A few months ago I read a wonderful novel, The Old Mermaid, which José Luis Sampedro published in 1990. I enjoyed that book, and it suggested this one to me.
However, this book is not a copy or a similar one, but rather it was suggested to me by that reading: Sampedro's mermaid adapts herself to living on land, in a bygone time, that of the Romans, while my mermaid is a 21st century man who gets accustomed to living in the sea, at the expense of the sea, and discovers —and makes us discover— that another world is possible, because it exists and is inside this one.
Serena's Male Mermaid is a fantastic story, the 78th one I have been involved in, but it is not science fiction, but fantasy fiction. My mermaids exist because they have always existed, just as chimpanzees have always been in the world without the authors who have spoken to us about them, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs, for example, with his Tarzan of the Apes, having to give us faith in their origin or continuity in the animal world: they exist and that's it. The reader may think that mermaids do not exist..., well: in this book they not only exist, but they will make us enjoy their world, their ideas and their adventures throughout the pages of this story. And if at the end of the reading you still think that mermaids do exist, or don't, that is your business, since what I have intended by describing this world is that you enjoy a moment escaping from your problems and worries, and get immersed —never better said— in this magical world of the sea.
The characters and events are entirely fictitious, and have nothing to do with people or situations in the real world. If they remind you of them in any particular way, bear in mind that this is pure coincidence beyond the will and imagination of the person writing this.
They say that mermaids were originally birds with the head of women, but luckily the truth has prevailed over time and for the common people we have recovered the fish tail that we never stopped having and in which our own self and our wisdom reside.
Mermaids have been on the planet Teluris for millions of years. Humans know Teluris as Earth because they have little imagination and believe that what is important is what they step on, even though it is the smallest part of the whole. From the crest of our waves we have seen the dinosaurs come and go and many other species, including humans, whom we will soon say goodbye, given our experience observing the cycles of the different species that have come and gone throughout our long history, which we estimate at more than a billion years, since the planet cooled enough for Essa, the first mermaid, to appear on the face of this rock with water and air.
Essa came from consecutive species of marine animals, and lived alone until she learned to copy herself by parthenogenesis. Something went wrong, and her thirteen children did not turn out well. Some died shortly after birth, others lasted decades, and only three females and two males managed to live a century. Little by little they evolved, through a hundred generations, and we have reached extreme longevity, to such an extent that I do not know of any other mermaid —not even myself— who died or shows signs of old age, as the oldest of us report.
You will be surprised that I speak in the feminine, and do not refer to male mermaids. They do exist among us, but you will discover throughout this story why the male sex has so little relevance among us, mermaids. And why they do not last long.
I do not want to tire you with generalities, so I will tell you my story. It will be your responsibility to believe whether this is true or not. We mermaids will not cease to exist, or will we begin to do so, because you doubt or stop doubting on what I am telling you below.
I was born on an island in the Mediterranean Sea, near the African continent. Some of us are born in the sea, but mermaids prefer to give birth on land, so that the baby can use her lungs, since the gills open in our sides and are used automatically when we run out of air. On the contrary, when we give birth in the water, the gills open automatically, which makes it much more difficult for the baby to open her lungs to the surrounding air when it comes out onto land, and it can drown if her mother does not intervene quickly. When a mermaid comes onto land, she crawls, using her hands to help her, until her tail dries and our abdomen forms, with very white legs, because they have not been exposed to the sun. Normally we exhibit the female sex, which is natural for us, but if we make a mental effort before leaving the water until our legs have dried, we can become male at will. It is not something that is done frequently, except for reproductive purposes, since we are viviparous and therefore need the help of the male.
My father, Nefrenio, maintained his sex for 20 years, until I was fully developed, because he said I needed a male reference. Then he became Nefrenia and was my mother's best friend. My sister's father, however, was Sheelo, who a few days after giving birth would return to being Sheela because she said she couldn't stand it. Luckily for Siele, my father and I adopted her and taught her everything he knows, before becoming feminized again, when she was ten and I was twenty years old.
One or two decades of age is still early childhood, compared to what mermaids have to learn to survive and what we can do, given that our longevity is very long and is measured in centuries.
My mother, Irenia, had never had a baby, and it cost her a lot more than she thought to bring me into the world. A mermaid can have offspring once every ten years, approximately, so when my sister Siele was born, I had already learned many tricks to defend myself in our habitat, the liquid layer that covers our world.
Hehe, man thinks he is the king of the universe, but he doesn't usually live to be a hundred years old, and instead we die only by accident or by mermaid murder, because not only are we long-lived by definition, but we love life. Man is pigeonholed into countries of several tens of thousands of square kilometers, perhaps a million, but we have five billion square kilometers (or almost two hundred and thirteen billion cubic kilometers) for a much smaller population of just a few hundred of us. Sometimes a mermaid dies, but it is very rare. We have no predators, and we do not prey. Some of us eat only sea plants, but others of us eat different species of sea animals, although not so much that we kill any species. My favorite delicacy is sharks, because they have no bones, and their hardest parts are the teeth in their mouths, but I spit those out. Sharks eat everything they get their teeth on, they are voracious, and they go crazy for blood. That's why I go after them.
As I said, my mother gave birth to me on an island in the Mediterranean, we call it Iscia, but I think humans call it Cyprus. When there were no humans there it was a peaceful place, with magnificent sunsets. But for a few thousand years those people have been fighting each other, and sometimes they have surprised some of my kind and attacked them, not knowing that sharks are afraid of us. My friend Tiara was once attacked by two humans, and she defended herself by biting them and killed them. She then told me that they didn't taste very good, although they were very nutritious. She had to swim a lot to synthesize all the food that those two unfortunate guys gave her. She had to fast for about a month, and she suffered from aerophagia that lasted for weeks. The bubbles she made made us know where Tiara was...
My mother breastfed me until I was ten, when Siele was born. From then on, my mentor was Nefrenio, my father. He taught me to hunt, and to respect the fish populations that were not very numerous. He also taught me to break the nets of the fishermen who caught everything they could, without caring about making entire colonies disappear, whether they were minority species or not. We broke their nets, and even wrecked their boats, attracting them to the rocks with our songs, because when in contact with the air our voice is melodious and we sing duets and trios very well. They see us when we stick our bodies out of the water, and they are dazzled by our hair and our breasts, believing that we belong to their species, and they come towards us. They run their boats aground and sink them in their greed for lust, and if they do not jump ashore in time, the sharks —who have also heard our songs and know them as the prelude to a feast— show up and carnage. We let them do, because it takes them three days to synthesize the flesh of the land dwellers and then the sharks taste better when we eat them.
Nefrenio also taught me to distinguish underwater currents and to take advantage of them to navigate more quickly and with less effort, as well as to interpret well the messages they bring us through color, smell, taste, flavor and temperature.
The light of the Sun —from red to violet— does not penetrate the sea very deeply. When we feel like it, we go up to the surface and lie on our backs, receiving the rays of our star for hours. Sometimes a dolphin comes up and plays with us, and we chat a lot with them. Other times we fall asleep looking up or down, which gives us a darker skin tone. I like it when the waves lift me up, and I look out from the crest at the surrounding sea. Sometimes I ride the wave continuously, so that I am always on the crest, and it seems to me that I am on top of a still mountain in the sea, although in reality I am moving with the wave towards the open sea or towards the beach, and when I reach it I lie down on the sand with my arms extended. More than once I have woken up with my tail dry, that is, my legs. When this has happened to me and I see a human nearby I dive into the water so as not to end up hurting them. They are stunned, looking at me, and after I throw myself into the water, they stay looking to see me appear, what never happens.
It is in those moments when we are lying on the beach that a male siren can appear and fertilize us. But the life of a mermaid becomes much more complicated when that happens, because for the next 80 years we have to take care of our offspring to teach her to live as a good mermaid.