Sonnets for Senior Sirens

by Kelly Sheehan Heath

“Look at ‘em.” I mutter to Sabella, shielding my eyes and squinting at the gaggle perching on the other end of the sun-drenched rock. “Gabbing and laughing like the only ones for miles around! Does it matter to them if the wind carries their racket down to us whenever it rises? Does it matter to them if you’re trying to nap?”

“Actually, they aren’t bothering me much at all,” Sabella replies, her eyes shut and her head resting comfortably against a dozing elephant seal. The end of her tail swishes lazily in the ocean surrounding us. “You ceaselessly grumbling under your breath sure is, though.”

“Do they not sound like a bunch of horrible gulls, or is it just me?” I ask, ignoring her last sentence.

“It’s just you,” she drawls, tilting her visage upward. “We weren’t so different at their age, you know.”

“Oh, whaleshit!” I snap. “I was nowhere near as insufferable in my 200s!”

Sab smirks up at the sunlight, lids still closed and hands folded serenely on her soft stomach. The smirk deepens the already deep lines at the corners of her eyes.

“You don’t remember yourself, Euryalina,” she states. “You never pictured yourself as the 1,000-year-old mermatron you are now. You figured you would be young forever, too!”

I gaze again at the boisterous group of mermaids—at their blonde-brown-red-black hair and the brightness of their scales in the warmth of the afternoon. I then glance down at myself: a few liver spots on the tops of my hands, skin laxity in my upper arms, breasts sagging in their seashell bra. The strands of my hair blowing in the breeze are grey. My trusty tail, which has spent a millennium swimming, is a dull, faded colour.

My lips shape into a hard, straight line—the opposite of Sab’s smirk.

“You’re mistaken!” I tell her. “I wasn’t as self-absorbed as these mermaids—not as clueless-yet-entitled. Or as loud. And you can stop smirking like that, you filthy plastic waste!”

Sabella breaks into a full-on cackle, causing the seal underneath her to awaken and angrily snort. It begins to move, peeling itself away. “OK, OK!,” she remarks as she stiffly sits upright, allowing the large animal to jiggle its mass to the edge of the rock. We listen to the splash as it reenters the water.

“You’ve made me lose my pillow.” declares Sab.

“That’s another problem!” I trumpet suddenly, ignoring some of Sab’s words for a second time. “Mermatron. Why must we get called such a thing? Who decided? It doesn’t happen with mermen; they get the one label their whole lives. Even boys are mermen. We, on the other fin, get split into two categories. The moment you turn 500, bam! You’re a matron, whether you’re paired or not! And, of course, there’s a shame attached—it’s on purpose! You’re supposed to feel bad about it. It’s the official stamp of invisibility. Nobody on land writes about mermatrons! Who sings or makes stories for us? No one! It’s the mermaids who attract all the attention. It was so in our mother’s day and our grandmother’s! You only exist to anyone when you’re in your youth. You’re only a source of inspiration for land poetry and land legends when you’re a mermaid.”

Sab scoots nearer to me and rests a palm on my back.

“It’s a rotten business.” she muses. “I agree! Once past your spawning years, society considers you useless. A dead weight! We live another 5 centuries after we stop laying eggs, which is a long while to hang around being pointless and hating yourself. But we’ve done nothing wrong by growing old! Nothing offensive. To think it shameful to be a mermatron is nothing but internalized mersogyny! It’s a result of living in our merman-dominated merculture. Direct your frustrations there, not at the mermaids. Yes, we may receive zero attention, but you can’t have forgotten all the unwanted attention of your youth! The pressure, the harassment, the objectification! It’s tiresome always being a poem or a song and never an individual. A mermaid is a material land folk will happily work with like clay but never ask the opinion of. How demoralizing to be fodder for someone else’s art! Art that’s only any good on rare occasions, might I add. Those girls you’ve been glaring at, what exactly do you think would happen if a sailor came upon them? Would he care to learn what they’re speaking of so passionately or what makes them laugh so noisily? No. He’d care that they were pretty.”

I heave a sigh, relenting.

“I’ve not forgotten the blooming anxiety I would have in my chest as a hatchling swimming home late at night,” I confess. “Alone and taking shortcuts through those sunken ships…it never seemed completely safe.”

“And how about that teacher we had? The octopus?” adds Sab. “The one with the big head. Wasn’t he so weirdly touchy-feely with the female students?”

“Ugh,” I groan. “He was gross. If his class wasn’t enough to fill your gills with bile, all the trident talk among the guys in our grade certainly was! They were forever comparing them—”Well, mine is longer than yours!”, “Yeah, but mine has sharper prongs!” I swear, they were obsessed. I’d never thought about mermen’s tridents half as often as the mermen themselves did. Countless methods for successfully catching fish, but they really made their tridents the be-all and end-all! Made a manatee out of a mollusk!”

Sabella chuckles heartily and gives my back an affectionate pat. “Have I ever shared the story about this one merman, Metridium, who I met at a party? He’d eaten a salema porgy, so he was tripping balls. He tried convincing me to follow him to his littoral cave by explaining he had a quinquedent to show me!”

“What a stupid lie!” I burst, and Sabella’s chuckle expands into her recognizable cackle. She hides her mouth with both hands and rocks with laughter, nearly making herself roll off the rock.

“See, Euryalina?” she exclaims when a bit calmer. “Being a mermaid isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. There’s a lot you don’t miss!”

“…True. However, my mind can’t help but wander over to mermatrons like Diadema. Have you bumped into her lately? Notice what she’s done to her face? She’s gone absolutely too far with the jellyfish stings and the electric eel treatments. She thinks she looks revitalized, but I’ve got news for you: She looks like a goblin shark!”

“That’s mean, Lina!”

“All I’m saying is she looked perfectly fine as she was—before all the interventions. She was more lovely as a mermatron than I was even in my mermaid prime. And her insecurity with ageing has ruined it! It’s depressing. I like to think that regardless of how vulnerable I feel on occasion, I wouldn’t resort to such extremes. Then I reflect on last summer when I rescued that young landman from drowning. It was obvious he couldn’t swim…he was unconscious when I yanked him ashore. I coaxed the water from his lungs, and he coughed and sputtered—I was so nervous! I leaned over him and watched him return to his senses. He lay blinking at me, and I heard his voice feebly ask, “Are you a mermaid?” I just kept gently repeating, “You’re out of danger. You’re alive. You’re out of danger.” He’d been through a trauma, the poor kid, and I wanted to proceed with caution. His eyes gradually became more focused. He was definitely rallying, and when he saw me properly, he yelped. It was a yelp of fright. He scuttled backward, distancing himself and kicking up the sand. He pointed at me, and do you know what he screamed? Sea hag. “Stay away, sea hag! Don’t touch me!” I’d rescued him from an almost guaranteed death, and this was the thanks I got!”

“I’m terribly sorry, Euryalina. How hurtful!” Sab responds, the recent mirth draining from her countenance. “What did you do?”

I shrugged. “I grabbed him by the ankle, dragged him back into the water, swam out several yards and let him go.”

Sabella stares at me. She slowly wags her head, her neck waddle swaying.

“No.” She murmurs. “No way!”  A smile starts to spread.

“You’re pullin’ my tail!” she squeals, smiling wider. Her reaction—her delighted incredulity—makes me chortle.

A giggle escapes her; she is powerless against it.

My laugh evolves, and my shoulders are shaking. We can’t quit making eye contact, and it’s the funniest thing on the planet. Finally, unable to control myself anymore, I double over. Sab is wheezing. She leans on me, too weak to support herself. The laughter has me crying, and Sab is the same. Fat tears are streaming down her unsmooth cheeks. It’s unimaginable that it should ever end.

A few gulls whirl above us. My grey hair whips around my face. Sabella and I hold each other and howl. From the other end of the rock, a fresh shriek of amusement emerges from the beautiful mermaids, who are wrapped up in one another and don’t realize how much we resemble them.