Sirens

The Green-Eyed Sailor

'Love is a prize worth dying for,' her mother had said to explain why they did what they did. 'We die trying to find love or kill in the name of it. That is what it means to be a siren.'

It was how Leonora grew up to see love. Those words were what she'd been living by for the past hundred years on this Island of a Thousand Skulls.

The truth was, more than a thousand skulls rested here––too many than she could count. How could they, really? Some sirens fed on the beach, some preferred the forest, some set up a feast in their homes. Skulls were everywhere. She had two on her front porch, crushed and made into a vase for her flowers. One could hardly count them then.

This one I'll take back to the sea, Leonora thought, looking back at the body of the young man lying on his back, staring blankly at the ceiling. Those sea-green eyes were pretty, and those hands had been gentle in their love making. She had enjoyed winding her fingers around the curls of his chestnut brown hair, had thought––as with many before him––that he might be the lucky one she was looking for.

She would have been content with this green-eyed sailor, would have given him a home, a daughter, all the comfort and love any man could ever want. She would have given up her immortality to be in his arms, to live and die by his side as they watch their daughter grow. She would have given more, if only he hadn't failed.

They'd all failed at one point, some quicker than others. Many had made an effort to court her, and those were the ones she would take to bed, laying her immortality bare and putting it on the line. The ones who had tried to ride her as soon as they were alone she had killed and eaten, or eaten and killed, depending on what she felt like at the time. Men could be such a contradictory creature. Some took pleasure in making her scream like pigs, and then called her a monster when she made them scream like one.

But this one had been different. He had been patient, observant, respectful even, when she had allowed him into her home. The boy had made her laugh, put flowers in her hair, and had taken great care with her in bed.

And died the next morning.

She might have known he would, had she been willing to look closer. 'Only the truest of hearts can break our curse,' her mother's words resurfaced like a reminder of her folly. Bedding a siren was fatal without being true at heart, and most men's heart failed when put to the test.

Her mother had been the rare, lucky one among them. She had found her sailor in the rain and storm that tore through the island on a spring night. The handsome captain had chosen to follow the song of a siren to swim ashore for his life and never left. Leonora had grown up listening to those stories with her head on her father's lap, his strong, callused hand stroking her hair. Her mother had listened and smiled, with her weathered eyes and deep lines of age framing either side of her mouth no other sirens possessed.

She had been so beautiful then, Leonora remembered whenever she thought of her mother, with all her wrinkles and scars of passing time––her most prized possession and evidence of a curse she had broken. The captain had survived their consummation, passed the test of the truest of hearts, and given her a daughter. Three-hundred-and-fifty-four sirens on the island, and her mother had been the only one to have escaped immortality, to have lived and died by a man's side, to have tasted love. She remembered how lovely her parents looked in their grave, with silver in their hair and laughing lines that stayed on their faces. Lines that spoke of their stories, leaving them behind like delicate drawings on ever-changing canvas.

Leonora had no such lines on her face. Her beauty was flawless, perfect—a blank slate with no crease, no unsightly colors, no evidence of being touched or scarred by time. She had once asked her mother why she should find eternity a curse and wished that her body could be marred. Her mother had smiled then, placing a wrinkled hand on her cheek. 'There is no value in what cannot be lost, Leonora,' she had said. 'We must learn to lose things or we treasure none.'

Those words had been why she kept on trying while others had failed and abandoned hope. The rest of her kind called men to their deaths now, picking their fun from the new faces being offered, competing with each other whose songs would draw them in the quickest or render them the most helpless. Sirens, immortal creatures once created to be the test of true love, were now monsters of the sea, killing men, claiming empty victories, turning humans into delicacies with beautiful songs that had been meant to break the hearts.

Perhaps that is what we really are, Leonora thought as she wrapped her fingers once more around the curls of the green-eyed sailor's hair, dragging him off the bed behind her and out the door onto the beach. His body was heavy, perhaps more so than the others before him, but the strength of her kind had never made it too difficult for them to clean up the mess. For Leonora, the difficulties lay in the twenty steps it took to reach the water's edge, not in this.

The beach hurt her eyes, for one thing. The sand was blindingly white and made worse by the bones that littered the shore. Its dry, loose grains sank under the weight of her sailor's corpse, leaving four long trails made by his lifeless limbs as she walked, slowing her steps. For another, the other sirens always raised their heads to look when she passed.

'Fool,' they called her, laughing at her with their eyes to smooth the sharp edges of their own misery. She was, after all, the only one among them who still brought men to her bed, the only one who still desired her curse broken. They made fun of her for trying, told her she would never succeed.

Most of the time she simply ignored those mockeries, on a bad day she would dump the body halfway down, leaving it to be devoured by the others. But today, she decided she would take her sailor to the water and give him a proper burial in the sea. After all, he had been kind and would likely be her last. She was tired, too tired of searching, of wanting something that might no longer exist. Today, the steps she had to make would be the hardest. Today, they would be made by a fool.

'There is nothing out there for me, no end to eternity through these tainted hearts,' Leonora thought as she stood by the water and let go of the body. It drifted out to sea and sank beneath the waves the same way her mother's words faded from her mind.