The Ladies of Horror
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Far From Home 
by Loren Rhoads 

It was supposed to be a vacation. Alondra’s mouth quirked into a smile. She found herself thinking that over and over these days, but every time she traveled, some creature always seemed to find her—or some person with a problem with a creature.

This trip was no different. The fisherman found her lingering over a glass of Sciacchetrà as the sun settled into the ocean beyond the trattoria’s balcony. He stood over the chair opposite her and didn’t meet her gaze. Not a pickup, then.

In Italian, Alondra asked, “Can I help you, sir?”

“It’s my mother,” he said. “She is very old…”

Alondra gave him time to continue, but he didn’t seem inclined. “Please sit, signore.”

He ignored that. “The priest has seen her,” the fisherman said. “Two weeks ago. I thought she was at the end, but she lingers. She cannot find comfort in her bed. I thought…perhaps… It is said that you know creatures of the sea.”

“Let me come see her,” Alondra said. “I will help, if I can.”

*

When the fisherman opened the door to his apartment, the smell of seaweed rotting in a too-shallow tidepool rushed out. Alondra ignored the fisherman’s apologies and waited for him to turn on a light. Instead, he struck a match and lit a candle. “The lights hurt her eyes,” he said and gestured Alondra into the bedroom where the smell was the worst.

As the light drew near, the old woman huddling in the bed hissed at them. Her eyes were too large for her face, solid black orbs more geared for swimming in the depths.

“How long have you been on land?” Alondra asked in Italian.

“So many years,” the woman sighed in English. Her voice had an Irish lilt to it.

“Why don’t you return home?”

“There was a fire,” she said and began to weep.

Her son picked up the story. “When I was a boy, we lived on my father’s yacht. He was sailing around the world when my parents met. They fell in love, she traveled with him, and I was born. One night when we were in the harbor here, the boat caught fire. It burned to the waterline, everything lost. My father swept me up, dove into the water with me on his back, and saved me. We thought Mother drowned. Eventually she came back to us and we settled here and never left.”

“I can’t go home,” the old woman sobbed. “My cohuleen druith is burned and gone.”

Alondra swayed under the weight of what the merrow woman was saying. Decades she’d been trapped on land, unable to regain her real form, because the magical cap that allowed her to transform had been lost in the fire.

“What will happen to you?” Alondra asked gently in her best Gaelic.

“I’m turning to seafoam,” the old woman moaned. “It hurts, it hurts. I’m rotting where I lay.”

“Does your son know?” Alondra asked.

“He’s his father’s son,” she answered in Italian. She held out her hand to her son. Alondra winced at the sight of her fingers. Bones poked from the tips of her fingers as the skin and muscles jellied around them.

“What can we do?” the man asked.

“We must get her to your boat,” Alondra said. “I can’t prevent her death, but seawater will ease her pain.”

While he went to bring the car around, Alondra found some garbage bags under the kitchen sink. She wrapped the old woman up in them carefully, tucking the edges in, until the merrow looked like a mummy. The old woman bore the pain as well as she could, moaning in a low voice like the ocean inside a sea cave.

*

The old woman quieted as the boat pulled out of the marina. Her son—his name was Aurelio, Alondra finally learned—piloted them out to the deep waters where starlight glowed blue on the wavelets. “Far enough?” Alondra asked her.

“Yes.”

“Stop here,” Alondra called to Aurelio. When he joined them on the deck, Alondra said, “Will you get into the water? I’ll help her down to you.”

Aurelio paused a moment, as if prepared to argue like any sane person would. Then he looked to his mother, shrouded in the black plastic trash bags, her bulbous black eyes gazing up at the stars rapturously. He toed out of his deck shoes and emptied his pockets, then dove off the boat into the sea.

Alondra put her arms around the merrow. Her flesh was too soft, rotten like a peach left too long in the fruit bowl. The old woman moaned. Neither of them spoke as Alondra pulled the merrow to the edge of the boat and lowered her as gently as she could over the edge. She kept hold of the loose edge of the garbage bag shroud and pulled. The old woman tumbled into her son’s arms as he paddled in the sea.

Wherever the water touched her, she dissolved into bubbles. The old woman laughed, delighted. She leaned forward to plant a final kiss on her son’s cheek. Then she was gone.

Fiction © Copyright Loren Rhoads
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

More from Author Loren Rhoads:

Alondra’s Experiments

Alondra DeCourval travels from San Francisco to Prague to Olso, encountering magical creatures and searching for the limits she will go to for love.

Available on Amazon!