Content warnings

Pregnancy. Birth. Infant loss. Death. Grief.

“The MacRae sisters tell me you were the first one to spot the creature?” 

He sounded like he’d jumped straight out of the BBC Radio the boys had sent their father from Edinburgh. More often than not there was no signal and when there was, he’d argue with the voices.

Màiri lifted her gaze from the woven fish basket she was mending, sitting on a stool outside their cottage and looked the man up and down. A circle of pink rose in his cheeks under her inspection, as she took in his suit, his clean-shaven face, and the spectacles, slightly shaded under his hat. 

His word “creature” was the deciding factor; she wouldn’t answer his question. The MacRae sisters would have used the word sea-child just like everyone else on this island. She picked up her basket, went inside and shut the door behind her.

The women in Màiri’s family sometimes lost their babies to the sea. It was a fact she’d known since she could remember. Màiri was the oldest and her mother lost one soon after she turned six. She’d seen nothing of that baby. 

Before she lost it, when the baby was growing steady inside, her mother told Màiri about their family, and the babies that sometimes went to the sea. Young Màiri wasn’t taken aback or even sad at the idea. She had wanted to understand why. 

Sometimes people are born in the wrong place or the wrong time, her mother told her. And sometimes we have babies that were meant to be born in the sea. They belong to the sea. The reason still eluded Màiri, and all she could think was that an ancestor of theirs must have wronged the sea badly for it to take their babies when it pleased.

The sadness of it had only sunk in when that baby’s time came. Her mother went to her older sister’s cottage where she lived alone, a stone’s throw from the beach. Two nights later she returned, arms empty. Màiri’s father had simply been told the boy was born without a cry. 

Màiri knew differently, ran to her mother and gripped her so tight as tears dampened her mother’s dress, who eventually gave her a pat on the shoulder. 

Then the twins came and thankfully they were meant for land and helped them forget. They weren't to stay on the island though, left on a ferry last summer. They had pleaded with her to go with them; silent when she had questioned who would look after their aging father. Not that she could ever imagine leaving the island herself. Soon after the twins had their first holy communion, their mother had cried bitterly when her monthly visit didn’t come. It was like she knew from the start. 

Màiri was terrified the whole pregnancy, exhausted from taking on all her mother’s chores and looking after her brothers. She never told her mother but every night she would run down to the beach and make an offering to the sea. A flower, a feather, a pretty shell or rock. A chicken egg, a snail, a shell filled with milk. She thought it best to vary them seeing as she had no idea what might appease the sea, but she begged it every night to let them keep this baby. 

The man with the BBC voice, a reporter he called himself, knocked again the next day. 

“They’re holding a funeral for the mermaid today,” he said. “Or a service or something.”

She placed a hand on his chest and pushed him back. He stumbled a little, then righted himself with a brief look of terror. This damn island, she could almost hear him say. She shut the door behind her as she began the steep walk to the church at the top of the hill. 

“Seeing as we’re going the same way, why don’t we walk together.” He stepped in beside her, but kept an arm’s distance between them.

“I’ve nothing to say to you.”

He didn’t insist, and as the incline steepened, his ragged breath was the only sound.

It wasn’t a funeral or a service, and Màiri’s request for a prayer was refused. It was done in silence and with haste, with the priest looking over his shoulder every now and then, as though his mother was about to come charging in asking what trouble he had gotten into now. The burial wasn’t done in the graveyard, not that Màiri had expected it to be. It was done at the bottom of the slope round the back of the church, like a dirty little secret. The ground was softest there, was the reason given by the priest.

Only a handful of people were gathered round the hole in the ground, not that people had been openly invited. The body was wrapped in a faintly patterned sheet, the dregs of someone’s donations to the church. The priest himself, along with his good friend, the butcher, lowered the body into the ground. But they leant forward too quickly and the body unfurled from the sheet, rolling down with a thud, the sheet hanging from the priest’s and the butcher’s fingers. 

The journalist made a strangled sound of shock; the realisation that the outlandish story he came from the mainland to report on was actually true.

The priest and the butcher laid the sheet over the body and began piling the dirt back in. They hadn’t bothered with a six-foot-deep grave, it was barely a couple of feet. That was good.

“Perhaps the body should… perhaps I should take the body back with me to Edinburgh.”

The priest looks at the reporter but says nothing, then continues piling the mud back up.

“There’s the zoological society or the council of—this really is groundbreaking. I don’t think you understand.”

“Naw, you the wan who disnae ken.” The butcher lifts the shovel before bringing it down and patting the ground level.

The reporter jotted something down in a small notepad before walking away, shaking his head. 

When her mother was ready to deliver the last baby, Màiri had gone with her down to her aunt’s house. Her aunt was feigning flu, bedridden upstairs and they had to use the downstairs room, the fire crackling a soothing song. The labour itself was over quicker than Màiri expected. Then Màiri heard the tut of the midwife’s tongue and saw for herself the glimmer of the baby’s scales. 

The midwife placed the baby on her mother’s chest with a sigh, thick with disapproval. Màiri had gone over to her mother and put an arm under her head and wrapped the other around her and the baby as she cried into her shoulder. Her mother’s tears were silent and she placed her forehead against Màiri’s.

“Off, off.” The midwife interrupted their embrace of grief, placing the baby in Màiri’s arms as she started pressing on her mother’s stomach. “The placenta.”

More waiting, pressing, and shoving and pushing, moans from her mother, but the placenta still would not come.

“Màiri, my pearl.” Her mother held out her hand and beckoned her closer. She stroked her face and then the baby’s. “You have to take her down to the sea now, or she won’t make it.”

“But I—”

“She needs you; you have to take her down to the sea.”

“Just put her in the sea and leave her there?” Màiri was shaking as she held her sister closer than before.

“Don’t worry, love, the others will come for her.”

Her mother kissed her hand. The midwife shooed her out.

Màiri sang a lullaby, broken with sobs, as she walked towards the shore. The head of her sister was resting in the crook of her left arm and the scaly, shimmering tail was in the other. She walked into the sea up to her hips, still singing, now looking straight into her sister’s face. The helplessness and innocence she saw was overwhelming. She held her sister closer still. Her eyes were closed and her little fists curled together under her chin. 

Màiri walked further into the sea until her sister was partially submerged but still, she could not let her go. The sky seemed thick with cloud but as the wind picked up it dispersed, revealing a perfect crescent moon. When Màiri looked back down at her sister, she saw glimmers of reflection in the sea around her, and then, she let go.

Cold was biting her bones through her drenched skirts and all through her blood, her arms crossed against her chest as though she was still holding something. She moved so slowly, the short distance felt impossible. She wondered how many times her aunt had done this for her grandmother, and she understood in a way that broke her.

She reached her aunt’s door as the midwife was leaving. 

“I’m fetching your father. It doesn’t look good.” And she was gone before Màiri could form a question.

At her mother’s side she stroked hair away from her face. The cold left as she took in the deathly paleness of it, the papery feel. Her mother stirred, lifting her head, lips murmuring one word over and over. 

“Eilidh?”

“They came for her, like you said.”

Her mother settled after that, laid back and reached for Màiri’s hand.

“Promise me something, Màiri.”

She tried to shush her, but her mother tugged her closer.

“Bury me at sea when I go.”

Màiri tried to pull away but the little strength her mother had left overcame her.

“I want to be with them. I belong there too,” she said. “Promise me.”

Màiri could only nod and kiss her mother’s hand. True to her word, she, her brothers, and her reluctant father, rowed out in the boat with the priest and the butcher. When they lifted the body over the side she held onto her mother’s hand until the weight pulled her down, away. And she looked for any sign of a glimmer.

The journalist came back one more time that afternoon. His knock on the door was gentle, his hat in his hands and a concerned look on his face when she opened the door. She let him in and put the kettle on the stove. When it boiled, she made three cups and took one up to her father and when she came back down, she sat opposite the journalist and told him about the day of the summer solstice, nearing a week ago.

“Most of the village was down on the beach for the coldest midsummer the island had known in generations. There was a bonfire and music. A few folks had guitars and there was one lass who could play the fiddle. 

“It must have been the music, the singing, or the laughter even, that attracted her.”

The journalist wrote a few notes then sipped his tea as he waited.

“I was sitting on one of the big rocks, the giant’s toes we call them, a little away from the crowd.

“I had that feeling of being watched. I looked down at the sea to my left and there she was, staring, fascinated. I didn’t scream or shout but some sort of sound escaped me. Before I knew it half a dozen people were clambering up the rocks to get a look of her, a sea-child in person. She sort of froze in shock. So did I.

“Then a few lads starting throwing loose rocks. A few grazed her but when she finally swam away, a big one caught her badly.”

Màiri stopped talking, sipped her tea, stared at the journalist’s unmoving pen.

“The rest you know. She washed up on the shore a mile further down the next day.”

They sat in silence as Màiri continued to sip while the journalist watched her, not straight on but looking out the side of his eyes from time to time as he faced the window.

“Your tea’ll be getting cold,” she said.

“Have you seen one before, Màiri?”

She smiled. He hadn’t been looking out of the window, but at the framed watercolour painting she had put up on the wall to the left of it. Her rendition of Eilidh. He’d seen the body at the burial that morning, the resemblance was clear. The same blue-green shimmer to the scales of the tale, the same paler scales up the torso and the same vibrancy in the hair framing the face.

That night she lit her father’s old lantern and walked up the hill towards the church. She collected a spade from the workman’s shed and walked round the back of the church, and down the slope. Crouched close to the ground she searched for the recently disturbed soil. When she found the slightly mounded patch, she began digging. She dug through the top layer and then she used her hands, they didn’t bury her deep at all. When she pulled the body out, it was bigger than she expected, but she had to remind herself, this was not Eilidh, newborn and tiny. 

She covered the hole in again and then she carried the body, with the head stiff on her left shoulder and the tail curling down to her right as she held the body firm. It wasn’t very far to the beach from the church, but it was the hilliest part of the island and much of the ground was bogged with mud. She slipped two times but held on to the body. 

By the time she made it to the shore, her arms and back were aching. Just like all those years ago, she walked into the sea up to her waist. She let the body lay back into her left arm and then tried to wash off some of the mud. She saw a glimmer to her left and then more to her right. She let the body go. 

It wasn’t right burying a sea-child in the ground. Some people belonged to the sea and there was nothing she could do but deliver them.

The Edinburgh Chronicle, July 14th, 1938

Page 7: Mermaid child sighted, and sadly killed, near Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides.

Author's note

This story is set in the Outer Hebrides, where one of my great-grandfathers was born. It was partly inspired by reported accounts of sightings of mermaids on the island of Benbecula in the late 19th Century, although this story is set slightly later. As I started drafting the story, it became about belonging and grief.

Safiya Cherfi

Safiya Cherfi is a web developer based in Scotland. She loves exploring the speculative and the historical through her writing. She has short stories published in Gutter, The Selkie, The Fantastic Other and more. In stolen, precious moments, she works on a collection of short stories.