A story with very little love.
I was a fisherman since my very early days. I used to go out with my father and uncle on his boat, and while they were working and hauling up the catch, I stayed out of the way and watched the nets come up with their bright flopping bodies and the spill and rush of saltwater.
Sometimes I would pretend to be a fisherman too. My father and uncle were hardworking and I could never handle the big rough fishing nets, but I could tie a long cord to a mop handle and trail it in the water. One day, when I was having lunch, I tied a gummi worm on the end and dropped it into the deeps. There was a sharp tug at the line. When I pulled it out again, the string was cut.
That was scary, just then, but next week when we hit the same place I dropped another worm. Again, I pulled up the line snipped off short. I did the same thing two weeks later, and again after that, each time holding it closer to the surface to see what was taking my sugary bait.
I saw something about the length of an otter once, pale and shining, but I never saw it again after that. My uncle and father worried about overfishing and tried a different place, and then we started taking out tour boats and that business unexpectedly boomed and we didn't fish there again for years. (For some reason tourists seemed to be jittery about going out alone; all kinds of crazy stories were flying in the next few years.)
I went out on my own, once, when I grew up with a boat of my own, and that was when it happened.
I was letting her drift (it was too deep for an anchor, but I was just out for a chance to relax) when I heard the splash and looked over and saw the mermaid.
"Maid" sounds like she was human, like she could be spoken with; not at all. She had the upper body of a fish with arms and a near-human head. Long lines keeled up over her ribs and arched out like the illusion of a woman's chest. Her neck was wide to make room for all the gills. Her eyes were wide and alien, set just like a human's would be, fathomless and dark, and she turned them this way and that over the deck before she looked again at me. The long, trailing fins on her head were as white as the scales on her tail, and they gleamed and glittered like opals. She spilled onto the deck, bracing herself with her arms. She had long, long claws, but no thumbs.
That was all I saw. She took one look at me, and then the end of her eel-like tail whipped up and over and hit me square in the chest. I went down and broke three ribs landing, and by the time I could pay attention to things again she'd gone all over the deck and found my picnic basket. She ripped the top off, grabbed up my little plastic bag of gummi worms in her sharp teeth, and leaped over the rail in a ribbon of sparkling white. Not so much as a backward glance at me.
Years later, I went to visit my daughter and son-in-law at a park in the mountains.
"Lots of people getting attacked by bears this year," my son-in-law said. "You can avoid it if you remember a simple rule: don't feed the animals."
"You don't have to tell me, son," I said. "Let's go if we're going. My ribs say it's gonna rain."