Drown: A Twisted Take on the Classic Fairy Tale by Esther Dalseno

Author:Esther Dalseno [Dalseno, Esther]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi
Publisher: 3 Little Birds Books
Published: 2015-10-30T16:00:00+00:00

Ten

Something Metallic, Like Barnacles

It took some time before the six remaining princesses realised their youngest sister had disappeared permanently. Most were unconcerned, even when it was suggested that she had likely been killed for her beauty, as food became harder to catch and therefore more expensive. It was known that the youngest was a wanderer, and not like the rest of them, and if she were stupid enough to enter gypsy territory without protection, there was nothing anyone could do. But royal body parts arouse suspicions, as the eldest pointed out, and if this had been the case, reports would have been circulating all over the kingdom by now. The mermaids nodded their heads in agreement and decided that like their mother before them, their sister had simply disappeared before her time. This explanation sat well with them, and they resumed sucking their oysters and admiring their reflections in the looking-glass.

The nanny was not convinced. She continually reminded the princesses of the youngest’s obsession with the human world and the Prince that lived there. But the sisters could not connect this fact with her disappearance, and merely shrugged. They had already forgotten her. All excepting the sixth sister, who shivered at the mention of the Prince. She recalled the light that flared in the youngest’s eye like a beacon and shuddered. The word that she had uttered, that one fateful word, began to echo in her head tunelessly. Nausea overcame her. She looked down at her oyster in disgust and discarded it.

From that day forth, her appetite eluded her. She tried to busy herself with her appearance, but found that it all seemed empty. Watching her sisters’ stony faces as they pulled and prodded at each other with beautifying instruments of torture, she saw vanity. Watching them feast on the cold, fat bellies of porpoises, she saw waste. She did not know what these ideas meant, but her reality continued to shift throughout the final days of her life, as the poison thickened and virus multiplied in her bloodstream.

The sixth princess took to surveying the kingdom, and therefore began to question it. She felt stabs of compassion and horror when she saw merfolk with missing limbs, sawn off in exchange for food. She felt sorry for the hideous sea-gypsies as they were shunned by the commoners, who refused to exchange their fish even for handfuls of silvery scales. When she witnessed the slow, mundane rhythm of the simple, predictable events in a mermaid’s lifetime, she asked if there was a greater purpose. The black, empty space inside of her whispered that there was. There she would stop, because the fact that she was feeling anything at all, let alone hearing voices, alarmed her.

But most of all, she wondered about love. It took hours to fall asleep at night, because the subject kept her mind racing. Finally, she stopped sleeping altogether and let the word resonate within her, her thoughts treading any path they wished to go. The small streak of

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