The Sinking of the Siren: A Story of Life After Drowning

By Kaylee Walsh

The Sinking of the Siren - A Story of Life after Drowning asks the question: What price is too high for immortality?

The book follows a young girl who uses her dead brother's name and disguises herself as a cabin boy to flee the Irish Potato Famine. After disaster strikes, she awakens to an afterlife as a siren in the

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Dec 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781636762302

Book preview

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Contents

Author’s Note

Part I

I

II

III

IV

Part II

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

Part III

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Glossary

"While yet I speak the winged galley flies,

And lo! the Siren shores like mists arise. [...]

Blest is the man ordain’d our voice to hear,

The song instructs the soul, and charms the ear.

Approach! thy soul shall into raptures rise!

Approach! and learn new wisdom from the wise!"

- Homer’s The Odyssey, (Book

XII

)

To my mom, who read me all my first stories.

You gave me the certainty that magic is real, at least between the pages.

To my sisters, starmarked.

You will always point me home.

And to my dad.

I would have given you all my remaining years, if I could have

Author’s Note

They say a siren’s song is ill fortune but maybe it is a kind of justice. Fairytales like rough justice, a kind of karmic punishment more than an equalizer: a woman baked in her own oven, fingers cut off to make skeleton keys, a character torn apart by birds, made to dance in iron shoes. Justice is almost universally enacted against women in fairytales. Wicked women who dare to take control, to hurt the innocent. The stepmother. The second wife. The scorned sister. The jealous lover. Second in love, second in line, second, second, second.

Maybe that’s why a siren song is not a fairytale. It’s related as a myth, a warning, an omen. The siren is a seductress, there to lead a good and decent man off his path. No one worries overmuch what he has done to his wife or what he has said under his breath to the neighbor’s girl. He is still a good man, working hard on a ship, on the docks, on the river, on the sea. He is an honest laborer first, and a woman is always second.

I wanted to write something that explored the myth of the siren and the price of the fae. The Sinking of the Siren began as a short story for a friend who wanted a tale about mermaids. She read part of it and said it was too sad. She wanted a happy story with baby turtles and singing whales and a loving family. I wanted a story about loss: of family, of self, of life. I wanted a story about a girl and a monster, and whether they were one and the same. The original story ended just after the protagonist woke up, her own name on her lips, no longer hiding beneath someone’s clothes, a borrowed life, her dead brother’s memory. 

The story felt unfinished. She was still second. So the story continued. 

Fae is a strange word. Something mythic, and something costly. You must never take a bargain—even an implicit one—from the fae. Never eat the pomegranate, never drink the water. Never give your name, and never mock fate with your arrogance and assured humanity. Fae are tricksters first. The word fae even has different meanings. At first, when writing this story, I used ‘fey,’ which I later learned means ‘fated to die.’ It was startlingly apropos to the story and also a description of any human meddling with things they don’t understand. 

The fae have been softened with storytelling. Even their name ‘faerie-tales’ have come to mean something wholly different; morals and clear stories of triumphing heroes, even when the original of the story is much darker and murkier. When I was younger, I could tell you at once if an author remembered what it was like to be a child. The worst stories were ones where the main characters weren’t really people because they didn’t have real feelings. Now that I’m half grown-up (as grown up as I really ever want to be), I understand why. Adults don’t want children to be sad. It’s that simple. 

Adults want to stop the world from happening or let it happen in manageable bites as children grow up. They don’t want children to be angry, with the kind of deep burning anger that leaves the world dark to their eyes, and they definitely don’t want them to think about dying. So they sanitize stories once grim and terrifying into something whose name, fairytale, means that good will prevail, and everything scary about the world will be solved.

That was always kind of silly to me. Even the youngest child can tell you the world isn’t fair. You don’t choose the way life happens. It just sort of does. Likely as not, life doesn’t involve a rainbow or a clearly marked ending, only a deep breath, and then another. We go on.

I never liked scary stories, not even now and especially not as a child. But changing stories into softer versions of themselves didn’t make me like them more. There’s something shivering and wonderful about a story that makes you a little sad: it may not be a perfect ending, but it also tells you that there are others like you. Even now, that’s what I like best about stories whose protagonists were sad. Life may be a shout into the void, but art is the answer that you are not alone. 

It made me feel very lonely when I was a child and I was angry or sad because I wasn’t sure how to be. In all the stories, kids were fearless adventurers, or exceedingly lucky, or never had any trouble that something in their pocket couldn’t solve. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a good kid. I didn’t want my parents to ever worry about me, and when I was sad, my parents would talk in low, worried voices. So I pretended not to be sad and to get frustrated only over little things. I would be a ship on the water, wind in my sails, gliding over the top of a turbulent sea. 

But as you grow up, the storm of life hits hard. I could drop platitudes here about smooth sailing never making a skillful sailor, but the truth is messier, and so is this story. 

So if you want a story about a girl disguising herself as a boy, sneaking aboard a ship, discovering her own voice, and finding a new family, read on. It is about loss and anger but also some baby turtles and a loving family. Every single person who reads this story is welcome here. And every single person who reads this story would find a home in Siren City. 

Remember, there are people around you, even if they aren’t starmarked, who will be your guiding light through the times ahead. This book is for them. And this book is for you. You are someone’s guiding light, even if you haven’t met them yet. You are not second in your own story. You get to be angry, you get to be sad, and you are, and always will be, beautiful. 

Remember, fae cannot lie.

Part I

I

I had never really had a proper plan, of course. Nobody wakes up with a plan so crazy as that. It was more a slow insistence that I had to leave by whatever means possible. I was under no illusion: I would not be one of the lucky few—if you could call them that—to survive this famine. Callum had already left me, besides.

Well, I’ll see you. That was it. A lifetime together, and that had been the end of it.

Yeah, I had said. As if we both didn’t hear the lie. I wouldn’t see him again.

Callum rubbed his black curls ruefully, then mine, spreading luck from one black sheep to another. I held my hands in fists, so I wouldn’t be so weak as all that to touch the place his hand had been. Our house by then was barely standing, and I knocked on the neighbor’s door while he watched, but when I turned as it opened, he slipped away. I never saw him again in my life.

It was easy, after all, for Callum to get work. Boys were expected to pick a trade young at any rate, so when Cal chose to be the cabin boy on the nearest ship in the harbor when he was twelve, no one stopped him. By then, there was no one left to, at any rate. We were all clemming to death as it was, hunger punching knives through our stomachs, and I watched him go with some wistfulness for my Irish twin. He was my older brother, to be sure, but only by eight months. I was an early baby, lucky to survive. 

A neighbor woman with too many children took me in for board—food wasn’t guaranteed—to help with her littles. Two died over winter right there in my arms. They would cry from hunger, and I would desperately try to keep them quiet. Everyone was angry, all the time, at being alive. It was no good to keep on living but somehow worse to stop. So the woman screamed her frustration; the tots howled theirs. I was angry too. Angry at watching littles die slow, and angry at the haggard thin face of a woman who gave even her boiled leather bootlaces to her children instead of eating them herself. I couldn’t help their wailing, even when I tried to hold my hand over their mouths. They were just as angry and scared as I was, but some of them didn’t even have words yet. 

When she hit the tots, those who couldn’t even speak for themselves, I would crouch next to them on the floor in the dark. They seemed more like bundles of rags than actual children. They breathed and shook and rattled though, and my hands fluttered uselessly, looking for a place to touch down that wouldn’t hurt, butterflies in the darkness. I never let myself love them. It was too hard to love something when everything else was gone. 

I had loved Ma, Da, and Eoin, all dead. I had loved Cal, and he had left me. The littles didn’t even have names to me, just a string of things wrong with them: Scabby Knees, Snotty Nose, Black Toes, and Rattling Breath. They didn’t use my name, either. The ones who were left by the end of the year after Cal left just grunted at me to be picked up or jerked away when I tried to wipe their faces. I wasn’t a mother to them. And why should I be? I was just the neighbor’s girl, there for the year to work for what little scraps there were of moldering potato peelings. 

She started with thirteen, I think, and by the end of the year after Cal had left, there were only five remaining. Not all died, just the littlest without their milk, and the oldest ran out, just like Cal, boys to the sea and girls to the city to beg, but more probably to take what work they could. One or two died of a small sickness, something that would have been nothing at all in fatter times. When I had nearly scraped the cold ground for my own grave, already so overturned in searching for scraps, I knew I had enough. The woman was a skeleton, and I was only a little better. I was angry, hungry, and desperate.

I told the littles I was going, and they cried and cried. I didn’t tell the mother, though. She was a hard woman, and my going would be more hardship for her, even with reduced numbers. But I also knew she wouldn’t be surprised. She never was when she saw the empty bed with rumpled sheets or a discarded body left behind. She only pursed her lips and cleaned up the mess.

Where will you go? asked Belligerent Cougher.

Away from here.

They didn’t have anything to say to that. They would have left, if they could. I made my heart stone and turned away. No one called after me; my name never rose to their lips. It was dead in the ground, anyway, buried with Ma who owned it first. My bare feet didn’t even leave footprints to show I had been there. 

The problem was there weren’t a lot of places to go. The only way to leave Éire was by boat, and the cities were already crammed full of people. Everyone was clemming, even those who were rich. The richest, of course, left, even if they weren’t rich when they got where they were going. 

As a girl, it was hard to find work. Work was already scarce as it was, with people searching for any small thing to make enough coin for bread for their families, split so lean. The streets, even in the country, had never been cleaner. The shepherds picked up the leavings of their animals to burn, glancing longingly at any sickly lamb, and fervently guarded swollen ewes, ready to drop. Everyone was leaving, one way or another. There were droves in the ports, the roads, the graveyards. Girls didn’t have much of a choice, and orphan girls even less. I knew what was expected of me, but I wasn’t heartened by the prospect. 

I wandered to the seaside, surviving only off leaves of plants; their berries were stripped bare long before. The leaves made my tongue green and my stomach clench. More than once, I stopped to dribble a long streak of green sick, too weak and empty even to heave properly. The port was full of girls like me, but all the boys were absent. The captains were happy for the labor, and the boys were so accustomed to eating so little they could be fed half rations, a third even, and be grateful for the meal. They were a bargain and could be sold with their contracts in the New World only a little worse for wear. 

When I made it to the docks, I was already weakening. I wasn’t even to my first blood. I was already too beag as it was, too knock-kneed and small to even be of interest to the coarse sailors who grabbed at the hems of skirts and lifted them to peer beneath. The girls on the docks bore it with a bored patience, their faces showing nothing until they were snapped at, and then they went eagerly, their smile never wider than the fins of the little silverfish that were all to be got, and gladly hauled, by the fishing boats down here.

But when a hand grabbed at my skirt and lifted it to stare at my bony legs, I trembled beneath the gaze. Yet I was so hungry, I daren’t make a sound. He was old. A grandfather, probably. But he only snorted at the state of me and ripped my dress, pulling it roughly back down. 

I didn’t think, of course, anything strange of the pile of clothes kept to one side of the graveyard. It was hardly better than a trash heap. Most of the good clothes that were stripped from the bodies before burial were already shabby to begin with, but even more had been grabbed up by the first spectators hovering at the sound of shovels. 

All the girls’ clothes had been taken by those walking the docks. All that were left were trousers and too-big shoes. Everything was raggedy and holey, not even fit to be used as blankets or scraps. But I climbed into two pairs of trews, the patches overlapping into almost one complete set, and one very large shirt that was obviously a man’s once. It rolled quite nicely up over the arms, and I was able to stuff rags into it, tying them snug around my waist to keep me warm and make me look bigger than I was. 

I was a lucky girl in that I was no beauty. None of the men upon seeing me in boys’ garb said a thing. I didn’t have a flash of red hair to stir their blood, nor the blond locks to tug with itching fingers. I was a black-haired, gránna, angry thing. I only had to sleep on one more empty stomach before I woke up and found a dull fish knife stuck hilt deep in a barrel. Cutting through my thick curls was rough and slow work, and the wooden handle hurt my fingers. 

At the end of it, I looked lost and little. Younger than twelve. Gritting my teeth and not thinking too much about it, I pulled the dull blade across my forehead down one eyebrow. It didn’t draw much blood. It was a bad knife anyway, and I threw it into the ruff when I was done, feeling the puffy raised cut over one eye. It was enough to show me as a scrappy lad not afraid to fight for what he wanted to the next ship that came into dock. 

I was already waiting for it on a barrel. I had been waiting there since dawn when someone cried it coming in on the tide. I had been hungry long enough in the port—a few days of trash and sucking the prickly bones of fish heads and fins—to know how the crew worked. I didn’t move, though. Many a sailor laughed at me as they came off, heading straight for the girls. There weren’t any proper women. They were probably all dead or working in the bigger cities, so the most popular girl on the docks was hardly fourteen. I could have joined them. It might have been safer. But maybe it was Callum, or maybe it was spite, but I couldn’t force myself to stand in line with them, knowing I’d be in another line, another helper, last picked and ill-used. I wanted out.

The last man off was always the captain. I had learned that much. He was no different looking, really, then most of the men. He had a scruff of beard, fairly well combed, but his clothing was none better. This was no navy ship by the looks of it, but a private company, though it was carrying goods enough to feed me on wherever it was going. 

Sir, I said at almost the last moment, forcing him to turn around and look at me as I tried to appear stronger and older than I was. 

Boy.

I breathed out slightly at that. At least the lie wasn’t obvious. Sir, I want work.

You want work, he mocked. Get off. Everyone wants work. I’m off to eat. If you’re still here in the morning, you’re a damn fool.

I sat there all night. I daren’t even leave to relieve myself, and I only squatted off the side of the dock, surprised at my own boldness. But these were hardly the times for pride. I had been living on little enough to know pride wasn’t filling. Sometimes I even ate mud, just to quell my whimpering stomach with something akin to fullness before it was wracked with pain. 

I don’t think I slept, but the stomp of boots on the planks still startled me in the greying light of dawn. I turned.

Boy.

Sir, I said as politely as I could manage. Hope was the beating of butterflies in my chest, and I thought briefly of those littles I was leaving behind, inexplicably happy that I would never see them again.

He only grunted, looking pleased. Well, get on then, he snapped at me, just like they did to the girls, only this time he pointed. And take that barrel with you.

There was nothing in the barrel of consequence. It had been full of sand, a weight for mooring. I was slightly smarter than I looked. I had already dumped most of it into the water in case I had to hide in it, which had been my less preferable secondary plan. 

I hefted the barrel onto my back without hesitation. The captain made a surprised face as I walked as quickly as I could up to the narrow shifting plank leading up from the pier to the side of the ship. I hesitated a moment before stepping foot on it.

Well, get on, you’re holding up the crew, snapped the captain, just behind me. I had the funny feeling he knew what I was thinking: the overwhelming helpless terror of the first step: the final step, really, that I was ever to see on my homeland. 

I didn’t stop again, though the barrel was growing heavy in my shaking arms. I was clem and faint, and even the reduced weight was heavy for me who only ever had to lift a little or a basket of washing. Once on deck, I shouted, Where do you want this, sir?

Over the side, lad. It’s useless.

He grinned nastily, but I knew better than to stop moving. I only heaved hard on the port side so that the barrel might be dashed upon the rocks. I knew some of the more desperate townsfolk sucked on salted wood to help ease their stomachs. It was better than eating the sand. 

Well, that wasn’t as rubbish as I had expected from a culchie.

I flushed hot. I hadn’t hidden who I was as well as I had thought. I held my breath; if he guessed now, he would probably use me up and throw me after the barrel. It wasn’t a pleasant way to go, all things considered. I couldn’t even swim. I feared drowning, which made my current predicament even more bizarre. 

If someone had asked my poor mam when I was born if she thought I’d be twelve years old, hair shorn like a bad trim for a lamb, in trews, and lying baldly to an adult, she might have died all over again with the shame of it. 

What’s your name, boy?

This was embarrassing, really, and mortification prickled in my cheeks even as I panicked at the question. How had I not prepared for this after I had sat on the barrel all night? I didn’t have one of those names like Siobhan, which could so easily be shortened to Sean. 

My long pause seemed to make the captain even surlier. About to lie? he guessed shrewdly.

My family’s dead, I said, which was truth.

Well, all right then, what do you want to be called? He was getting testier than ever, and I knew as soon as I could be out of sight, hiding until I was wanted, the better it would be for the both of us.

The question of what name I would begin my new life with was one I wished I had more time to consider. Instead, I borrowed my eldest brother’s name, though it hadn’t been said aloud for the many years since his death. Eoin. 

Eoin Murphy, have you ever been to sea?

I knew he was trying to goad me with my supposed surname, the one that would go in the logs. He knew I was from the country: O’Murchadha. Of the sea.

I didn’t give him the satisfaction of rising to the bait, only shook my head.

Been on a boat?

No, sir.

And I suppose you want to tell me this is your true calling?

No, sir, I said again, surprising him, I think. I’m only trying to keep from clemming to death like everyone else I know. My brother went to sea last year. Haven’t heard from him since, but I’d like to think he’s not as dead as I’m like to be if I stay here.

The captain actually laughed, but it wasn’t a nice laugh. You’ll never see your brother again.

The thought had occurred to me months before, so I wasn’t as shocked by the truth as his rudeness. I said nothing.

You’re useless to me.

I kept on saying nothing.

You don’t know anything about anything. You’re only on board for the food.

I didn’t want to spoil anything, so I kept letting him complain for a good five minutes before he finally blustered into the contract I knew I’d be offered. It was a poor one, too.

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