The Salt Grows Heavy

Set in a dark fairy tale world that reimagines the story of the Little Mermaid, this novella follows an unnamed mermaid narrator, a deep-sea predator far more alien and dangerous than the nymphs of human illustration. As the story opens, she stands amid the ash-covered ruins of her husband's kingdom. Her newborn daughters, half-human and half-mermaid, have devoured nearly everyone in the realm, including the prince who married her. The mermaid is mute: Her husband cut out her tongue when he discovered her pregnancy, braised it, and fed it back to her on a soothsayer's advice. He fished her from the ocean, murdered her sisters, and pried the teeth from her gums.

The plague doctor, the only survivor of the prince's court who never feared the mermaid, approaches wearing austere black robes and a bleached vulture-skull mask. They offer companionship, and the mermaid's smile suffices as agreement. Together, they burn the kingdom's dead and depart on horseback into the frozen taiga.

As they travel, the mermaid's true form gradually returns as she feeds: translucent skin, iridescent eyes, luminous hair. At camp, the mermaid asks to see beneath the plague doctor's mask, which reveals a sharp, androgynous face with nearly invisible stitching along jaw, cheekbones, and eye sockets. The plague doctor explains that they are both "manufactured beings," one assembled with thread and sinew, the other shaped by magic. The mermaid breathes her name into the plague doctor's keeping. In this world, names carry immense power: They can kill, transform, and "hide a soul in the curl of a stranger's tongue" (11).

A shriek interrupts them. Two boys burst from the woods. The older one, Samson, drives an iron stake into a smaller boy, killing him. The plague doctor seizes Samson, but the boys insist this is a game: They take turns playing "the pig," and their "saints" always bring the pig back. They need only retrieve the dead boy's bezoar, a bolus of compacted biological matter from which new life can be grown, from his abdomen. The plague doctor's composure falters, but they follow the boys to their village.

The village is small and grim: cottages, dirt roads, and fifteen bodies hanging from crude gallows. Three men emerge, the surgeons the children worship as saints. They wear ornate masks of bone, porcelain, and gold and speak in eerie, echoing repetition. The mermaid and plague doctor are given a hovel that clearly belonged to someone else. Inside, the mermaid finds a handmade scripture: an ancient religion rewritten as a children's game.

That night, the surgeons perform a public resurrection. The dead boy, Luke, lies with his torso open. They install the bezoar and add bronze cogs, wire spirals, and preserved organ segments, joining each to his viscera. Luke gasps back to life and screams, convulsing with the terror of a dead body forced to relearn how to breathe. When the plague doctor protests that the surgeons have never endured this agony themselves, the three demonstrate otherwise: one severs his own hand, another gouges out his own eyes, and the third excises his own heart, each continuing to function. The discarded parts are carried away.

Before dawn, the mermaid slips into the shed where these parts rest and eats them all. The surgeons' flesh proves extraordinarily restorative: Her voice returns fully. She tells the plague doctor they must leave, correcting the myths about her: She never surrendered her voice for love. The plague doctor refuses, fixated on freeing the children, and the mermaid perceives the truth: The surgeons created the plague doctor. At breakfast, the plague doctor notices the surgeon who removed his eyes now has new ones that look just like Samson's, confirming the children are being harvested for parts. By a frozen riverbank, the plague doctor reveals their history: Nearly a century ago, the surgeons found them as a child, half-dead after a war, and used them as a test subject until nothing of their original body remained but the bezoar, from which they were rebuilt entirely.

Together, they devise a plan. The plague doctor treats Luke's crude sutures with expert care and a painkilling compound. Luke, experiencing compassion for the first time, begins to doubt the surgeons' doctrine. The mermaid proposes the strategy: To destroy the surgeons' godhood, they must show the children the saints are just men who bleed. She trades the promise of deep-sea knowledge for two more self-mutilation demonstrations. After the surgeons perform again, the mermaid eats the discarded parts, and the plague doctor substitutes a dead lynx's organs for the surgeons to install unknowingly.

The next morning, the surgeon who took the lynx eyes is on his knees, clawing at his face. The plague doctor cuts his skin open before the children, exposing the ill-fitting animal eyes as proof the surgeons are fallible. But a scream erupts from a nearby cottage, where one of the other surgeons is eating a girl alive. Luke declares the plague doctor was right, but an older boy strikes him down. The children turn violent, and the mermaid loses consciousness.

She wakes on a table, meticulously vivisected. The lynx-eyed surgeon works over her, interrogating her about her species. The mermaid baits him, claiming her swim bladder sits in the roof of her mouth. When he leans close, her mouth distends and her teeth close on his jaw. She eats him alive and regenerates completely.

She follows a trail of frozen blood into a blizzard. The children are hunting the plague doctor as the pig. She fights through the storm and finds the plague doctor slumped against a broken oak, dying. The damage is beyond the bezoar's ability to repair. The mermaid curls into their arms, breathing in time with their fading pulse. The plague doctor asks to be buried, to have a lock of their hair carried through the centuries.

All three surgeons arrive with the surviving children. The surgeon the mermaid consumed has somehow regenerated, confirming the true extent of their immortality. They bind the mermaid and the plague doctor to birch trees and order a pyre built. As the flames rise, the plague doctor reminds the mermaid of the power in her kind's names. Then, as their heart goes silent, they speak the mermaid's name into the fire. A devouring radiance ignites within the mermaid. She exhales celestial flame, and her body combusts but transforms. She burns them all.

She wakes at dawn among charred figures. She crawls to where the plague doctor burned and finds their bezoar: whole, glistening, blood still pulsing through its arteries. She is functionally immortal and resolves to make it right.

Four hundred years later, the mermaid has mastered medicine, mortuary science, and countless other fields to reconstruct the plague doctor from their bezoar, giving them muscles stitched from her own tissue, bones of black onyx laced with steel, pianist fingers capped with gold. The plague doctor draws a rattling breath and wakes. The mermaid offers them choices: rest, a new life, or anything they wish. She has not yet given them skin or hair, wanting to ask their preferences. Wordless, the plague doctor stretches out their arms. The mermaid plunges into their embrace.

An appended prequel, "And In Our Daughters, We Find a Voice," recounts the events preceding the novella's opening. The prince kills the mermaid's sisters, keeps her captive in a windowless tower, and feeds her only sugar to deny her the power that flesh provides. The plague doctor appears as the prince's physician, already bold enough to challenge him. The mermaid secretly lays clutches of eggs, the final daughters arriving full of teeth and rage. They devour the prince, and the mermaid opens the doors, watching her children spill into the night.