Ocean's Song

The sounds of the sea, of the waves rushing over rocks, was a sound I has grown up to.  It was my lullaby as an infant, the only constant in my ever changing world.  It seemed fitting that it would be the last thing I heard as my life ebbed away with the tide.

Salty water splashed up below me, close enough that if I had the strength, I would have been able to reach out and touch the affirming life-essence with long, slender fingers - they looked almost to be human now, their blue faerie glow dimmed to a sandy brown, the once scaled skin now as rough and worn as the hands of one of the washer women whose gossip carried from river to sea.  My ears, shortened and chapped by the wind, could still make out those faint whispers - a thousand conversations carried on the ocean like wind on a gull's wing.  Poetry, those words were to me.  My dry throat burned as I opened my cracked lips to croak out passable English, learned from the chatter of dolphins and the whisper of white foam as the splashed from land to sea.  "Peter," I crooned, like a mother to her baby, a thousand years of living being reborn in his name, his face, his touch.

I would never blame Peter for where I was now.  No, it was the moonlight, drying me out even as it coaxed the sea, my sea, my whole world, away from where my helpless body lay in the sand, chained the to beach by my own carelessness.  It was I who had left the safety of my own kind out of wanting to belong to him.  It was I who, driven by the madness reflected from the deep black of my eyes to the most taboo parts of the ocean, had risen from my frosted palace in order to feel the fire of his eyes on my skin once more.

Desperation filled me, overpowering the quiet resignation I'd found hours before, as the horizon flushed pale gold against the black night.  My beautiful tail had long since surrendered it's scales to the ebbing tide and the white skin beneath had been slowly crumbling into sand, slowly, slowly, slowly, but I would endure the pain of a thousand nights on this shore than die the death of the sun's rays.  I could already feel them, so weak the earliest riser would still be in nightclothes, crumbling my hair into ashes, baking the tattooed nape of my neck.  I struggled wildly, wriggling towards the ever elusive water, gasping in ragged breaths of air that smelled of home but tasted of death.  The sun crept closer, ever closer, as I fought to return to the home I'd scorned only hours before.  Higher and higher it rose until there was no escape.

"Peter," I choked out, the alien syllables still on my tongue as it too crumbled to sand.  The water finally swept in, sweeping up the word, pulling my last shred of consciousness back to the sea.

Inspired by Mermaid by Woodland