A Mermaid Afterlife

art by DollDivine.com

A Mermaid Afterlife
by Rebecca Fyfe

The boat went down so fast. I'd barely had time to put a life vest on and leave my room three floors down before the water came rushing in. I wasn't the only one who drowned that night, or the youngest.

There were hundreds of us on that ship. We'd all been asleep when the ship hit something. I still don't know what we hit, only that it was only a matter of minutes between the ship's movement suddenly jarring most of us awake and the water rushing in. A wall must have breached above our floor, because the water was coming in from above us, pouring down the stairs in a torrent that pulled many people's feet out from under them.

I struggled against the flow, mostly managing to remain upright while the icy water numbed my legs and tried to pull me in the opposite direction of the stairs. It didn't take long before there was too much water in the corridor for me to continue walking against it, so I started swimming. At first, the water swept me backwards, the current too strong for me to fight, but eventually, the corridor filled all the way. I was fully immersed in sea water and had no way of breathing, but that's when the current stilled enough for me to start swimming. I wanted to live.

It didn't matter though. The floor above ours was full of water too. I could see others, some just children, but none of them were moving; I was the only one still struggling. For some reason, I refused to believe that I was going to die, that I wouldn't be able to make it out of there. If only I could hold my breath forever.

Despite my struggles and my will to live, death took me anyway. There wasn't a cloaked figure in a scythe coming to take my soul or anything, but there weren't any angels glowing with holy light either. No, my vision just started to get darker and my head felt like it was going to explode. I desperately needed to take a breath and my body was screaming with pain from the need. Eventually, my body gave out, and death took me on a sigh as cold sea water filled my lungs. Everything went black.

They won't ever find my body though. When the rescuers come, there won't be anyone left to rescue, not even our blue and still corpses. It turns out, when you die in the sea, you get a completely different afterlife than the one you would get if you died anywhere else.

We were all given new bodies, ones that could breathe underwater. We had tails like, well, like mermaids, I guess. Yes, that's right. We get to live our lives as mermaids. I'm told that we will have lifespans that can go on for 1,000s of years. Then we'll get to come back as something else.

We have had to leave our families behind, except for the few who were lucky enough to have family on board with them at the time. As far as our families are concerned, we all died at sea. It's better that way anyway, because we could never survive on land anymore, even if it wouldn't really freak people out to find out we existed.

I'm happy down here. I didn't think I would be, not when I first saw the ones who came for us, all glittery scales and porcelain skin, with their long hair flowing out behind them. But the ocean has a way of welcoming everyone. I feel embraced by it. And there are so many others like us. It's like living out entirely new lives in a world that's completely alien to our first one and yet similar in a lot of ways too.

Yah, I'm happy.

Overboard

art by Robert Fyfe

Overboard
by Rebecca Fyfe

The ship's sailing had been easygoing for the past few days. The water had been calm and tranquil. But today, things were different. Today, the storm had moved in and Eric wasn't sure that the ship was going to make it out of this one.

The waves were crashing over the aide of the ship, sweeping everyone and everything that wasn't tied down overboard. The swells from the sea were tossing the ship in every direction and the thunderous waves had caused the ship to list first one way and then the other, falling so far to each side that it almost overturned several times.

Several crewmembers had already been tossed overboard. Eric had been unable to save them, needing all his strength just to keep himself from being swept into the ocean.The dark clouds had blocked the sun, and the storm had lasted for so long that Eric wondered what god they had angered to cause such a continuous and violent attack on their ship.

As the waves lashed at his face, her thought he glimpsed something in the water, something close by when the ship listed so far to the side that he could almost touch the ocean's surface. It was a very large fish of some sort, for he'd seen the scales. And yet, he thought, for a brief moment, that he'd glimpsed a woman, with her long, dark hair flying behind her in the wind as she surfaced. She'd gazed at him, her eyes full of sorrow. But Eric knew that his eyes had just been playing tricks on him. There had been no women on board, and, if one had fallen over, she would not have been able to surface again so soon, let alone stare at him so calmly.

Eric heard a large crack and knew immediately what it meant. The ship was falling apart. None of them would survive this night. He untied the rope from his waist and waited for his imminent slide into the sea. It would be better to let the sea take him quickly than to cling to debris and hope for a rescue that would never come.

Eric felt the wind rush past him as he fell and then the cold, wet of the ocean swallowed him. Instead of drifting down as he expected, he felt arms wrap around his chest and something propelled him upward. As his head broke the surface, he finally looked upon his rescuer. She was lovely. It was the woman with the sorrowful eyes. She held him in her arms just above the water, and stroked his cheek.

"You will live," she whispered and he felt his eyes closing against his will as an unnatural fatigue overwhelmed him and sleep claimed him.

When he woke, he was lying alone on a beach with debris from the ship all around. He saw two of his crew members on the sand too, but when he checked, their bodies had already grown cold from the unrelenting hands of death.

Eric looked out to sea and saw her in the distance. She dove under water, a long multi-colored tail surfacing behind her before splashing back down into the ocean. He knew he had her to thank for his life, and he vowed to help protect the ocean's waters from then on.