The Siren

Her hair, black and wet like ink spilled across a mirror, wriggles like sooty snakes on the surface of the roiling ocean waves. Her voice unspools from that place deep inside her where her own bit of the sea turns and sways, sending its temptation and promise through her willing lips.

A half-sheathed dagger, her black-purple scales reach up to her alabaster waist, and spread at the bottom into a great iridescent fan of a tail that catches the highlights of the sea and throws them back. These scales shine like an eclipsed pearl, from deep underneath a outer sheen of deepest black, and contrast beautifully with her silken snowy skin.

The clunky, ungainly ships filled with men starved for beauty are less than easy to lure. When they've been at sea for months, their hungry, lustful eyes would drink in even the barest hint of beauty with relish.

The siren is joined by her sisters as the ship draws nearer. A trio of porcelain women, delicate hands clasped and floating on the surface of the waves like beautiful, dead fish. The sailors cannot see the ominous tails lurking beneath the waves, visible extensions of the sisters' inherently evil nature. Clouds gather.

Two other voices of silver and velvet intertwined with the first. Any brief stirs of fear wobbling in any sailor's breast was now forcibly stilled. The music formed a hand, and the hand seized their hearts.

They forget their wives, their sweethearts. Months or years of fond memories, of first kisses, of love-making, vanish in a single breath of wind. The wind holds the music in its fist. It shoves it down their throats.

Smiles curve the painfully lovely lips of the sirens. They release each other's hands and hold them out to the smitten, hapless sailors.

The first one leaps over the edge. A final splash serves as his last will and testament, and a warning that falls on ears choked by the music.

A second and third jump almost simultaneously. Rain falls.

They're coming faster now, splash-splash-splash, in time with the wind-slanted rain needles. Their caution-laden stings pierce shivering skin to no reaction. Music caresses the skin in a terribly lovely dance, warding away the slimmest chance of escape.

The skeleton ship rocks gently in the embrace of the waves, empty, with phantoms clinging to the sails. The sisters abandon all pretense of beauty and let their true selves break through the mask- teeth edged with razors, dead skin clinging to sharp, angled bones, fingers long and lethal with claws. The red-tinged ocean foam slides away, as do the sisters. The first siren remains. She watches the sunset, made of blood and ghosts. She smiles and closes her once-again lovely eyes that hold the sea inside them, listening to the echoes of her music.