing.

Not long after that conversation, as the woman stirred a pot of stew, her two living children came running, excited, into the cottage, hands outstretched to show their mother what they had found on the beach. Little scales, little finger bones. One round blue eye. When the mother took them in her hands she knew that they could only belong to her dead daughter, and so she sent her children back to the beach to collect everything that they could.

They returned with bones, lots and lots of bones, and the mother held them to her chest and wept.

That night she baked two cakes, subtly sweet, stuffed full of berries, just the way her husband liked it. One she left unmarred, to give to the children. For the other, she stirred tiny bones into the batter, ground them to dust to substitute for flour, pressed little scales into the icing for a glittering bit of decoration: this one she would serve to her husband.

Within three bites of the cake, he made a face and said, What is in this, dear?

Nothing you didn't bring upon yourself, she responded. Subtlety was never her strong suit.

It tastes like sand, he said. I think you may have put a bit much salt. And what is this? He nudged one of the scales with his fork, a frown on his face.

Just a garnish, she said. A gift from my daughter.

The husband looked at his beautiful daughter, happily eating her slice of berry cake. He looked back at his wife, her scowl watching over him. She never was angry like this, she never had been -- even when he dragged her up out of the sea and they couldn't speak to one another, she was not angry. What have you done?

What have I done, no, what have you done, she said. What have you done with our daughter, I know she didn't die when she was born, I heard her cry. You took her, what did you do with her? The children found her bones on the shore.

He protested. No, I buried her in the garden, those could be anything's bones, God, you didn't put the bones in the cake did you?

Show me the grave.

The ground is uneven.

Show me the grave.

It's been raining, your chair will sink into the mud.

Carry me, then. Show me the grave.

He said nothing.

Unless there is no grave? The woman tilted her head innocently. There is no grave.

I didn't mark it, is that what you need to hear? That I didn't want people to know that our stillborn child was strange, was --

That she was like me? That she was like me, and that you killed her.

There was no response. The rest of dessert was silent. The woman put her children to bed, and she laid down beside her awful husband in her own bed, but she couldn't sleep, no matter how hard she tried. Sometime after midnight, she crept out of bed, fingers crossed that her chair wouldn't creak and wake everyone up, and snuck out of her room, kissed each child on their foreheads, and left into the night. She had to leave her chair at the door -- it was a step up from the ground -- and so she crawled to the edge of the cliff, and she crept carefully down the stony path that years and years ago her husband had carried her up, and when she finally reached the beach, she cast off her human clothing, the last remnants of the life she never should have mired herself in, and she finally returned to the sea, without even the slightest twinge of regret for leaving them behind.