milk of the siren

Sirens really do exist. But they are not beautiful like in the stories.

They are creatures of the deep sea that look bizarre and frightening and ugly. They have greenish, slimy scaly bodies that are very thin and about twice as long as a human body. Their eyes are big like turtle eggs and all black with a malicious sparkle in them. Sometimes they have hair, which is very long, black and covered with slime, but most of the sirens I have seen are bald. Their mouths are full of sharp pointed teeth. They eat human flesh. Men's flesh. Women don't get eaten by them, they mostly just let them drown. I don't know why that is. Charisma means it's because women taste differently, because of different hormones, but I don't believe that. Well, maybe women do taste different, but I think that the sirens deliberately decided to eat only men.

But even though they wouldn't eat me, they scare me. I know that the other women are also afraid of them. Even the priestesses. They don't want to admit it, but I know. That is why they pray to them. You don't pray to things you're not afraid of.

There are only female sirens, no male sirens. I think every siren is capable of both motherhood and fatherhood, but I don't need to know how exactly that works. In spring, they give birth to one or two little baby sirens each. They need a few years to grow up. In the days after birth, they are always wrapped in greenish mucus, which the water eventually washes away. The young animals are suckled. Sirens have two teats on their upper body, exactly where humans have them. No bulge in front of it, no chest. Just two teats that are a little darker green than the rest of their skin. The milk that comes from it is also greenish. It shimmers oily and exudes a slightly fishy smell. It looks poisonous and is poisonous. Their poison has a very unique effect on the human body. But I don't want to think about that now.

I roll onto my back and look up at the gray cloudy sky. The sea roars in my ears. I think: If it stays so cloudy during the night, the ritual can't take place. That would be great! I allow myself a small hopeful smile. If the full moon doesn't shine on the waves tonight when we go swimming in it, then the milk of the sirens can't take effect either. Sirens are nocturnal. They are worshippers of darkness and the moon. They live life based on it`s phases. They can be heard singing during full moons, because that's when their voices are most similar to those of human women.

I don't think they like us, but they want to sound like us. On the nights when we hunt, they listen to our voices almost as intently as the sailors whose ruin we are. I close my eyes and think of an old song.

Most of what we sing during the hunting nights has no words, only melody. The old women know songs from the human world that are like little stories. I asked to have them all taught to me, but at some point, they were no longer enough. When it comes to words and stories, I can never get enough.

We have fifteen books that come from the shipwrecks, and I've read each one about a dozen times. Even if they were in languages I didn't understand. I speak good English because most of my books are in English, but unfortunately, I don't speak many other languages. I like to call them my books, although they are not. They belong to all of us. So they don't really belong to anyone then, but that's the way it is with things that the sea gifts you.

I squint up into the clouds and listen to the waves. The milk of the sirens makes our eyes very susceptible to daylight over time, but since I've only had one procedure, it's not so bad for me yet. They only hurt when the sun is shining, but that is rarely the case on our island.

The language we speak here is similar to English, but a little different. It has throaty and shrill sounds similar to what the sirens sound like when they communicate. We don't have a name for our language. We don't need to, because for many of us there is no other language, no other world, at all. Not anymore.

We know about the world out there, but it doesn't know about us. That's a good thing, the old women always say. We should be grateful to the sirens for keeping the ships away from us. We should be grateful for this island, for the milk, for all that the sirens have given us and continue to give us. The sirens are our destiny, they say. The sirens are our world. We belong to them and they belong to us. The sea inevitably bound us together. They saved us. We are in their debt and we have to repay this debt - with flesh. Men's flesh. Night after night, body after body.

I am torn out of my thoughts as Maris approaches me.

"Are you daydreaming again?" She grins and sits down next to me. Like me, she has only taken part in the ritual once, but unlike me, she is looking forward to tonight. Maris is always looking forward to something. She's the happiest girl I know.

Her name means something like sea star or originating from the sea. It is short and cheerful and suits her. Her mother is one of the priestesses. Her name is Saga Andersen and she was once Miss Denmark a long time ago. Maris looks very similar to her with the same dimples, brown hair and delicate freckles. Her eyes are a bright shade of blue. They always gleam at you very cheerfully.

I sit up. "I was just thinking."

"About what?"

I shrug my shoulders. "The ritual. Do you think it can take place tonight if it stays so cloudy?"

Maris examines the sky. "It will clear up by the evening." She says as if it were a done deal. I nod dreadfully.

Maris looks at me with her head tilted and frowns. "You don't seem very... You're not exactly looking forward to tonight, are you?"

She knows me well. I pinch my lips together. "It's not very nice to wake up with a stomachache and no memory of who you are or what happened, don't you think?"

I haven't forgotten the last time. Not yet.

Maris shrugs her shoulders. "Look at it this way: a new cycle begins. You start again at the very beginning. You become young again. You have a chance to do everything all over again."

You don't lose your whole memory when you drink the milk of the sirens. Skills such as speaking, eating or walking are retained. However, you will lose your memories. Not only those from the years you are rejuvenated, but also those from the whole time before. It's just the way it is. You wake up as a blank sheet of paper. As a person with no memories, no history.

I look at Maris and try to remember everything that has happened ever since we have known each other.

"Just think of everything we experienced together, Maris. All the conversations, the trips, the diving through the wrecks, the fun we had."

She shrugs her shoulders. "We can do it all again."

"But it won't be the same!"

"It might. After all, we will still remain the same." Maris grins. "And you can reread all your books again."

I laugh. That's actually a plus. We sit next to each other silently and watch how the night falls. Wind comes up and drives away the clouds, just as Maris predicted it. As the orange and pink of the evening sky slowly turns into blue and the first star appears, we stand up without a word.

…

We walk across the island. Small, hard pebbles bore into the soles of my feet. Everything here is rocky and there is little vegetation. That's why people have spurned our island for so long. In recent decades, more and more ships have arrived, but we and the sirens are making sure that none of their crews survive long enough to set foot on the island.

My parents were Jamaican fishermen whose boat capsized. At least that's what I was told, I don't remember any of that anymore. Saga, the mother of Maris, said that the sirens probably found me special in some way. Instead of letting me drown they brought me all the way here. I was fourteen years old at the time and, according to the other women, quite difficult to handle. They said I cried every night and screamed for my parents. They were happy when they were finally able to do the ritual with me and the milk erased all of my memories. I don't remember anything about the person I was before. I don't know anything about my parents, my childhood, my roots.

My parents drowned and the sirens certainly ate my father. That's how much I've put together. Everything else I know about my past I learned by chance, because one of the women slipped up and told me. I know that I used to speak with a strong Jamaican accent and that sometimes the other women would not understand me at all. Supposedly, I often refused to eat my food and was said to have been very stubborn. I don't know if that's true. As I said, I don't remember anything about my past self.

"There you are at last!" Charisma sits by the water and stares at us, raising her black eyebrows. "I thought we had to come and get you."

Charisma is the daughter of the woman who competed as Miss Egypt in the miss world pageant of 1953. Her mother's name is Marina. I always forget her last name, but that doesn't matter, because there are so few of us that no one needs a last name.

Charisma is pretty. With full lips and expressive brown eyes, which would probably be big even without the siren's milk. Her hair is dark like mine, but unlike me, she wears it braided or decorated with clips almost every day. She loves jewelry. Hair clips, necklaces, bracelets - everything that is shiny drives her crazy.

I sigh. Charisma has already completed the procedure for her second cycle. She doesn't have to take part tonight.

"We're here now!" Maris says a little brusquely. She and Charisma don`t always get along. Charisma is erratic and irritable like the sea, while Maris is more like our freshwater spring on the other side of the island, which bubbles gently and happily at any time of the day. I get along well enough with both girls, but that's probably due to the fact that I barely talk.

"Are you excited for tonight?" Charisma asks. I shake my head.

Charisma loves the rituals. She would probably take part in them every single time if she could. In a way, I understand her. The milk of the sirens not only makes us young again, but it also makes us slightly more similar to them. Externally, it does so in a way that can be perceived as beautiful. We become taller and thinner, as if our limbs had been elongated. Our hair becomes unnaturally soft and shiny, our skin shimmers more and more with each ritual. Our eyes get bigger, and our faces become more defined. We become fantastic divers and swimmers who are indifferent to both depth and cold. We can hold our breath underwater for a long time and see well in the dark. I can understand why Charisma and some others just can't get enough of it.

At the same time, I don't understand it at all. For me, the procedure is something that robs me. It robs me of my memory, my age, my experiences, my humanity. And that's not all: Some of the former beauty queens have already gone through three or four rituals and they look more siren-like than the rest of us. They avoid the sun and feel more comfortable in the water than on land. I dread thinking that they could turn into real sirens at some point. What if I turn into a real siren at some point? To become one of those frightening creatures who eat human flesh… It would be my biggest nightmare.

One by one, the others arrive. There are seven of us who will drink the milk tonight. Maris, Luna, Estelle, Coraline, Rhea, Selene and me. In reverent silence we wait for the moon and the sirens. They appear in front of us in the water when it is already pitch dark. Normally there are only two or three who bring the milk, but today there are five. They greet us with high-pitched, hissing sounds and we bow our heads before them.

Brenda and Chavatzelet, former Miss England and Miss Israel, give a speech. They tell of the ship that was once supposed to take the participants of one of the first Miss World beauty pageants from England to North America, but was capsized by pirates not too far from this island. They tell of how the pirates raped the women and the sirens saw it and avenged them. They tell us about the sacred pact we have had with the sirens ever since then.

"We were to be ceremoniously received in New York," Brena recalls. She never drank the milk, because a few chosen women need to live and remember. That way they can guide us. We call them our priestesses. "Giving interviews and being presented to the American people - But we never got there. Pirates attacked our ship, killed the crew, raped us fourteen young women and abandoned us on an uninhabited island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Laughing, they prepared to drive away and let us starve to death there, when they recognized strange figures in the water."

I know the story by hearth, but it still captivates me every time.

Brenda smiles. "They were sirens. Powerful beings that dwell in the deep sea. They saw the injustice that happened to the women and capsized the boat. Before the astonished eyes of the wounded women, they dragged the pirates into the depths and ate the flesh from their bones. "

I shudder. I know that that is what happens to all men who we bewitch with our singing, I know that they deserve it, but still. It`s brutal.

“After that, the sirens offered the women a pact.” Chavatzelet continues. “They would bring them fish, protect them, and give them their milk, which makes human women young and beautiful and their voices hypnotic. In return, however, the women have to beguile the sailors with their song and beauty and lure them against the rocks, so the sirens can feed off them. The women had no boat and no way to ever get away from the island, so they had no choice but to accept the pact.” She smiles. “And that is our story.”

When the moon is high up in the middle of the sky, I, Maris and the others take off our clothes and wade into the sea. The waves are gentle tonight. They wash around us and welcome us like old friends. The sirens hand us their milk, filled into containers that come from sunken ships. Goosebumps cover my body. I am rarely this close to the sirens. The moonlight is glistening in their huge black eyes.

Standing up to our necks in water, Maris and I exchange one last look. Mine is nervous, hers joyful.

"Promise me that we will remain friends!" I whisper at her. She smiles. "I promise."

Tomorrow this promise will be forgotten. Just like everything else.

At a sign from the priestesses, we raise the vessels to our lips. I suppress a cough. The milk smells fishy and is terribly oily, just as I remembered it. I can't really see it in the steel-gray drinking bottle with a narrow mouth opening, but that doesn't make it much better. With one hand I cover my nose, with the other I raise the bottle to my lips. Now it is important to stay focused. A small sip corresponds to the deduction of about five years of human life, a large one to the deduction of ten. I have to be about fifteen years younger to be just about a grown woman again. At my peak.

I drink the small sip first, then follow up with two big ones, but in between I have to cough and some of the milk shoots up my throat again. In this brief moment, I see a rapid succession of images.

I see beaches with crystal clear waters, green bushes and palm trees, like in my books. A woman repairing nets. A cheerful old fisherman, with rugged brown skin, who laughs without making a sound. I feel myself being small, balancing on the bow of a brightly painted canoe and looking down the lagoon. I see other, even more colorful boats than the one I'm on. I feel happiness. Then I turn around because someone is calling my name, but I don't hear it. I only know that I am being called by my name. My name. My real name. I swallow hard. Then the memory, or whatever it was, is over.

I drink the last two sips and notice how the bottle gets taken away from me. The moonlight is reflected on the waves and I sway. My whole body becomes heavy. Just before I faint, I feel someone pull me out of the water. I want to remember, is my last thought.