The fisherman's witches

She stares down at her hands, the lines like cracks in glass that seem to stretch on forever, reminding her of the bleak eternity she faces. The chill fills her bones and her breath turns to fog as she makes her way through the kitchen, standing over the stove to bring forth a spark of warmth to revive her dying soul. Though so many years have passed, age fails to linger on her as if time stands still in its attempt to keep her youthful beauty alive. She drudges through her chores, feeling the weight of all those years pressing against her shoulders.

Her eyes flicker with an inner light, burning until her lids can no longer hold them open and she is forced to succumb to sleep.

A witch warned her that she won't be able to have a son. Her words rang true as she gathers around her seven daughters, each with the same scaly red hair and piercing gaze that cause people to recoil and flee in terror at their sight. The village reluctantly accept their presence as they are left with no other choice, but they fill the air with suspicious murmurs and pointed stares meant for her and her daughters alike. There is a collective consensus that they are not human and should not be trusted. 

Misty steam rises as she pours boiling water into her coffee pot and over the ground beans. She takes a moment to look at the long pathway from her house to the garden gate and the old road slanting down towards the ocean at the boundary line. The pleasant odor of freshly brewed coffee fills her nostrils as she takes a sip.

With the cup in her hands, she embraces the thought of what could have been. But saving him would mean leaving her daughters behind, and that was something she couldn't bear to do. She longed for a life where they could all be seen as normal women, but knew that wasn't an option. The day when she'd have to give it all up was coming soon, and it was inevitable no matter how much she wished it weren't so. Her short lifespan seemed like such an injustice compared to ordinary humans, but she refused to accept any debt owed to them or anyone else. And yet somehow, she had to find a way to make all this work out. It's not that she is immortal, but her life expectancy is so short... It's not fair that her relatives have to die so soon, like ordinary humans. Neither does she. She owes nothing to anyone. 

The weight of the air in her throat feels like a vice grip, squeezing the hope out of her. She longs to return home with an intensity that she never thought possible. She places her cup down on the table and her fingers tremble. A shaky smile appears on her face as she looks at the strangers around her– their strangeness is so moving. Tears begin to well up in her eyes as she remembers how close they (she and her daughters) are to finally reaching their destination, but fear grips her tight. She never expected it would take so many years for them to reach this point, but necessity forced her to conceal who she was to give them a chance at a better life than what they were born into. Now, fear takes hold of her as she wonders if they want to stay, although it never crossed her mind before.

She looks down the road, her breath catching in her chest. She darts to her room, the chill of winter seeping into her bones as she grasps the carved wooden box from atop her wardrobe. Trembling, she runs back to the kitchen, box clutched tightly against her chest. She carefully places it on the table and opens it reverently to reveal her treasured heirlooms.

The first thing she takes out is a small piece of fishing net. Her fingers trace each loop. Oh, that green rope was the beginning of everything. Memories flood her mind - memories of fear and dread as the fishing net pulled tighter around her slim body sending her plummeting towards the ocean. Images of a starry night overwhelm her and she gasps for air as if breaking face first through a wall of water. And she trembled at the memory of the lure that twisted her when the nets entangled in her body pulled her to the surface. 

The man thrust out his arm with all his might, desperately trying to hurl her back into the depths of the sea. But when he started the boat's engine she felt herself being dragged through the water at an unimaginable speed. Trapped in the tangle of hets that had taken away her freedom, she wailed and screamed FREE ME! FREE ME! But he was also shouting and saying something that she was not going to register. It took her a while to realize that there was no understanding between them.

With slow, deliberate movements, she carried the cup to the sink. The porcelain was cold against her palm, and the water trickled down into the drain with a soft gurgle. She filled it calmly, mindful of every drop that splashed back up against her skin. When she looked out of the window at the road, she didn't see anyone coming. The sky was brilliant blue and cloudless, stretching out like an endless ocean before her.

Next, she filled a pot with water and detergent and started scrubbing the kitchen. Bubbles formed around her fingers as they moved in circular motions along the dishes, carving away at remnants of old food and stains that refused to disappear. Anything to make those endless hours go by. Life went on and she felt the need to tell them so many things... She knew she shouldn't have waited so long, but now there was no turning back.

Returning to the table, she carefully folded up the net and placed it in the center. The rememberings spread out, each one a unique blend of colors and shapes that danced across her vision.

She looked at her hands again, always, always the hands. They were a key to agree on renomances and futures and to know... To know what? She wasn't sure anymore. All she knew was that they were tired and worn, rough against her fingertips with lines etched deeply into the skin. Yet despite their fatigue, they never stopped moving - always pushing forward towards whatever lay ahead. 

The ticking of the clock sent shivers up her spine, reminding her of the three days of agonizing monotony that led to this moment. The man's look of disbelief and dismay as he shoved her into a boat would be forever etched in her memory. With one abrupt movement, she shook off the last emotion and focused on the blue eyes of the fisherman. As it drew closer, she desperately tried to reach it, to rescue him from her watery world. But his clothes weighed down in her mind like anchors, making any kind of movement near impossible. The heavy wetness clung to her skin like an unwelcome companion.

She felt a pang of sadness as she smiled, remembering the moment he put her in his car (now she knows it was a car, at that time nothing more than a strange and frightening object) and took her home. There, he began to slowly unravel her, speaking with warmth and tenderness in his strange language, quietly whispering words she had never heard before. Years later he confessed that looking at her made him scared - her seashells scattered over her face, her peculiar teeth - but she laughed it off. She understood intrinsically that beauty is subjective: in her world she was one of the most attractive. And it also took her time to adjust to his rare beauty.

She frantically grabbs a piece of cotton cloth from the box, her hands shaking. It was from the shirt he left at her feet for her to get dressed. That day, she looked at it without knowing what it was. He pointed to the one he was wearing and she understood in a moment that he wanted her to wear it. But when she felt his cold hands attempt to slip it over her arms, her voice erupted in a primal scream of terror, making him leap back and cover his ears as if her voice was tormenting him.

She looked out the window again. Nothing...

When she suppresses her thoughts, the past rushed back with overwhelming intensity. She remembered his face that day, the moment he covered his ears with his hands and she understood he couldn't stand her voice. That's when she stopped crying. He took his hands away from his ears and smiled. She still remembers the fear that filled her seeing the terrible look on his face, with his mouth open and those small white teeth. "What am I going to do now?," she thought in despair. But she let him come closer because she already realized that that ugly being wanted to take care of her. He touched her wounds with a strange liquid that, when touching his skin, fervored. She was frightened, but as the days went by, she saw that he was healing her.

She looked down with horror, her tail was gone. Each day that passed triggered a stark transformation, as if her body was being covered in an invisible illness. She sobbed uncontrollably on the beach while the man slept, begging for some kind of divine intervention to save her. When she finally returned home, her new neighbors huddled together and whispered about mysterious lines stretching across the sea, their catch depleting rapidly with no discernable cause. Fear seized them all; what had befallen the village?

She blossomed into a beautiful woman for humans and started to walk around the village with the fisherman. She tried to be a good companion for him. To begin with, she learned to pronounce his name and his language was not difficult once she began to understand its rules. However, he never did anything to learn her own. Humans were such simple beings... He told people that she was a woman from a nordic country, Finland, he said. To her the name sounded like a fairy tale, magic and promises. But he never took her on the boat again, not to Finland or anywhere else. 

She is sure now he was afraid of losing her. That by going back to the sea, she could regain her essence and return to her world and never come back. And he was right. Of course he was right. Because it didn't take her long to see with joy that her tail reappeared when she bathed. And she was beautiful again, glinting off the corals and seashells on her face. With unmistakable joy she began stroking through the water, feeling herself being pulled further and further away from the village with each stroke, until she woke up into the bath and nothing remained but an unbearable ache.

Until they had their first girl... Then she was afraid her little daughter was too human to be able to sneak in with her. And even so, she guessed that the duel was going to be for that nice man, whom she ended up loving. Yes, indeed, she loved him. 

The beautiful woman gets excited when she takes the rubber duckling out of the carved box. The duckling of her first daughter's first bath. The one that contemplated with her the little tail of the girl when she came in contact with the water. In that moment, she knew mermaids lose their tails when dried and her daughter was also a mermaid. And as the other girls were born, she anxiously awaited the moment of the first bath to prove that they all were. But she never told it to her man.

She clutches her hands tightly as if to hold onto this truth and keep it alive within her. She reads the story in her palms, never allowing herself to forget who she really is.

The brush... Her trembling hands grasps it tightly, as she stands and listens intently to the muffled sound coming from down the road. But no one comes. With a wave of loneliness washing over her, she sits back down again, caressing the bristles of the brush which the fisherman used to write her name on the boat. And she also remembers the first night she spent alone, when he dared to go back to the sea to fish, after making her promise not to go there. 

The fisherman never knew that, naturally, that night she went to the beach. She did not dare to go into the water, for the call was so strong that she feared she would not return, would forget her life here and not come back. But she felt the voices of her sisters. And he knew that her fisherman's destiny was not to return one day.

It was not that day. Seven years passed, marked by the birth of each child, full of happiness in that house. But at the end of year seven, he did not return. The sea had claimed him as its own in exchange for the prized mermaid he had stolen away.

As the sun rises, the shadows of her daughters creep towards the house. Anxiety runs deep in their veins, they can feel the immense weight of this special day even though no of them has said a word. Unspoken dread lingers in the air and yet, each of them carry a secret that none of them want anyone else to know; their bodies are scaly like fish. Strangely enough, for all these years, no one had ever seen them venture out into the turbulent sea - which in a fishing village like that only would had served to increase the whispers and gossip during late night conversations. Everyone shudders at the mere mention of them, and all refer to them by the same fearful name; The fisherman's witches.

She cackles, her mermaid's laughter breaking through the air like a screeching scream. It is more than music to the fisherfolk. It pierces through their bodies like shards of glass and shatters their senses with its ceaseless vibrations. When she speaks her voice is sweet to humans, but her laughs, cries and screams shatter eardrums with a sonic frequency that is agonizing for them.

The villagers swear they hear dolphins and whisper of the fisherman's witches that haunt the old house on the hill. They spin myths as thick as a spider web, alluring tales of black magic and strange incantations that lure fish to the dark covens of the witches they fear, who manipulate the destiny of the fishermen. Depending on their mood - whether they laugh or crie or scream -their nets will be empty or full, and even some men never return from the sea. Such is the power of fate at the hands of mysterious forces of witches. 

However, she did not scream or cry the day her fisherman left. She remained silent and stared unblinking at him, unable to form words from the heavy emotions that weighed on her chest. Her throat tightened until she could barely breathe and with a whispered goodbye she watched his figure diminishing in the distance until it was barely a speck on the horizon.

With a hollow ache in her heart, she began to count down each tick of the clock counting towards the time when she would have to return to the sea, leaving dry land forever.

As the last rays of light touch the house, all her daughters have come back home. After an emotional reunion and a silent dinner of vegetables and legumes (they never ate animals in that house, much less fish, they all cried when the fisherman had a good day at sea), they hastily tidy up the house - scrubbing the floors, polishing the windows and arranging everything in perfect order.

When the moon is at its peak, they rip off their shoes and sprint through the meadows towards the beach. They cackle with manic laughter that echoes far into the night. The neighbors mistake their chilling howls with those of dolphins and predict a bountiful catch on the morrow.

As they reached the sea, a sudden urge seemed to pull them forward. The colors of the water were so alluring that it made them laugh in delight. She leaves the wooden box on the shore and the eight women begin to strip off their clothes. They perform an ancient dance, each step taking them closer to the water until they paddle out further and further while being pummeled by the crashing waves. As if swallowed up by the sea's embrace, they vanish without a trace.

The next morning, the beach is abuzz with whispers of a mysterious box found in the sand. As the hours and days pass, the fisherman's wife's absence becomes more and more palpable, her bizarre witch-like powers just a distant memory. Eventually, years go by without any trace of she or her daughters and tales begin to emerge of their strange and powerful magic.

As you venture towards the sea at night, the sound of joyous laughter echoes around you - like hundreds of dolphins singing in chorus. And it is clear that a single man's voice is amongst them, their laughter carried on the wind like a raging storm.

However, in the village, no one will hear the dolphins anymore...