MicroHorror Featured Pick -- "The First Of The Sea"

Here's the second of MicroHorror's three winners from the 2008 Halloween contest. Every great hero, villain, and abomination deserves an origin story, so I was intrigued to find an old myth in this new guise...

"The First of the Sea"
by Lori Titus


I am here and now. I have existed forever.

I have lived so long that it’s come to the point that I cannot even fathom all of my own past. I can tell you this: there was a beginning. When the world was young, so was I.

I may have been alone on the shore when the sea was new. I remember feeling a part of the air and the wind, how the water that cooled me was a new sensation. I was a part of it all, a being that was corporeal, but knew no difference between itself and the outside world.

For decades I was carried on the sea into this confusion that humans call the modern world. Time is nothing.

I will always be.

If I could touch you, I would, because it’s been so long since I have…

When was the last time that I did? It’s hard to remember. But you’re a human man; my touch may kill you.

What name did they give me? I know they called me Mara. I sang songs. I drew men to me. How perfect they were for all of their imperfection.

How their eyes light up when they see me. Upon that moment, I am their ideal, full of life and irresistible; I am what they have waited for all their lives, the thing that they cannot resist. No two men ever see the same woman when they see me.

But they will all tell you that I am the most beautiful woman that they have ever seen.

How many of them dived into the depths for me? How they kissed with abandon, as I pulled them down into the water, sucking the last breath of their lungs into my mouth?

In those moments, the last of their lives, I drew in all of their essence: their life, their need, their pain. To take this is the depth of ecstasy. They give, and their vision of me flows away as does the last of their spirit.

My soft arms turn cold and hard, made of bones and not the softness of skin. My long hair tangles them into a mass of dead seaweed.

My song is the first of the sea, the last of the sea, what all men that sailed in ancient times grew wise enough to fear.

I am Siren.

Copyright: © 2008 Lori Titus