Hunted

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

{28°12’ N, 91°11’ W – The Gulf of Mexico, 2023}

I didn’t know exactly how it happened to this day. I didn’t understand how or why I was turned. It just happened. I knew that someone must have been behind it, but I figured that it’s been so long, what was the point?

These were the kinds of thoughts I had, every waking moment. For the last twenty years, in fact, I had wondered at this exact point every single day.

The last human memory I had was of standing on the beach, a few hundred feet from my home in Texas, and then suddenly everything went black. The only thing I remembered about the transition from human to siren was the absolute and blinding pain. The pain and blackness slipped away from me and I regained consciousness, and from then on I had siren memories.

I separated the two ‘kinds’ of memories, because they were two extremely different experiences. My human memories were wonderful and happy, yes – but they were also growing increasingly fuzzy and less vivid the longer I remained in the ocean as a siren.

One of the first things I noticed just after I was turned was the clarity of sight. When a human goes under water and opens their eyes, of course they can see but it isn’t nearly as clear. As a siren, my sight was as good under the water as it was on land when I was human. All around me was the deep, blue ocean, filled with colorful fish and lots of coral. I knew for a fact that the ocean should have been cold, but for some reason I didn’t feel cold. In fact, I didn’t feel warm either.

The second thing I noticed was that I could swim two or three times faster than normal. At this point, I was freaking out. I didn’t want to look down, because in the back of my mind I knew what I would see. Still, I took a few minutes to calm myself, and then took a deep breath (of water) and looked down.

I remember thinking that my tail was freakishly long. Ariel’s tail wasn’t this long in The Little Mermaid, and it certainly wasn’t as… creepy. While Ariel’s tail was cute, green, and clean-cut, mine was long and had a lot of tendril-looking things waving back and forth in the water. Although it freaked me out to no end, I had to admit that it was a gorgeous color of aqua blue, and when the light caught the scales going down my lower half it shimmered in a rainbow of colors.

I looked at my arms next, and I was halfway-relieved to find that they were normal – no scales or disturbing fish fins. I realized that I still had my shirt on, although the shorts that I had been wearing were floating off to my right a few hundred feet away.

I looked around frantically, hoping to see the siren responsible for turning me into one of them, but to no avail. They probably scrammed out of there as soon as I started turning.

As far as I knew, there had been no humans thus far to be turned into one of them. I needed answers, and I needed them now. I had so many questions racing through my brain, I was sure if I found another siren to talk to I wouldn’t even be able to form a complete sentence.

Oh god, would I even be able to talk to them? Would they hate me because I wasn’t born a siren, I was turned into one? – a freak of nature? My heart beat so quickly in my chest, I thought it was going to pound its way out.

Ugh, I just want to go home! I thought to myself. I wanted so badly to cry, but no matter how hard I tried tears wouldn’t come. That was the weirdest feeling ever, not being able to cry. I was pretty sure I was still making the ugly-crying-face, though.