The Stranding

The sea was at low tide and I could see the jut of rocks a quarter mile out, sticking up from the surface. It was these that I decided would make a good point to swim towards as I entered the chilled Pacific waves.

Invigorated, I climbed from the water and found that my perch was much larger than I could have seen from my vantage point on the sand. Amid the clefts and jags of this perch sat a woman, or what I believed to be a woman.

She turned to look at me and I immediately knew this was no woman in the literal sense of human. No, she was a mermaid, bare breasted, scaled and finned from the hips down.

I gasped in shear fright as she smiled a shark-toothed grin towards me.

“Poor darling,” she said in voice that sounded quite beautiful and very calming, “The tide comes in and you’ll soon drown or you may try to swim back and I’ll drown you. Either way, you become my day’s meal.”

Slightly to the south of me, I saw a small boat. I waved my arms and screamed with great panic for help.

As I did this, the thing heaved its body towards me with tremendous speed, knocking me down. It held in it’s hand a bone knife that it stabbed into my left shoulder twice and with quick succession.

Waking as the two fishermen lifted me into their boat, I struggled with them, thinking they were my eldritch attacker. Once they hauled me aboard, they quickly motored for land.

One of them told me how they had seen the seal lion attacking me. They’d seen how it had knocked me down and how I acquired the deep puncture wounds to my upper torso and how fortunate I was that they happened along.

I objected strenuously to this recreated version, before fading into unconsciousness once again.

Once ashore they said I was suffering from a fever brought on blood loss and fright attack. And they attributed my loose-tongued hallucination to these, meanwhile confirming it had been a large seal lion that had battered my stricken body.

But I know better, as later that same day, a woman and her dog were ‘swept from the nearby jetty by a rogue wave,’ while the surrounding ocean remained calm.