Sweet Romance18 min read
A Witch on the Shore (I Caught a Merman)
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I woke with sand in my mouth and the heavy taste of salt. My whole body ached, and the sky above me was a wide, bright blue I had not seen in months. I sat up slow, tasted sea and panic, and tried to remember how I had come to lie on a lone strip of sand.
"Where am I?" I said to no one. The words were a thin sound.
A wind moved across the shore and brought only the hollow music of waves. My hands found something cold and smooth—something like a tail—and I flinched. The next moment a bright light struck my eyes and I closed them against it.
I opened them again. The island was small, not more than a few acres, rimmed by jagged rock and bronze sand. No shells, no footprints but mine. I breathed and felt how small I was.
"I could die here," I told the empty sky. "That would at least be quick."
A ripple answered me. The sea performed a private laugh.
"Don't shout," a voice said from the water, low and rough as pebbles. "A lot hears you."
I froze. The voice came like a memory and a question at once.
"Who—" I tried, and then my throat cracked on the word. "Who are you?"
A green eye broke the water a little way off and watched me. The shape that rose had a dark tail and skin like pearl when the light touched it. He was taller than I had expected and narrower at the face, like a blade carved in ocean stone.
"I am Jorge," he said, and his voice fit his face: held and steady. "Which tribe are you from, little one?"
"I... I don't—" I swallowed. My mind was a fog. "I'm Marcella. I'm... from the shore of another world."
He blinked at that and the water around him turned a little restless, as if it wanted to leave him. "A human?"
"Yes." I remembered the last sound: a long finned mouth, a crash of teeth. "A shark. I was inside its mouth."
He made a small, soft sound that could have been pity or wonder. "You are foolish to shout at open sea."
"I thought so," I said. "So did the shark."
He came closer. The sea at his shoulders hummed and a faint scent of tide and green kept rising like a ribbon. He smelled like the place I had been thrown from and the place I did not belong to: wild water, salt, something clean and old.
"You will die if you stay alone," he said. "Let me take you to the tide caves. The storm will come."
"Why help me?" I asked. The honesty in the question surprised me. I wanted to say more—thank you—but my throat and my mouth were full of sand.
"Because you shouted," he said dryly. "And because careless mouths bring danger."
He moved like a sleeping fish waking. He dove, and his tail left silver furrows on the sea. He returned with a shell as large as my head. He pushed it onshore and it opened like a small house. He helped me into it. It smelled of wet pearl. For the first time since the shark, a small warmth reached my chest.
"Do you know where I am?" I whispered.
"The Deep Hollow," he said. "We call it the Tidehold. We live under cliffs. I will bring you home."
He was silent when he said it, but the word home landed like a stone. I held onto the shell and thought of my city apartment, my workbench, the smell of ink and wood finish. Those things felt very far away.
As he turned to leave, I saw that his hand had a wound at the wrist. Salt slicked the cut.
"You are injured," I blurted.
He gave me a look like a man catching his own breath. "A feathered beast came," he said. "Do not worry. I am fine."
"I can—" I started. My fingers moved by habit, while my head filled with an odd memory of needlework and threads. Before I left the real world I had mended jackets, stitched pockets. In my other life I could fix things that bled.
"Do you know how to stitch?" he asked.
"Like a seam," I said. "I can try."
He hesitated, then nodded. "Come with me."
We moved through surf and dark, and I clung to the shell. I had never been farther from the city than a weekend drive. Here, every instant felt raw.
A group of small eyes watched us from the green fold of a rock. The tide folk—shapes carved like sailors of water—with scaled shoulders and quiet breath. They spoke in notes that I did not know how to hold in my ear, but Jorge listened like someone listening to a hymn.
"Why did you bring a human to the Tidehold?" a voice said. A husky tone like pebbles dragged. A broad man with violet eyes and a waist like a tree trunk uncoiled from behind a rock.
"She called out from the sand," Jorge said. "She was alone."
"And a human?" the violet-eyed one asked. His name was Asher; I learned it later, but his presence now pressed like heat. "We do not take outsiders."
"You stumble in and think of policy?" Jorge's eyes were level. "She may be a witch."
"A witch?" Asher snorted, purple eyes bright. He had a snake's patterned tail when he turned. I had to hold myself still.
"Witch?" I echoed. I had never wanted that word and yet it felt like a cloak. "I am not a witch. My name is Marcella and I am—"
"You are a human," Asher said. "Humans bring sickness and new things." He smiled and showed white teeth. "We choose our trouble."
Jorge stepped forward, keeping his eyes on Asher. "Bring her to the cave. She called the sea. That is notable."
Asher grunted and pushed a neat stone to open a path. We went in.
The cave smelled of old moss and small light; it had a door of shell that shut like a jaw and kept out wind. Inside the tide folk pressed their faces with polite caution, and I felt a dozen pairs of eyes measure me like a tool.
"You were inside the shark," a small one with freckles said. She touched my arm with a damp finger. Her name was not said, but her eyes were warm. "You are alive."
"Yes," I said, and the words meant more than I expected. "I am alive."
"Why were you out on the sea?" Jorge asked. The simple question sounded like a court.
"I... I was on a small boat," I answered. My voice was thin. "My friend and I—there was a shark. I don't... I don't remember much."
"Humans do not belong here," someone whispered. It felt like a knife.
"She called the tide," Jorge replied again. "Callings are rare."
The elders gathered and spoke with low notes. The word witch popped again. I heard it on the tip of each shell-sounding voice. A witch might be useful; a witch might be dangerous.
"If she is a witch, she can heal," an elder said. "We have no healer."
"No healer?" I asked. "You have nothing to fix—"
"Our folk bleed," Jorge said. "We have salt and song, but we have no cure for some wounds. We lose mothers in births. We lose children to strange fevers. A witch would be... a boon."
My chest gave a strange little hop. Witch or not, I could not let them think I was more than I was. I had never cast a spell. But I had hands that could stitch and a head that could remember what worked.
"What would you ask of me?" I asked, quickly.
"To stay," Jorge said. "And to try."
I swallowed. "To try? I could be a liar, but I might survive. If you let me stay, I will do what I can to help."
The elders looked like stone. Then they nodded.
"She can stay," the chief said. "Let us test her."
Their tests were small—wash the pearl dust, tie the tide-rope, stitch a fin. My fingers moved and the folk leaned closer. When I wrapped a torn cloth around a child's leg and tightened it with a knot that did not slip, they made a low sound that might have been respect.
"She is human and she has skill," Jorge murmured near my shoulder. "Keep that in your pocket."
So I stayed. I stayed because the island could have kept me in its mouth and torn me small, and because the life I had known felt so thin it might disappear into a puddle. I stayed because the man with the green eyes carried my life like a fragile shell and because I could not tell him no.
"You're staying?" Asher said that night when the tide hummed like a drum in the cave. His eyes glinted like purple flame. My face had gone a faint, burning red. I had expected to be hidden away. The truth was I wanted to be near Jorge.
"Yes," I told him. "I am a maker. I can mend what breaks."
"And you will not steal our skins?" Asher asked. He spat out the doubt like a question.
"I have nothing to steal," I said. "Only hands and a head."
The tide folk accepted that. I learned their ways by listening. I learned to wash with cold salt and to carry shells without breaking them. I learned the songs they hummed to the tides and the way their tails moved when they were angry.
Jorge taught me how the sea named things.
"This tide is old," he said once, pointing to the place where the water met the sand. "It keeps memory."
"Like a house keeps dust," I said. The salt lifted from his shoulders.
"When you stitch," he said, "you make a line the body can follow. You give the wound a plan."
I liked that. People needed plans.
The first night he left me alone with a box of shells and a small wound he had stitched by himself. When I went to touch it he pulled back as if the skin would jump.
"Don't," he said, with a tiredness I had never seen on him before. "It will heal."
"I worry," I said. "A little care helps."
"You worry like a tide," he said, almost gentle. "It is good."
Days passed and my hands became busy. I wrapped fish-bite scars into neat bands. I taught a small boy to make a knot. I fished for water in a way I had never known to do: from rain pearls that collected in shells. I tasted my first true hunger and then my first hot meat soup. I learned the joke that the tide told itself and laughed when it found the right line.
Jorge watched me with that sharp, cool look that someone has when the world has lied to them too often to be kind by accident. Sometimes he would lunge out into the water, returning with gifts: a cluster of dark shells that made sparks when struck, a limpet with a pearl like a small sun. He was generous in things that belonged to the sea.
Asher watched with a different heat. He joked and he bit and he moved like a snake, always half-hidden. He wanted me as company, he said; he wanted me because I did not flinch at him when he shifted. He wanted me because he had a hunger, and sometimes a hunger could be a gift.
"I can show you something," Asher said one afternoon, voice soft as the underbark of a tree. "If you will help me with some work."
"What is the work?" I asked.
"You can help me clean a hide," he said. "My hands are better for the large cuts, but you can pull the threads."
I disliked his tone but not the idea of a challenge. "Fine," I said. "But Asher, if you are rude to me, I will use my knife."
"Sharp as your mouth," he grinned.
The work took the whole day. The hide was thick, the animal's body still warm. Asher's skill with a blade surprised me: precise, quick, brutal. His laughter was a warm, dangerous thing. When we finished, he looked at me and said, soft as a coin, "You do not avoid me."
"Why avoid you?" I asked.
"Because I am snake," he said. "Because I can make a trouble. Because men fear a wrong look."
"I am not afraid," I said. "I am afraid of falling."
He moved closer. "Fall on me," he said, like a dare.
I stepped back. "I will fall on Jorge," I said, almost before I thought. The words surprised me by how true they felt. Jorge's name made the island spin in the right way.
Asher laughed, not cruelly. "Then we must both be careful. People who fall often wake with bruises."
Evenings were full of small things: a fire I learned from Jorge with black shells that sparked like flint; the first boiling of broth that tasted like home because I had added a squeeze of a sweet red fruit Jorge found; stitches that made wounds quiet. As the days moved, the folk called me she-witch with fewer teeth. They smiled when I knotted a small child's torn fin.
"Why is your body not marked like ours?" an old tide elder asked me once. "You do not change shape."
"I am human," I answered. "I do not change."
"Some were born between," the elder said. "They are odd. They are taken or loved or left. It depends."
"It will depend on me," I said. "I will not be left."
In truth, I told myself small lies. I told myself that I did not want what I wanted. I told myself that the fear of being a burden was better than the risk of wanting a man who could not be like me. But then Jorge leaned over and pressed a bit of seaweed into my hand. "Keep it," he said. "You will have use."
I kept it.
The storm season changed the light. The sea began to boil with things that sent shivers down my spine. One night thunder and salt and feather-beasts tore the sky open. We sheltered under a great clam shell, Jorge keeping the entrance from being closed while I steadied a child who cried. Asher came bounding with his snake-tail, tossing small scavenged shells to root out water.
"Stay inside," Jorge said. He looked at me with fire in his eyes. "You go no more."
"Why will I not go?" I asked. The wind took my words.
"Because the sea will take you," he said. There was not blame in it, only hunger. "The storm brings beasts that break the shore. We hide."
"I will stay," I said.
The next morning we found carcasses and sentinels. A great tentacled thing had risen and left teeth in the coral. Much of the island smelled of iron. Jorge swam out at dawn as if to test the sea; he returned with a wound that smeared his white skin like dusk.
"Your wound—" I gasped. "This one cannot be left."
"I will be fine," he said. His voice was a thread trying not to snap. "It is only a bite."
"You are saying that like a man at the beginning of a story," I said. "Let me help."
He tried to refuse. "I do not want you near—"
"You do not get to decide that," I told him. "I know a little. Give me your hand."
He let me. He let me hold the cut and bathe it in rain pearls and strip off a curl of shell for a needle when he would not let my stomach churn. I had found a sharp spine from a shell and, with a line I pulled from my torn skirt, I did something I had never tried on living flesh: I sewed him with small careful stitches. He did not flinch much, but his hands were tight in the sand.
"Stop," he said once, very quietly. "You do not need to do this for me."
"I do," I said. "Because I can. Because you are not a tool."
He stared at me like someone learning how to speak a new alphabet.
Asher watched. He watched with a hunger that looked like a purr. When the stitches were done and the wound bound, the white band on Jorge's side made him look, if anything, even more human.
"Why did you not tell me you could stitch?" Jorge asked, and there was a hint of a joke in him now.
"I did not know until now," I said. "I am learning."
He smiled like an ocean taking a small boat. "Stay then. If you fix things, then you belong."
It was nearly a vow and yet not.
Days turned to a small, steady pattern. I taught myself to find water pearls and to prepare wild root and to make a broth that warmed even the tide folk's thin bellies. The folk gave me a name that fit like a band: Maker. They said I mended what needed mending.
Jorge and I moved in that quiet orbit. He would bring shells; I would make him coffee-like hot sea-brew that he seemed to like. We touched hands when we handed each other tools. We stood close when the wind was sharp. He would give me safe glances that were longer than simple thanks.
"I think the tide likes you," Asher said once, watching us from the cave mouth. "Or perhaps the tide is bored and wanted company."
"Which is lovely," I said.
"Then you will not answer me when I ask you to be my pair?" Asher asked with a flash of something like hurt.
"I do not think—" I said.
"Say his name," he said bluntly, as if the clearest way to wound a man was to speak the truth.
"Jorge," I said, and the sound felt like a small bell. Asher snorted in a way that could mean anything.
I did not choose Asher. I did not know how to choose. I only knew that I wanted a man who had saved me from the sea and who had allowed me to mend him. I wanted to be where he could see the world and so I stopped pretending that I did not.
A week later we had to leave the island. Food was growing low and the tide folk needed to move to the summer shoal. A wooden boat would make the trip easier for me. I had heard of trees elsewhere, big trees that would make a float for a little craft. I wanted to build it. Jorge told me that we would go, and Asher would come to help.
The jungle of the larger island smelled of heat and green and the heavy fruit that made my mouth water. We rode on Asher's back. Riding him was like sitting on a live, warm mountain. I held onto Jorge and his wet shoulder.
"Look at that fruit," Asher said, and his tongue flicked. He had an eye for food.
I found things to be small ways of joy. A red fruit that tasted like milk and roses. Roots that were sweet. A tuber I recognized: a starchy root that would keep and be warm on cold nights. I gathered and I stolen little things because I could not bear the thought of hunger again.
"Do not take too much," Jorge said, which meant he cared and he did not want to be greedy. "Leave for the animals."
"I will be careful," I said.
Asher flirted by the way he moved, by the way he showed me how to twist a vine to lift a root. When I pulled him aside to ask for help splitting a tuber and his hands were close, I saw a softness in him I had not expected. He had a wild hunger, yes, but he had tenderness; he could be quick to bite and quick to hold.
That night we roasted meat over the black-shell fire and the island smelled of hot fruit and bone. I poured out a small bowl of stew and handed it to Jorge.
"Eat," I said. "You will need it."
He looked at the bowl like it was meant for a king, as if some part of him had been waiting for that small kindness.
"I am not used to such heat," Asher said, and his face warned of something. He burned his hand with hot broth and I yelled and performed a clumsy rescue: the Heimlich-like shove I had seen on a video once, which I did without thinking and which worked. Asher lurched and coughed and came back to us blinking and sheepish and fond.
"You saved me," he said to me, breathless, and I felt small and then proud.
"I don't like how you look at Jorge," Asher said to the cave later, and he was not smiling. "You smile at him like you would a sea-sun."
"I smile because he saved me," I said. "That is all."
"Will you go with him to the Tidehold?" Asher asked.
"I will," I said.
"Then I will hunt for you," he promised, and his promise was not the kind you make when you are ordinary. It was hungry and true.
Jorge and Asher argued like two old beasts one morning: about routes and food and who would carry what. In the argument, Asher's tail flicked and he showed his teeth. Then, like a bad surprise, two long serpents rose from the grass and coiled like a brawl. A monster—black and huge—clashed with Asher. The beasts crashed, hissing and tearing, and I felt the world close like a fist.
"Back!" Jorge shouted, so quick his voice cut the air. He moved like a spear through the water when he attacked the tentacled things that the sea sent. Asher changed form and his tail became a blade. We fought with the island; we killed and we lived and the blood smell made my heart beat fast.
When it was over, Asher stood over the black snake like a king at victory. He handed me a dark, queer organ—snake bile, like the elders had said—"Take it," he said. "It will help. It will keep you safe."
I recoiled. "I cannot eat that."
"You can take it for others," Asher insisted. "It is good for the weak."
I took it like I took many bad things in the world: because the world did not allow me to be pure and because I wanted to be useful. I hid the thing in a small shell and I promised to be brave.
We left the island that night. The tide was a silver road. Jorge's scars had already closed from my stitches, the bands on his side a pale thread. In the boat I sewed and mended and made a roof of leaves to keep out the spray. At night Jorge said my name in a way that felt like permission.
"Marcella," he said. "Do not fear the tide."
"I will not," I answered. "Not if you are there."
He put a warm hand on mine and the world knit in a new way. We were a match of two strange things: a human who had no place, and a tide folk who bore an old black mark—stories said he was a cursed child, born with a black tail and a bad moon. But his hands were steady and his eyes ran with ocean.
"If you stay with us, with me," Jorge said softly, "I will give you a gift."
I looked at him. "What gift?"
"The long shell," he said. "It is a small thing. It keeps sound. When you are afraid, you hold it and you remember the sound of the sea staying still."
I took it later, a gift real enough to hold. Its pearl glowed faint like a breathing thing. The tide folk accepted me because I stitched and because Jorge defended me like a shield.
We sailed beneath sky that was still wide and bright. I learned to read the small edges of the world: when the wind smelled like rain, when the shoals turned dark, when the birds would take fright. The days were heavy with work. I became their maker and they taught me to be a water-lore. I taught them to make slow soup and to mend torn sails.
Once we reached the big pools of the Tidehold, many folk gathered. They watched the seam of my hands on Jorge's side with questions and with a small, growing respect. I felt like a patch sewn into a great cloak: odd and necessary.
One night, in the open square, someone asked about the black shell fireworks I used to make fire. Jorge, who had collected them, smiled like a child and lifted his hand to show them. They flashed like cold stars and someone clapped.
"You hear them?" Jorge whispered. "The shells are old. They come from the deep heat. Keep them for when you need light."
I kept them.
I will not say everything survived forever. There were nights the sea took a boat and did not return it. There were times when men feared me for no reason. But when the worst of the sea came, I had learned how to bind and to boil and to hold.
Asher and I grew a strange friendship. He would tease, and I would prick him with a needle when he deserved it. Jorge would step between us sometimes, neither angry nor jealous, simply steady.
"I will give you both a place," Jorge said once as the moon dropped low. "You will learn. You will be mine."
"I am not something to be claimed," I said, laughing like someone tired and full. "I am not a fin nor a tail. I am a maker."
"But you are my maker," he replied. He meant it in a way that left me breathless.
On the day we were to leave for the shorland of my choice, a trading group from a far shore came near. They had song and flags and a man whose eyes were low and sharp. He called himself a trader and he asked about our goods, then, sly as a tide, he sought to buy me.
"She would be worth many shells," the trader said, grinning. "A human who can stitch will fetch a price. She is a witch, I bet. Put her on a boat."
The square grew cold as a shell. Men who had been kind to me looked away. Some clutched their fishhooks and thought of the fresh coin.
"I will not be sold," I said. My voice did not tremble but my hands did. "I am not a thing."
"You can make money," the trader insisted. "She will work for many flags."
Jorge's jaw tightened. Asher's tail flicked like a whip. The crowd that had been curious grew a slow murmur. Traders liked to whisper fast and mean.
"No," Jorge said at last, and it was like a tide. He stepped forward. "She stays."
"But the law—" the trader began.
"The law is the mouth of those who have no shame," Jorge said. He did not raise his voice and yet every ear bent. "You leave now, or you take the shame of our village with you."
The trader laughed and shouted cheap words. He thought he could buy anything. People drifted to the edges. The trader looked ready to call his guards.
"Do not do this," I said. My voice was thin but clear. "He is my friend."
The man shrugged and tossed a coin like a stone into the sand. "Friends do not keep witches, girl."
Asher moved then. He did not shout; he did not rage. He simply took off his cloak of skin and made a show of tearing it into strips with such speed and precise violence that the traders' faces went pale. The band of men who had offered him coin saw the snake-in-man and turned their backs, swallowing pride.
"You cannot buy a life," Asher said. He spoke to the trader and all those who had been thinking of a sale. "You are not gods of the sea."
A ripple of laughter broke. The trader's mouth opened and closed and he walked away with as much dignity as a man whose hat had been dipped in poor water. The crowd watched him go, some clapped. The trader's guards were too few and too shocked. I stood there and watched the man's face turn from smirk to gasping to denial. He tried to hold his ground, and then he fled, leaving coins and banners in the wind.
We laughed and patted each other on the back. Asher winked at me in a way that made my knees weak. Jorge's eyes were steady. The village felt more like home that day than it had any day before.
Time wove past. I grew stronger. I mended not just cuts but bruises in the tide folk's lives. I learned their names in a way that made them laugh. I discovered a way to put a soft white stitch into a scar that the tide would not reject. People came from other coves; they came because they heard that a human who could stitch and sing might be clever.
"Are you staying?" friends would ask me.
"I am," I said. "I have found a new life."
One evening, with the shell gift warm on my lap, Jorge and I walked on the shore. The moon pulled the sea like a string, and our shadows lay long like lines.
"I thought you might leave," Jorge said at last, voice smaller than usual. "Sometimes I thought it best if you went with the boats."
I stopped and looked at him. "Why?"
"Because I am not safe," he said, and at last he showed the thing that lay under every kindness: the truth. "Sometimes I become dangerous. The old folk say it is a curse. I thought to spare you."
"You would save me by pushing me away?" I asked, almost laughing. "I am not that fragile. I will be by your side."
He took my hand then and it felt right like a seam made fully. "Then stay," he said. "If you will."
"I will," I said.
That is the promise I made: not grand and not sworn by gods, but a simple one that fit our lives like a small shell fits a pocket.
We lived there for a long while, and I learned the stern rules of being a maker and a human among tide folk. I mended boats, I taught knot work to the children, and I cooked soups that made their tails wag. Jorge fished and hunted and defended us when the sea sent its worst. Asher stole fruit and returned it, sharing with a grin. I learned how to be brave in small ways: to stitch without flinching, to boil broth long past patience, to say the right thing when a mother shrieked.
Once, when the market came and men with sharp eyes opened their lips about selling, I stepped forward. I told the story of the trader who had tried to buy me. I showed them my hands and my stitches and the quiet that comes when a person stops being an object. The crowd surged with the kind of noise that is not cruel but honest. The trader's shame ran ahead of him and he left, and later I saw the same clip of the trader's face in someone else's tale and I knew my life and not his coins had weight.
As the seasons turned, I saved a lot of small things: a child who swallowed a fish bone, a man who had given too much of his skin to the nets. I sewed and I sang, and the tide folk learned to call me Marcella the Maker, and sometimes Marcella the Witch with a wink and a laugh.
When the great storm came again months later and the ocean rose like a beast with a shining mouth, I stood with Jorge and Asher and the rest. We were a small village under the teeth of the wild. The sea beat and tested until it tired. We banded together and when the worst came, I stitched and cleaned and boiled and stayed at Jorge's side.
After the storm, at the big shell in the square, Asher stood and said something that made the whole place laugh. He took the leftover coins of the trader and threw them into the surf as if to say they were meaningless. Jorge wrapped his bands around his waist and looked at me with that steady look.
"You saved him more times than he would tell," he said. "You have become ours."
I smiled. "So have you been mine."
He leaned down then and kissed me. It was a small thing and the world did not crack, but something in me calmed like a tide going out. Around us, the sea sang, shells ringing like small bells.
That night, when the moon warmed the shell in my pocket and Asher snored like a happy beast, I put my hand to Jorge's chest and listened to the slow drumbeat of him being alive.
"I am glad I was swallowed and spit out," I told him, soft and a little silly.
"So am I," Jorge said. He sounded sincere and a little lost for words.
I smiled wide, crooked and human. "Then keep me. Stitch the seam and don't let it fray. But do not tie me down."
"I would not have it other way," he said.
We learned to live together, odd as a tune. I mended what needed mending. He taught me the names of the deep. Asher stayed near and kept his tail from slicing the sails. The tide folk prospered a little more and the rest of the sea left us with fewer bites. I kept the pearl Jorge gave me in my pocket and when I felt a worry like a cold hand at my back, I held it like a charm until the worry passed.
Years from that first day, when I think of the island and the man who looked like a blade of the sea, I remember the small shell with its single pearl and the sound it makes when I press it to my ear: a low tide like a heartbeat. I press it and hear the sea, and I know the place where I belong.
The End
— Thank you for reading —