Revenge14 min read
My River Bride: The Mermaid, the Heart, and the Hollow Man
ButterPicks11 views
I am Sigrid Aldridge. I married a stranger in a hurry because my family needed bread and because the rain had soaked our fields to mud. I married Flynn Webb because he came with a carriage and because he was quiet and handsome and because he promised a roof. I married him and slept beside a body that had a face like a poem—and a soul I could not read.
The first night he lifted my veil, I felt the air change. He had the kind of thin smile that could be taken for kindness, and the kind of empty that felt like a trap. I told myself I was foolish. I told myself to be a dutiful wife.
"I'll take care of the house," I said, soft as linen.
He looked at me and said nothing for a long time. At last he said, "Stay."
His hand on my jaw was warm. But there was a place on his back he never let me touch—a long, old scar like a seam. Once I tried to trace it and he flinched away as if the touch hurt more than any wound should.
Days bled into one another. He left often, sitting beneath the moon until dawn. He returned sometimes with mud on his boots, sometimes with a strange smell of river and iron. The neighbors whispered. I kept my head down and stitched shirts, and when I could not stitch, I brought eggs and soup.
"People say you keep strange company," Leona Howard told me one afternoon when she came to my doorway.
"I am new here," I said. "I keep to my chores."
Leona laughed, but not kindly. "Keep your head low, Sigrid. A quiet wife is alive."
That night I dreamed I was at the lake behind our house. Moonlight turned the water into a mirror. I knelt, intent on washing my dress, when a hand—cool and blue-veined—pushed through the surface and took my wrist.
"You're cold," said a voice like silver bells and spoiled honey. A woman rose from the water, her hair dark and wet, and when she smiled I saw too many teeth.
"Who are you?" I whispered.
She flashed scales at the moon. "Mariana Novikov," she said. "Your husband is a borrowing. He wears someone else's name."
My throat closed. "What do you mean?"
"You married the shell," Mariana sang. "Flynn Webb is only the skin. The man you loved—if you really loved—waits with his mouth open at the bottom. To bring him back, you must pry the shell and give it what it craves. The truest cure is a heart."
"I don't understand."
She laughed until water ran down her shoulders. "You will. Come. The lake knows. The knife will sing."
She shoved me. The cold came first—the marrow-chilling bite—and then I woke. My bed was damp with sweat.
When I told Flynn, he tilted his head and said, "Dreams are tricks. Bury them."
"I saw a woman at the lake," I said. "A mermaid. She said—"
He pressed his thumb to my lips. "Do not sit by the water at night."
That was the last sensible thing he ever did.
Weeks later, Leona Howard was found in our yard. She collapsed at my feet, eyes glassy and mouth gaping as if trying to say one name.
"Flynn," she wheezed. "Flynn—"
Then she cracked to bone. I watched with a hand over my mouth because my body moved before my mind could.
Flynn came when the storm broke, his coat soaked and hair flattened. He knelt by her, laid a white hand over her skull, and said, "She was full of lies."
"Flynn—" I started.
He looked at me then, and I felt cold as river silt. "You wandered. Why?"
"I was—" I could not say that the night I dreamed.
"A hard woman," he said, and then he smiled like a blade. "Go inside. Rest."
At the lake, the truth surfaced like a drowned thing that has been waiting long enough to rot.
"Flynn," the water breathed. The face that rose was not the man I touched, not the skin of Flynn Webb—yet the way his lips moved, the name he used for me when he could speak, it all matched the voice in my heart. He rose between Mariana's arms. The mermaid's hand brushed his waist as if she owned him. "Bring me the knife," she said to me.
"How could I stab him?" I whispered. "He is—my husband."
Mariana smiled with all her small sharp teeth. "You have a choice."
That night I bought a petty knife—but not to kill. I wanted proof. I wanted the shell to open and reveal the truth.
"Flynn," I said as he sat near the hearth, bones pale beneath white skin. "There's someone who comes in my dreams. She says my real husband is in the lake."
He did not startle. He took the cup I handed him without meeting my eyes. "You dream of water because you were born near water," he said. "Do not seek monsters."
"I am pregnant," I lied.
His fingers went to my belly without wincing. "Three months?" he asked.
"Three," I said.
He laughed, a small mechanical sound. "Then let us be foolish. If the child survives, it will be ours."
That laugh was the match that lit the tinder. I needed him to touch me. I needed his warmth. I needed time when he would not suspect.
When the lake opened and showed me the drowned man—for the first time he called me by the name he had used in the lifetimes before Flynn's skin—he asked me, with gurgling breath and bright, pleading eyes, to take the knife and pull open the skin. He blamed the borrowed skin for everything.
"My name," he mouthed. "Remember."
It was the right name in the way a song is the right song. When Mariana put the blade into my hand, she told me the method as if reciting a recipe: pierce the chest, take the heart, return it to the water. The lake promised resurrection. "He will come back if his heart drinks the lake's depths," she sang. "But be warned—the house that hides him will spill its secrets when opened."
I went back to our bed with the knife pressed against my palm and the lie at the center of my belly. I let him hold me as if he loved me, and because he held me I stilled. I counted the hiccups of his breath. The knife's metal kissed my skin like a dare.
When I plunged the blade into him, his skin was smooth as silk—eerily placid. Blood came warm. But the chest under his breastbone was not flesh and beating muscle. It was empty. He twitched and smiled and said my name like a benediction. He was not the man whose heart beat in my memory. He was a thing that borrowed the name and the face and the voice of the man who had once loved me.
"You are cruel," I told him as I searched with shaking fingers and found nothing but a hollow, cold space.
His laugh cracked then. He tightened his fingers in my hair. "Do you think you are the only liar?" he whispered. "You keep stealing what isn't yours."
I gave up. I gave the blade up to Mariana and plunged it where she told me. I thought I would save a husband. Instead, I widened a wound that swallowed us both.
Flynn—who had been more than a man and less than a god—sat up and looked at me, eyes burning, and the air around his jaw went sharp and sudden.
"You are like them," he said. "Decadent and small. You wanted a husband you could own. You wanted to name things and keep them from changing. You cut and carve and call it love."
I would have laughed had my chest not burst with cold. I had not known he could be furious.
"Bring the knife," Mariana said gently.
We were at the bottom of everything; the lake cradled us as if we were bad fishing. The real man, the one whose bones should have kept the story of love, opened his mouth and died in reverse. He pulled himself inside out like a seamstress unpicking a dress. He was not meant for life as we knew it. He had been replaced.
When I left the house that next morning, once the fever broke through my ribs and the neighbors had burned and prayed and prayed again, I had one thing: a lock of the man's true hair, furred and frayed with riverweed. It smelled of cold rain and hunger.
I ran into the world with it and, in my chest, an idea: if it was true that this man had been stolen, then I should reclaim him. If not for love, then for my hurt.
We did everything the legends promised: bargains, blood, bargains again.
When I became something else—red among losses—my voice grew strange to me. I sang the way the lake had once sang; it sounded like pain and pettiness and hunger. I found the places in Flynn's countenance where the seam had started. I learned to open wounds that would not close. I learned to laugh when men begged.
"Why are you doing this?" my own mother—dead for a hundred years—called from the rafters once. "You will never be at peace."
"I do not want peace," I told her. "I want him to answer for what he has done."
The village remembers me as the woman in the red dress who wandered at night. They tell children about my teeth. They point at my windows. They bring offerings I never asked for.
In time, when anger becomes a currency, I learned how to spend it.
I rose up to the place where rules gather like dead leaves. Flynn—who had become less and more in the space between breath and chant—ruled over a court of things that wanted light and could not have it fully. He called it a palace. Hundreds of little ghosts did his errands, and they answered when he spoke.
"I am still your wife," I said once inside his hall. "You have eaten men. You have fed your court on our people. We were poor and you were rich and you took more than we gave."
He smiled in that way that made the jaws of all who watched sink. "I married greed to keep myself from freezing."
That was not a decent answer.
So I arranged for a public thing. I planned it like a midwife plots a birth: she times the pain. I drew a crown of especial grievances: my father, my village elders who watched and did nothing, Leona who had gossiped and died, Fallon—my sister—who had been used by others and then used them back, Colton Schultz—who had pushed his hands where no one could consent. I set them up like pins and drew an audience from the far places of noose and bone.
The bridal procession I commanded was not ordinary. I rode in a red palanquin braided with malevolent flowers. I wore a robe of stitched grievances. Behind me walked hundreds—no, thousands—of little dead things who had tasted Flynn's banquets and found them made of human pieces. They kept perfect time with their small knives and their small voices.
The palace doors opened. The court—hundreds of ghastly faces—looked at me, curious. Flynn's face was a white mask. He stood at the dais like a criminal mayor.
"You called me wife," I said. "You dressed me, you opened the wine, you pried me open with your promises. For that you will answer."
Laughter flew like moths. A thousand lamps shook.
"She is mad," someone hissed.
"Let her have her hour," another voice said. "She will tire."
But the hour was long. I walked down the center of the hall where many ghosts clustered. I stopped at Colton Schultz—he who had taken the laugh from my mouth that night in the rain, who had smelled of cheap liquor and broken teeth.
"You remember the night?" I asked, and the crowd waited.
Colton's face fell. His lips tried to come out with a joke. "Who will believe—"
"Everyone will," I said. I lifted my hand.
What followed was deliberate and public—the sort of punishment that leaves smoke and memory and the understanding that the world can be bent.
I called the witnesses from the village: the women who had watched me being dragged, the servants who had closed their mouths, the small ghost children who had seen everything and had not yet learned to lie. They lined up like a jury made of bone. Flynn listened without blinking.
I did not kill Colton in the usual manner. I extracted what mattered to him: his reputation, his place among men. I stripped him of speech first. "You will name what you did," I told him. "You will confess in front of your fellows."
He tried to roll it into a joke. "She's a witch."
"Name the day," I said.
"A-and—"
I pushed forward a little paper, simple and honest, and from the crowd came the face of the girl he had taken. She was small, pale, and made of a memory. Colton bent as the truth settled over him like cold.
"Do you deny it?" I asked.
For a while he laughed like a man who had not yet learned fear. The crowd had leaned close; several small ghosts were filming with their amber eyes, their clicking mouths like cameras.
"No," he said at last. His jaw had gone slack. "No, I—"
Then he tried to run. The hall was long and doors were few. The ghosts closed like nets. He was dragged to the center, his face banged against the flagstones. He spit. "You can't—"
I told them to hold him by his ribs and to make him taste the cold bread he had once thrown away. A dozen ghost hands cradled his face while another drew from the crowd the widow he had ruined. She stood and spat into his palms. The sound of it was a chorus.
His pivot of emotion was small but perfect: first, denial; then a puff of anger; then a choking realization as the public shame took root, the crowd's murmurs sharpening like knives. A woman in the audience cried, "I saw him! He touched my sister!" Another shouted, "He was drunk; he was laughing!"
He began to stammer. "I—no—it was not—"
"Admit the names," I urged.
He named them all—each dishonorable act, each bribe, each lie—and each name spoken was a drop of salt. The crowd listened, then a slow, terrible thing happened: they turned from watching to action. They took his tools—his coins, his signet ring, the hat he wore to pretend gentility—and broke them beneath their heels.
"Shame!" I shouted, and the word became a living thing. The ring, the hat, the coins—they were trampled, then ground into dust. Colton's laughter faded into a wet, animal sound. He thrashed and tried to plead, but the ghosts closed ranks. He went from bluster to plea to whimper—all while the crowd watched and the little children pointed.
Public punishment is not always death. Sometimes it is worse: the striptease of reputation, the slow unmaking. The ghosts tied him to a post and placed around his head a crown of rotten reeds—symbolic kingship turned mockery. Then we made him stand where everyone could come and spit. They did. They spat until his face was a map of rage and despair.
He begged for mercy. "I will leave! I will go! Please—"
"Speak to the ones you wronged," I said, and the first widow stepped forward and took his hands. She dropped cold water over them. She revealed the bread of their hunger. The crowd spoke. The ghost of my neighbor Leona — her skull polished and still with the echo of gossip — clapped slowly and then, with a stiff, bearlike motion, hurled the last of the dried fish Colton had thrown away one winter into his face.
He changed colors from pink to grey to the blue of a bruised fruit. He tried to say he was sorry, but his words were gone. "Please—" He tried to name people to save himself: "My friends, my—"
They had all turned at last. The witnesses stepped forward with everything they had kept: old letters, a broken comb, a locket. They dipped them in water and threw them at his feet. Each object was a memory that belonged to someone else; the ghosts formed a ring and recited the names of the women he had touched.
Then, the worst humiliation: I made him pronounce my name. "Sigrid Aldridge," he said, coughing once, and the sound sounded like surrender.
"Now," I told him. "You will stand and be recorded by every soul who saw."
He could not speak. Tears streamed down his face—the sort of animal, sloppy tears that do not beg but simply show the body reacting to hurt. "I am sorry," he whispered finally, but the crowd knew his sorrow had been manufactured for the smallest of comforts: that he had not lost friends forever.
They made him walk the market route the village had chosen for him for three days, barefoot, carrying a basket with a woman's shawl in it. Children followed and jeered. He ate what they fed him: cold porridge and bread they had left for the ghosts. Each spittoon and every cursed word stripped his pride until there was nothing left to burn.
Flynn watched all of this from his dais. At first his face was unreadable. Then when Colton's last shame was consummated, Flynn's expression changed. It was not triumph. It was a small and precise heat like a bellows. He bent and touched my hand with that same thin smile. "You have a taste for rulership now," he said softly. "Be careful—or you will be a queen who burns her own people."
The crowd erupted into a small, ugly cheer. Colton's voice had become a croak.
Public punishment stayed for days in the mouths of those who had watched. People who had once sneered at me now avoided my shadow. They told their stories to the new arrivals: "Do not cross her," they would say.
It was not enough for me to humiliate one man. The village had conspired; their leaders had stood by and watched me sink. I made them attend the next stage.
Fallon Carr—the sister who had taken her share of safety by stabbing—was next. I did not kill her. I stood in the center of the market and told the story of her knives and how they had been used, not for hunger, but for silence.
She begged. "Sigrid, please—"
I let the crowd decide what they would do. They made her sew a red thread into every gown she owned so that whenever she tried to hide, people would see the trembling red. They made her speak the names of those she had betrayed. Her face turned from astonishment to humiliation to breaking, and I watched each shift like one watches coals turn to ash.
When the market cleared, riddled with gossip and the song of small children, I stood and walked home. Flynn followed. He touched my shoulder once, hard enough that I felt it through layers of anger and bone.
"You set them to justice," he said. "I will not stop you."
I believed him.
But when the gods came to bargain—when Gregory Marques, the Judge of the Dead, stepped into the hall with paper eyes—everything that we had arranged suddenly belonged to law. He looked at me with the patience of a man who had been tying ribbons on the coffins of kings.
"You owe the world," he said.
"What I owe is the truth," I answered.
"You cannot bargain with both heart and law," he told me. "Bring the heart."
Flynn's hands trembled as I handed him the judgment he had hoped not to face. We argued through the night—he using the old quiet like a shield, I using the fire I had been fed. In the end, I took the red thread from Fallon's sleeve and tied it to my own hair. I told Gregory that I would trade my right to haunt for one warm, whole life for the man I loved.
The bargain was vicious and neat. We got what we wanted and paid with a ledger. The river goddess Jensen Persson offered a trade in the dusk: a heart for a promise. We sealed it with the shudder of bones.
"Promise me one thing," Flynn whispered, after the great arguing had ended and after the bodies had drifted into quiet corners.
"No more deals," I said.
He laughed. "Of course there will be more."
There always were.
Years passed in loops. I fed on the wrongdoings; he fed on the law. Sometimes we sat on the same bench and watched little black lanterns float over the water and called one another names that sounded like lullabies. Once, when our child Nolan Lehmann—an orphan Flynn had once rescued—grew into a small, furious boy, I held him like a miracle and felt something like being a mother.
"Don't let him fall to fat shame," Flynn would say. "Teach him to be cruel in mercy."
I did not understand his meaning then. I do now.
The end came as it always does, not with a trumpet but a whisper. When the final ledger was closed, Gregory Marques came and read out the last accounts. He lifted his pen like a blade and wrote our names with slow, deliberate cruelty.
"You have done well," he said to Flynn. "You have met your dues."
"Is that all?" I asked.
Gregory smiled like a moon. "You both owe the world a truth. The hearts that were taken—some will never be returned. Some debts will hang from you like jewelry. Wear them. Make others see."
Flynn looked at me across that table where judgments were tallied and nodded once. Then he rose, and for the first time in a very long time, he touched the ring he had placed on my finger when he thought I would be the one to die first. He looked at the hole in his chest that I had once tried to fill with steel and promised again.
"I will find a way for us to keep each other," he said.
We lived under that promise like a splintered pact. The lake kept secrets. The mermaid sang. The river god laughed.
At last, when I carried Nolan, when I smelled of the stew of my labor and the small warm weight of a child, the last bargain had to be honored. I placed my palm over Flynn's heart and felt it beat under skin not quite real and not quite false. He gave me the thread that would hold our son between worlds. We left a mark on the river that turned into a field of small red flowers—Juliet's roses that bloom on graves.
"Keep him safe," I whispered.
"Always," Flynn said the word and meant it like a weapon against fate.
When the day came that I finally let go—when a soft white light took the edges of my vision—Flynn did not push it away. He held my hand like a man who knows the names of the stars. He let me walk toward the light that promised a place where the ledger would be closed.
I do not tell you this to beg your sympathy. I tell you because there is a strange tenderness in the way the afterlife divides its kindness and its cruelty. I tell you because you will someday want to know whether you should be brave enough to cut a borrowed thing from itself in order to bring back what you once loved.
And the answer, in the clack and soft hush of the river, is simple: there is always a price. Some of us pay with our names, others with our bones. I gave my blood and my cunning and, at last, the memory of a girl who had worn her father's shame like an old coat.
When I die, the lake remembers me. When I return, the red flowers open. Flynn and I are bound with a knot tighter than honesty, looser than fate. Sometimes he laughs like a child. Sometimes he is cruel as hunger. We are married, yes—but married by debts that will never be fully repaid. We are lovers only on the nights when the moon forgives us.
And sometimes—if you come to the river at the edge of evening and if you look just so—you will see a woman in red sitting on a bank and a man in white a little apart, watching the lights. A little boy will run with a shawl bigger than his shoulders and call us names we gave each other long ago.
We will both look at you as if you were a memory and ask, quietly, "Did you expect any less?"
The End
— Thank you for reading —