Page 4 of Siren Song

Laughing, I turn in his arms and hug him back. His face tucks right under my chin, the patchy stubble on my jaw catching on his wild, messy hair. “I don’t know. I think we have the right amount of trauma that makes us specially qualified to write gut-wrenching and smutty fan fiction.”

He pats my back. “Thank you, brother, for encouraging my delusions.” Stepping back, he puts his hands on my shoulders, gripping me tightly. “But back to you. The letter says they’re going to make their ruling after the start of the games. You know it’s bullshit, right?”

I nod.

“If they reject your appeal to perform a solo, you’ll have no time to practice.”

“Yeah, it’s a shit sandwich, isn’t it?”

“Fuck,” he breathes. “It really is.”

The sympathy in his eyes borders on pity, and I can’t take it. I can’t think about what I’ll do if they reject my appeal to compete as a solo dancer. It feels like every step closer I get to competing again, there’s another obstacle standing in my way.

“I need to go practice.” Turning, I crack open the energy drink—Sonic Mango, the best flavor—and grab a jar of peanut butter and a spoon from the drawer.

“Grab more chicken and rice on your way home,” Damian says, picking up a controller and cueing up the minotaur combat game we’ve been playing recently. “You know being an athlete doesn’t mean you have to eat the most boring food on the planet, right? You could try, I don’t know, a recipe that requires…spices? Chopping? Simmering?”

“I like condiments!”

“Condiments don’t count!”

“You’re an asshole,” I call out, but I’m laughing as I grab my backpack and slip my feet into my sneakers. “Call me if—”

“If a coach magically shows up on our doorstep, yeah, I know. Love you, bro!”

“Love you, D.” I slam the door with a huge smile on my face.

It takes half an hour to get to the Frio River from the apartment I share with my brother on the outskirts of the large city of Soledad. It’s an easy enough drive in the old sedan Damian and I share, and I relax as the traffic-filled freeways give way to the narrow, two-lane roads winding through the rolling hills.

I’m still not used to the muted greens of the Central Lowlands. Everything looks dull, like all the growing things are one drought away from death. It’s nothing like where I grew up in Yucatec’a, where every leaf is competing to “out-green” the next.

I park on the dusty shoulder and climb through a sagging barbed wire fence. The place I’ve found to swim is on private property, but as far as I can tell, no one actually lives there. It seems to be a Lowlander thing: buy land with stunning natural water features, put a fence around it, and then ignore it.

In the two years since I’ve found this spot, my almost daily visits have worn a path through the scrubby tufts of grass on the hillside. I duck under the juniper branches, careful not to disturb the orange pollen clinging to their tips at this time of year.

I may be a mythical creature, but I’m not immune to these stupid fucking allergies.

Even before I see the flickering of blue, I can feel the water. My pulse flutters, and the ever present patch of pale green scales where my shoulder meets my neck itches.

I’ve trained my entire life to dance in the water. My childhood was spent in crystal-clear cenotes and the stone training pools in the center of the colony, feeling the water against the scales covering my tail and the sun hot against the long, dark hair that used to flow down my back.

Being a siren is in my soul, passed down to my sisters from my mother, and her mother before her.

It was passed down to my body, too, which only now feels like my own. My head, shaved to nothing but a layer of dark fuzz. My jaw covered in stubble, my chest finally flat, thanks to the twin scars curving along my ribcage. The patch of pale scales at the junction of my neck and shoulder are always there, no matter how far away I am from the water.

The Fates don’t make mistakes, my mother always told me. It was what she said when I worked up the courage at eighteen to try and explain that I wasn’t the daughter she believed me to be. It was ironic, really, coming from someone who sat around with her sisters sipping vodka sodas and talking shit about those same goddesses for the curse sirens still carry to this day.

My body, finally right, but still cursed. Still a siren in my blood.

When we are born, our mothers dive deep into the water, and we breach their bodies in our true form: tail, fins, gills, and all.

At least, that is how it goes for the female offspring. Males are born weak and human, and it is only through the mercy of their mothers they are brought to the surface. It is only through the mercy of their mothers they live.

I wonder if my mother had known then who I really was in those fragile first moments of my time on earth, if she would have brought me to the surface.

She’s made it perfectly clear she has no interest in me now that I’ve become myself.

The swimming hole in front of me is tucked at the base of towering, pale limestone cliffs, likely the result of thousands of years of floods carving deeper and deeper into the earth. I love the water here. Against the browns and rugged greens of the landscape, the clear blue-green water is breathtaking. The rocky shore holds the swimming hole like hands cupping something sacred and precious.