“Are you really my mother?” I whisper.
The mermaid’s tongue sweeps across my forehead, down my nose, and across my mouth before retracting. “Ah,” she sighs. “Not my broodling. No, I would remember one like you.” That childlike hand is nightmarishly strong. “But you are ours nonetheless. You taste like the ocean, not like the stinking land above.” She lets go of my chin, but I don’t back away. “I would grant you a boon, luk, in place of your mother. But I must have a bite of your flesh to make it true.”
Dad used to tell us an old tale about a magic fish that granted wishes if you caught it and released it back into the sea. I don’t remember this part of the story.
Her baby-fingers trickle across my shoulder. “Right here. It will not hurt much.”
A hysterical laugh bubbles up inside me. I am standing naked in the hold surrounded by mermaids, talking to a magic fish. What am I afraid of? I have had worse injuries; I can handle a single bite. I am an adult now.
I open my mouth to ask her for enough money to get off this stinking boat, enough gold to drown a sailor in, to drown all of the sailors in. I open it to ask about my mother, if she knows her or can find her or bring her back. If my mother is alive or dead. Whether she was human or fish, truly.
But then I think of my sisters: Iris, shaking beneath her blankets and clutching the biology textbook like a magic charm, and May, who had given me hers to protect me at sea. I remember that there are more important things. I think about the people who hurt my sisters, who could hurt them, about the boy in the broom closet and Sunan in the hold. About my father on landing, his eyes bitter cold.
I tell the mermaid my real wish.
She grants it.
There are many versions of this story, each with a different ending.
In one, I swim away with the brown mermaid. The sun wavers in a jagged disk overhead, glinting in strange scintillations. The water is cold, the pressure enormous. It pushes in on my billowy body, still tender, pressing it into a tighter, sleeker shape. Our tiny, delicate hands are locked tight as we dive deeper into the ocean.
In another, a large storm scuttles Pakpao, along with all the other fishing boats in the area, on the reefs by Teluk Siam. The hold cracks, allowing the mermaids to escape. Everyone survives and is discovered days later. The rest of the story is fairly uneventful, equally implausible, and made up by people who care more for happy endings than truth.
But here is what really happens. The brown mermaid disappears and Pakpao makes it safely home with a hold full of live mermaids. If the crew looks a bit dazed and disoriented, if they are not quite themselves and walk as if they are not used to having two legs, it is just the result of sunstroke. If the mermaids in the hold swim in frantic circles, their eyes rolling wildly in their heads and their wails ricocheting through the hold, it is just what fish do. After all, mermaids are fish, not people. The Japanese traders find the catch acceptable and the mermaids are transported by tank to restaurants across Hokkaido. We make a huge profit.
With the exception of yours truly, every member of Pakpao’s crew drowns within a week of returning home. Though I live, our family does not escape this tragedy unscathed; my father’s body is found floating in the nets behind the house. A joint funeral is held. Sunan’s widow speaks tearfully about how her late husband stopped talking after his last fishing trip and had spent the days before his death trying to walk into the river, a story that resonates with the families of the recently deceased.
My sisters weep, their futures secure. I weep, too, licking the salt from my tears. There is a bandage on my shoulder and a bite beneath that will not heal.
Santos de Sampaguitas
Santos de Sampaguitas was first published in October 2014 in Strange Horizons.
The dead god descends on me as I sleep, the way it did my mother the night before my conception, and my grandmother before that. Even with my dream-eyes shut, I know it’s there; the weight of folded limbs on my body threatens to crush my ribs, and I can smell the wreaths of sweet sampaguita hanging from its neck.
“Go away po,” I tell it, adding the honorific since Nanay always taught me not to be rude to gods. “I’m having a good dream for once.” I usually have nightmares during bangungot, trapped halfway between sleep and waking, unable to push my way fully to either side. The pressure on my chest, the terrible prescience that something very bad is about to happen, and the sound of distant screaming, like a boiling saucepan of human voices, are too familiar to me. But tonight there is only a pleasant floating sensation, fresh from a dream of flying over the oceans cresting Manila.
Cool, smooth fingers push my eyelids open. Just as my mother told me, the dead god dresses like a saint, all in chipped white paint and dried offerings, braided together on cheap twine. It is man-shaped, though it is neither a man nor a woman. Even though it has no skin or flesh, the stench of rotting lechon assaults my nostrils.
Magandang gabi, my child, it whispers. Blessed evening, Maria, my heir.
“You have the wrong Reyes sister,” I tell the dead god. “If you’re talking blessings and inheritance, find Silvia po. She’s two years older.”
It lowers its bone-pale head, and kisses my hand. The waking dream ripples around me, and my beautiful, healthy dream-arm evaporates, shriveling and twisting into a withered claw. My real arm. I do not make mistakes, says the dead god. You wear my mark, like your nanay and your lola and many others before you. It cradles my mangled hand gently, lacing its fingers through mine. I chose you, just as I chose them. Therefore you are mine, Christina Maria Reyes, are you not?
I fight the sleep paralysis enough to snatch my hand out of the dead god’s grasp, but when I try to cradle it to my chest, my limb flops against me like a useless wing.
“Why are you here?” I shout. The shrill boiling sound has started up again, a high wail in the distance. “Nanay promised you wouldn’t show yourself to me until I was grown. I’ve still got years! Besides, Nanay is your disciple right now, not me.”
No, says the god. It has no eyes in its empty, hollow face, but somehow it manages to look away. Not any more. Your mother is dead.
The waking dream shatters. I bolt upright in my bed, drenched in cold sweat. The dead god is gone. My sister sleeps quietly, tucked next to me in our small, wooden bed; none of the other maids in the room are awake, either.
It takes me almost a minute to realize that the teakettles I’ve been hearing are my own high-pitched, muffled whine, and that my lap is damp with tears.
My sister is draped in piña, in the middle of the Calderones’ living room, trying to avoid the dressmaker’s pins and the American ma’ams’ glares. The thin piña cloth shimmers over her dark hair like a halo, and she reminds me of the fresco of The Holy Mother, on the wall of Saint Peter of Makati’s chapel, only rounder and shorter. But she has the Holy Mother’s same expression of inner contentment and peace. All of the bladed comments and piña in the world would not be enough to hide Silvia’s inner glow.