SIREN’S SONG

KENNY MOONEY

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I.

It draws me down from the dunes, through the sucking sands along the shoreline which swallow my feet. Her call emanates from the depths of the undulating ocean; her grey-blue umbral skin. She stretches and yawns, sending waves crashing towards the coastline, pushing water through rock, creating a thunderous cacophony that rolls across the sky - her hymn for the hinterland.

I pick over cool sand in the half-light of silver moonbeams, drooling from her lipless mouth, tonguing gums and grinning teeth. Her breath on my skin sends pin pricks of static charge coursing through me; she licks me with her electric voice.

At the shoreline her wetness sloshes around my ankles and I feel her cold song fill me up. It courses through my heart, pumping hard in the cavern of my chest; through the rivers that run red with my rusty water. She reaches deep inside with delicate fingers that play over my nerves, a lingering icy touch leaching through my flesh.

I kneel in the sopping sand, her salty aroma rising to me as my hands dig, swallowed into her frigid curves. This is where she said she would be. Down in the sands, deep under the waves, being ground to particles and corroded by the ocean until nothing remained but dry-blood rust. And I will find her here. I will dig and scrape and burrow.

Just like I promised.

II.

My memories of her have been evaporating into mist. I awake in the night, dreaming of falling through the many mouths of her many faces, each one gasping for air beneath the glassy water, her eyes like dead stars collapsing and dragging me into the swell.

Dragging me down into her mouth. Down into the sand. Down into her gravity well.

I defend my memories by rebuilding her sand castles, her fortifications on the beach. But every day they are washed away as the cruel ebb and flow of the tides scrubs my mind, eroding those sand walls and picking away the watercolour pictures of her face, bleeding them into muddy greys that seep away to the cracks in the concrete streets.

But each day I come back, and each day they rise again, tall and proud.  Spreading them out along

the golden bow, I hope that some part of those defenses will still be standing in the morning.

And then today I heard her song; I felt it deep inside my gut. In the weak piss light of this winter morning, I came here to find her again. Just like she told me I would when she walked into the sea.

Just like she promised. 

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Kenny Mooney was born in Berlin, and grew up in Scotland, England and Cyprus. He now lives in Glasgow and is a writer and musician. His fiction has appeared or is upcoming in such places as > kill author, Spilling Ink Review, Metazen, Emprise Review and Fractured West. Say hello at www.dragline.co.uk.