Mermaid Flash Fiction

Nika Goltz, The Little Mermaid — Nika Goltz, *The Little Mermaid*

We had some fabulous entried in the Mermaid Flash Fiction competition, conducted by Dr Daisy Butcher, with the slideshow of inspiring images and playlist of mermaid-themed music (both below) that were shown and played during the competition.

The competition was judged anonymously by our wonderful plenary speaker Betsy Cornwell, author of the selkie novel, Tides, her memoir Ring of Salt (also drawing on selkie motifs), and the fairy tale reworkings of Mechanica and others.

The prize is one of OGOM’s edited collections and the winner was OGOM’s Ivan Phillips; Betsy said, ‘This is a fabulous collection of flash fiction, and it was genuinely hard for me to pick a winner! However, I have to go with number 14, “Honeymoon”, which is haunting and startling.’ But Ivan has all our books anyway! So we asked Betsy to pick a runner up and she chose the entry ‘Underwater Fantasy’ by Monica Germanà, which is equally evocative and which Betsy already had as a very close second.

Here we give the two winning entries; the rest follow after. Thank you all who submitted; you all wrote uniquely creative explorations of the mermaid and selkie myths and they are a fitting coda to what was an inspiring three days.

The Mermaid Flash Fiction competition entries

14 Ivan Phillips

Honeymoon
They were in love, surely, and the small quiet room, the sounds of the sea – this was as close as they were ever going to be. Yet he knew she was crying, his skin felt like a stranded fish, and in the window he could see only his own reflection.

5 Monica Germanà

Underwater Fantasy

Your tail oscillates between my legs. A shell tangled in your hair scratches my skin, which your silver tongue heals before a drop of blood clouds the water purple. Our lips part, parallel chains of airy pearls trailing upwards to the surface.

1 Miriam Al Jamil

Sea snared in brine, unable to compete with the male bound shore; the smell of a visceral flow, a female uncertainty, fluid and confined to the constant changes, a flux of the moon and its trails of foam, shifting shells, draw of the shingle in a rhythmic wail

2 Fredrik Blanc

Far inland it was, yet never forgotten by the sea. Curled up, nestled between white mountains peaks, its vast body spanned nations, and dreamt a world of glaciers and rivers, forever a part of the main. Sails above and scales below, the lake slumbered, and the Mermaid’s bronze skin turned to seaweed green.

3 Maria Cohut

There is another skin under my skin, another body hidden under the blubber. Sometimes I feel it working at my insides, trying to scratch its way out. I plunge into the icy waters then, to numb that itch. My first skin is already cracking. I fill the cracks with salt.

4 Katie Garner

There were once three mermaids called Identification, Alienation and Ego. Each held a mirror. ‘I am the fairest’, said Identification. ‘Your hair is shinier than mine’, said Alienation. ‘I am the product of desire’, said Ego. And then they dived, to attend their socialist reading group.

6 Jane Gill

Lurking out of sunlight’s reach, my cursed mouth gleamed with ivory shards. The girl fought weakly as I drowned her. She made no sound. Death came quickly. That was years ago. The girl is long forgotten. The fen is no more. I am gone.

7 Rebecca Greef

Four Seahorses of the Apocalypse
Conquest. Silver-crested waves crash upon the shore, seafoam claiming every rough-hewn stone, each grain of sand as their own. War. Vermillion streaks trail behind the defeated, the battlefield ebbs and flows. Famine. Obsidian fins skulk in the depths, eternally hungering for those above. Death. Pale wreckages sink to the trenches.

8 Lizanne Henderson

Seeking Selkie Bride
‘I always knew one day I would marry a selkie. Smooth skin, the biggest brown eyes, long days spent lounging on the beach, unlimited supply of fish suppers. Yes, my perfect soulmate. But where to meet one? Is there a selkie dating app? Maybe I’ll just go down to the pub instead . . .

9 Bill Hughes

‘You enchanted me, gold tresses, preening mirror and comb, sea song. Led me from the lines on my chart to the abyss.’

‘You alone are enchantment’s fount, not I. Your instruments and grid distort the world; you could have risen from the depths and woven a map of Paradise.’

10 Emily Ingle

Here, the sea mud has teeth. I spend Saturday mornings selling candyfloss and paper windmills, warning the tourists. But the sea will smile and offer a path through the sand dunes, when she decides that this morning she is hungry.

11 Alexa Keough

A marine biologist scribbles studiously in her notebook: diagrams of orca pods and coral reefs, kelp forests and rogue waves, tiger sharks and sand bars.

Beyond the rocks, in the deep dappled sunlight-soaked shoals, a silver-finned mermaid makes her own observations, flitting between waves for a glimpse of her own human specimen.

12 Scarlette-Electra LeBlanc

I surface. Land once more! It’s been months. My fingers permanently pruned, my eyes salt-stung forever. Legs fused. Perhaps it would be better to never surface again. The journey back to the depths was gentle. There, there, the currents said. There’s space for you here. There’s always space here.

13 Mimi Manyin

I’m not my mother’s daughter. I live on land. I’m my father’s daughter. I’ll sail the seven seas. I’m not like my mother. I have legs, not a tail. I’m like my father. I drink and dance till I drop. I’m not like my mother. I’m better. I’m human.

15 Amanda Potter

Jenny’s teachers said the strange, quiet girl had an imaginary friend problem. The other girls would laugh. Jenny had learned it was best not to talk. So no-one noticed when one day Jenny swam out to sea and was never heard from again. Except her real friend, the mermaid.

16 Madelaine Sacco

The sun is tempting. Too tempting. I peek—just enough to check the coast is clear. Then I haul myself onto the rock, skin meeting stone, and sigh as warmth seeps into skin. It lulls me. Sleep sings its siren’s call. Ah, but I wasn’t careful enough. The sun is too tempting, and I have tempted.

17 Silvia Storti

‘Look at this stuff, isn’t it . . .’. She paused. ‘Slimy?’ Her sisters stared at the items: some sort of bright orange netting, a receptacle some sea-snails had made a home in, a pile of rags. Yes, yes, they all agreed, the stuff was slimy and, if anything, dangerous. One by one, under the cover of night, they swam up to the surface and piled it back up on the giant island of the stuff that had floated over their homes and would continue to float. Slimeness neverending.

18 Maria Szafrańska-Chmielarz

The dropped parasol covers her hungry smile well. Perfectly still, she waits for him to come, the sea hiding the scales from the sight.

Themoment he hears, he will come, they always come, never able to resist the sweet promise of ‘my saviour’ uttered before she feeds.

19 Agelika Vellisariou

The sorrow. Gone! He’s gone! What am I to do? Damn these scales, damn this tail, damn my voiceless thoughts! My son! I warned him . . . curious boy . . . always messing around their nets! Now he’s caught! The headlines the next day wrote: Strange aquatic creature caught by fishermen of the cost of Panama turns out to be a hoax.

20 Kimberly Woodward

The Atlantis scholar researches ‘Questions of the humanities’: What is real and what is fiction? She wonders about humans as she looks at her own reflection on the oceans’ surface. ‘What a superfluous debate considering that I exist as both’.