The Little Shore Maid

An adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid.

[Hey guys! I know commenting has been sparse and this is kind of long, but my prose classmates told me I should submit this to publication so I really wanted some opinions. I edited it so it's longer than the one they read; let me know if it's too long-winded, or too meandering. Any critiques would be really appreciated. Thanks!]

She appeared the morning after the storm, draped in seaweed and without a tongue.

The night had been a bad one; the prince had almost drowned as his ship was crushed and sunk by the waves. Despite the exhaustion of disaster, however, he had been unable to sleep, and went for a walk on the beach to calm his mind.

It was as the sun drenched the horizon that the prince noticed her, crawling like a crawfish through the shallow tide. At first he thought it was a dog, but as the waves subsided, he noticed the bald skin beneath the shaggy kelp. He moved closer to investigate and she looked up. Her eyes latched onto his.

They were small and black, lashless, like eels coiled inside her skull looking out through the two gashes of her eyelids.

While he stood, unable to move, she cocked her head and transferred her weight to two tiny feet. The seaweed fell away as she wobbled there, exposing her naked body to the prince. He could not help looking at her small breasts and puckered nipples.

She took a step forward and her mouth gaped open. The ocean heaved and swilled around their ankles, the smell of blood and vomit strong in the air. Beyond her uneven yellow-black teeth was an empty, bloody cavern. She tried to screech something, but it only sounded like the keel of a ship grazing a shallow rock bottom.

The sound set his nerves on fire. He ran back to the castle as fast as he could.

At dinnertime, the court was spreading the latest gossip, which seemed to involve a recent pirate attack.

“What’s all this?” the prince asked his father when they were alone.

The king, swelled with importance and wine, said some servants had found a young girl washed ashore with her tongue cut out, clearly a victim of piracy.

The prince’s eye twitched. “But where is she now?”

His father turned from him suddenly and boomed, “Here she is!” to the court at large, which announced the otherwise silent entrance of the seashore girl. She looked clean now, garbed in a plain beige dress with her black hair braided around her head. She could have been pretty, in a pale, bony way, but a seaweed stench still hung about her, and the prince feared what he’d see if she opened her mouth again.

The women all gathered around her, and the men, after a good look, grouped in clusters of rational discussion. The prince clung to a corner for the remainder of the evening, where the girl’s gaze would graze over his body every few minutes. When his father passed him a goblet of ale, his hands were shaking.

“Don’t be so anxious, dear boy,” the king said. “It’s all meant to be a bit of fun before the wedding!” He turned round to the roomful of people. “Shall we not invite this lovely new guest to the marriage celebration next week? I’ve no doubt she will wish to partake in the festivities of my son’s nuptial bliss!”

The court cheered, except for the girl, who smoothed the dress on her thighs and looked down at her feet.

Over the week’s preparations for the wedding, which was to take place on the largest, most lavish ship of the fleet, the prince felt an uncanny presence around him.

“You’re just anxious for the honeymoon,” his father winked at him, clapping his shoulder. “Be grateful for your time left as a free man.”

As if to emphasize this fact, the king ordered the seashore girl to dance for the prince every night while they dined. She did so with utmost grace, undulating like a sea snake caught in an eddy. The court clapped and shouted their delight, but the prince’s mouth stayed as straight and tight as the girl’s.

She never took her eyes off him until the music ended and the dance was over.

During the days leading up to the ceremony, he tried to stay occupied and keep all thoughts of women out of his mind but he couldn’t rid himself of that tingling awareness of being watched. At times he’d smell a salty stink and look around to see the seashore girl with her pallid cheek pressed against a pillar, body limp and leaning. Her eyes were never in his direction, but he sensed that as soon as he’d look away, she would drink him in with her bottomless black eyes again.

Sometimes the prince would follow her, certain she was part of a suspicious plot. He’d find her tucked away, sitting behind a potted fern or within the closed curtains of a window seat, tears spilling down her gray face as if a summer rainstorm was hanging over her and her alone. The brown boots given to her by the royal shoemakers would lay unlaced on the ground while she clutched at her tiny, bloody feet. He’d watch her, hunched like a crone with shoulder blades sticking out like fledgling wings or twin dorsal fins as she’d wrap material around her blisters and open scabs, and he’d slowly back away.

Although he never made a sound, somehow he felt she knew he was there the whole time anyway.

The night before the wedding, while the prince stood on his seafront balcony grooming himself for bed, he saw the girl walking back from the shoreline. She was bright white in her moonlit nightgown, and her hair was undone from its usual braid so that it twisted long in the ocean breeze.

He squinted into the darkness at a shiny object that she kept turning over and over in her hands. It looked like a dagger, but the prince forced himself to believe it was his imagination. His servants had been commenting lately on how high strung he looked.

He went to bed, huddling beneath his goose down duvet.

The next day went surprisingly well despite the girl’s presence in the royal audience. By the time he slipped the gold band of matrimony over his new wife’s slender finger and kissed her delicate pink mouth, the prince was beginning to feel calm again. It had been a bad last three days, but things had evidently seemed more sinister due to lack of sleep and too much salt air.

He went to bed with his bride, feeling he was the center of the cosmos.

He awoke a few hours later to the creak of a floorboard and a shadow moving towards him and his wife, who slept softly on his chest in a pillow of her own flaxen curls. A seaweed stench inundated the room. He cracked an eyelid open, and was blinded by moonlight for a moment before he recognized the seashore girl. Gripped bone-white in her short fingers was the dagger he thought he had only imagined. Paralyzing fear tore all courage from him like a riptide.

As the prince watched, the girl shifted, leaned forward; rank fish and saltwater stink filled his nostrils, and he had to force down the ball of panic punching at his throat. The blade moved towards his chest. At any moment he expected to feel a sharp pain and the warm spill of his own blood. His eyelids flickered as he squinted, straining to keep the dagger in his sight. Up it went, tip pointed at the skin left bare and vulnerable by his wife’s head.

It came down. He squeezed his eyes and ceased breathing. But there was no blow, just metal clattering to the wood floor. He was still expecting pain when instead he felt the seashore girl’s lips press down on his cheek, just beside the corner of his mouth. They were moist, cold, and tender.

As she pulled back, he opened his eyes. They looked at each other. Her black pupils were empty and soft. She dropped his gaze and shifted with slow, deliberate movements to the direction of his wife. For a heart-stopping moment he thought she was going to harm her, but she only brushed his bride’s bright cheek in another light kiss. Their faces shone in the moon glow for a moment, one thin and sharp as fish bones, attached in a pucker like a remora to the other’s soft, round face.

And then she was gone, running from the room, fluid as eroding sand. A moment later the prince heard a solid splash, and knew she had thrown herself over the edge of the boat. She would certainly drown if he didn’t get up now and sound the man-overboard-alarm at once.

He let out his breath and reached toward the curtains, gently so as not to wake his wife, to drag them shut against the moonlight.