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It was as though I was created for the seas. I cannot remember where I came from, nor how I came to live like this, nor what my name was. Instead, I know where the fattiest fish swam, and how to tie twenty-three kinds of knots, and what maneuvers would bring me to the nearest ports the fastest. On those ports, nobody knows who I am, and nobody knows I am as much a stranger to them as I am to myself.

I call myself Killick, after a friend I met when we were both imprisoned. He gave me his name upon learning I had none, for he had a habit of giving me what he had and I lacked. We were nothing alike aside from being prisoners, except now we have a name in common. In a way, he lives on in freedom through the name I carry now with me. It is Killick that carries the breeze into my sails, and it is he that encourages me to remain dignified.

My boat was small, a vessel stolen from the men that dragged me out of the water where I fell a few months back. The boat was where I felt the most whole, working with more than the strength and tact of the one sailor I was. This day, I wanted to return to a port to sell the fish I had caught. I would have made it to shore within an hour, and I would have wandered into a bar to buy a drink with whatever I got from selling my fish. I sailed through the milk of fog cautiously; I did not know my way around this area enough to not ground or even destroy my boat. The waves rising and falling have a rhythm, and to this rhythm I heard music playing.

I could feel my eyes dilate. Their pupils stretched open to a strain, the light-gray of the fog became a blinding white. Somehow yet, the agony in my chest ached worse. As I folded over into myself, my heart was sinking down my stomach and dragging the rest of my body with it in a slow, scraping descent to the bottom. I knew the cause, even if I had never seen her, I knew I had to be in her arms, to have her in mine. I was not even sure who she was.

Because the rest of my senses had been compromised, my body took it upon itself to jump into the water, to get closer to her. I knew she would rip me to shreds, but in that way she would complete me, a sculptor carving out stone from their art, flesh from her finest dish.

I saw their plumages before I saw the rock beneath my grasping and clawing hands. Each organism was a throne of feathers of different hues. I, as the filth I smelled like, knew I was unworthy, but I, as a wounded animal, knew my pain would be quelled should I sit in those thrones.

I crawled towards her, all of her. I would bare my throat in her arms, I sang along, my limbs would be limp and tender for her. She would be my afterlife, and I the proteins in her body and the bones she spits out.

A disgrace that I move so slowly that one was forced to come towards me. Don’t exert yourself, I prayed to the creature replacing the gods that forsake me.

She took her head in my lap, tilted my head up to meet her gaze. She sang of the town nearby, of its hanging laundry and the smell of the ale in its taverns. She brought her nimble fingers to my ears. A squelch, something filled my ears, but it was not blood. The stickiness reminded me of stories, perhaps told from that forgotten past of mine: it must be wax. It had entered my ears, and nothing else after.

I felt my body reclaim its senses, save its hearing. I looked up to where the siren was and instead saw a woman. Her eyes sat under the shade of a mask carved in the likeness of the sirens around us. I could tell she was older than me, the hands holding me were callused and I could see the marks that her many smiles dug into the corners of her eyes. She was the beauty these sirens tried to imitate.

“Up,” she said, but I did not know what up meant in that moment. A hand lifted my body, under my arm, and dragged me and my stumbling body up the stony hill. The ashy brown of the cabin ahead was vibrant against the blurring grays of the rocks and the sky. It did not seem real, for how could something so ordinary stick out in this colorless part of the world.

The inside had a small cot. In a movement that betrayed a sense of familiarity, she tossed me onto it. A small fire started somewhere to my side. I felt entirely helpless to move, the world spinning too languidly for me to safely land my feet anywhere. The woman pressed her fingers to my wax-stuffed ear, packed it in there a little more. She withdrew, and then I was finally alone as I had happily been before the sirens.

When my fingers could find fabric below me, I gripped tight. I sobbed into the pillow under my head, feeling even more gutted than I had felt whilst hearing the sirens’ song. I was given a goddess, and a goddess was taken from me. I have been gouged, once in my life. On a bed like ice, I laid like a fish bleeding and choking to death in the stale air.

After weeping and writhing in the cold of the cabin, staring in the face of a useless fire in front of me, I sat up and instead stared at the door. The window was dark now, so I could guess I was here for two hours. The woman, covered in faded brown feathers, sauntered in and looked at me. She brought her hands to the sides of her head and gestured, she pinched her fingers and pulled them away from her head. My fingers reached my ear, where I felt a little nub of wax sticking out. Using it as leverage, I plucked out the wax in that ear, and then the next.

“Your boat’s safe,” the woman assured, then she emerged from the huge coat of feathers. She was a woman whose stout body was probably built to withstand the weight of the faux siren coat. Most of the scars I could see on her were claw marks, mostly faded. She struck me as someone who would be proud of these scars. As she threw her disguise off to the side, she glanced back at me. “The sirens take your throat before I found you?”

“What could I say?” I asked, plainly. I recognized she may be searching for a profession of gratitude.

“Something like, ‘I’m hungry.’ Siren victims feel hungry after their encounter—” and she added, “—usually.”

That explained the pit in my stomach, I thought. “I’m ravenous,” I thought aloud.

The woman smiled, diagnosis proved correct. “You’re lucky you came today.” No, I wasn’t. “Fresh batch of mainland food came in yesterday. Let me cook you something.”

I didn't expect her to leave the cabin, since she had just came back in. As I was alone, I realized it was still quite soundless, even without the wax in my ears. The fire cracked open the wood in its fireplace, reaching its many tongues deeper until each entire log was thoroughly tasted.

A shriek from the outside. I ran to the window, terrified that the woman had been mauled by one of the sirens. In the dark, I saw her silhouette and I saw black feathers flapping and waving in the air. Her silhouette was calm, still, and I realized she was holding a fowl upside down by the feet. The fowl seemed large, a long stretched out creature whose size she did not seem to mind. She took the fowl’s neck in one hand, and in a twist it went limp. Aside from the shock that I watched her kill a bird since I have only killed fish, I was then impressed that she was able to do so in the dark on a slippery, stony shore.

She came towards the cabin again, opened the door and my eyes were drawn to the creature whose life she had taken. The fowl wasn’t like anything I had ever seen with its long limbs, long neck, and odd plumage. Its head swayed with the movement of its butcher. After the unsettling theory crept into my mind, she confirmed it.

“I hope this changes your mind about sirens,” she said casually as she hoisted the dead bird onto the table, “They’re not good-for-nothing, they’re quite good roasted.”

“What,” I said. I can only remember the basic actions of what happened next. I watched her process the bird, like everything I had watched her do, with a precision that indicated years of experience. Hours ago, I had a goddess, and hours after, this woman was turning her into our meal. At some point, I was helping her. I was cutting potatoes and that was when I realized the motion felt oddly familiar once more, like my intimate knowledge of sailing. I could have been a cook in that previous life, but never knew until now because I could barely afford any ingredients to cook.

“How many of you are here?” I asked as I slid potato halves off my knife and into the pan, not sure what the term for “you” was exactly.

“Never more than five farmers on this shore.” She stirred the cream around in the pan. “I taught all of them.” I could tell she was proud, as she should have been.

“Who taught you?” was the natural next question; I have always been wary about the best way to guide a conversation, mostly to avoid fellow sailors getting offended.

“A man,” she said with a sigh, “We don’t have men around here now, not enough boys to raise into men.”

I swallowed. This was something we were both familiar with, to the point we did not have to address it by name. I realized that I thought this cabin and its shore were safe from that familiar atrocity, the one that stole boys and young men from the streets they played in. Moreover, I realized I was one of few who had seen what happened to them. For that reason, my mind and eyes were drawn to the back of the room, at the carcass of the siren stored away in a pot because the woman planned to use it as stock. I looked away, ashamed I even thought of such a gruesome comparison.

A silent conversation carried on as we took the pan off the fire. As I helped set the table, I learned she was particular about the way cutlery was because she would fix up whatever I put down. She must have learned I was religious when I crossed my hand over myself; I did not know what religion had engrained this motion into me was, nor did anyone else I met.

“You read?” the woman finally questioned as she reached to scoop some of the siren onto her plate. She asked this as though she already knew the answer and only needed confirmation from me. I narrowed my eyes suspiciously at my savior, because I knew how she would come to that conclusion. There was a journal onboard, a simple bundle of waxy paper where I write down whatever I want to. She must have found it and opened it.

One of the only clues I have about a previous life is that, in comparison to most other sailors I have met, I could read and write. I remember, if only just the statements and not the memories themselves, that I liked writing. I did not know the word in my native language for what I was writing, but I narrowed down the word in this language: poetry.

The siren meat was juicy, not as salty as I imagined a bird that spent its days by the ocean was. The cream sauce must have neutralized the saltiness and made the potatoes and fresh herbs taste richer. Maybe it would taste better with cinnamon or sugar, I thought, a controversial idea that I knew nobody would respect me for.

“I have a daughter,” the woman stated, “She’s young and she is good sailing like you.”

It took me a moment to decipher the odd tone in her voice. It reminded me of the older women on the docks trying to get me to buy something, but I imagined that I was the item being bought. She looked over at me, expectantly, waiting for an answer. There was something she expected me to understand. I became suddenly aware that she was currently looking at me as a man, a young and literate bachelor for her daughter to marry. Being alone on the seas allowed me to forget what I was to other people; it allowed me to forget about the stress of trying to remember who I was to myself.

“I’m sorry, I’m not looking to marry,” I blurted out. I’m not interested in women like that, I omitted.

“Well, hurry before it’s too late,” she joked, but we both felt the sense of urgency that statement carried. In this part of the country, a boat with a young man would one day be empty by the next morning, a meatless conch shell on the beach. Maybe she offered her daughter’s hand because she liked my company, that a wife would manage to keep me within her sight and she would know when I was safe.

If I were vulnerable with her, I would have told her that I had already fallen victim to what many boys and their mothers fear. I could have told her what happened to those boys because I had seen it and I had it happen to me. I was the carcass in the pot, I should have said, your daughter wouldn’t want to marry me, I’m only my bones and stock now.

Before I could spiral further, I took a deep breath and answered, “I call myself Killick.”

“Killick?” she asked again, and then she laughed. Everyone who knew the seas laughed when they heard my name was Killick. It is a fitting, albeit silly, name for a sailor. Killick himself told me that he got the name as a cabin boy, one of his crew mates threatened to fill his guts with stones and use him as an anchor. She laughed again. “You’re funny, boy. Where you from?”

“No clue.” Snarky responses like this were natural to me. I dreamed of hypothetical lives I had before I lost my memory. Among them was one with parents I would backtalk. My father would have a beard and I would look just like him, and my mother would be the strong sailor from whom I learned my trade. Both would still be alive, wondering where their son had gone.

“Your face—” the woman started, “Your face looks Ancharyian, but your voice sounds Monchie.”

“’Sounds’ Monchie?” I put my spoon down. “What does Monchie sound like?”

The woman nodded and pointed at me, still looking at her food. “There. You have an accent in there.”

“You sound like you got two. Ancharyian and Monchie.” She was eating as she said this, like it was a commonplace thing to talk about one’s ethnicity. “And you talk with your eyes. Every Monchie I’ve seen does that.”

My eyes widened, and I was now aware that they did. I never thought I would be described as Monchie, especially by a stranger. From the few I had seen, they had thinner eyes and darker skin than I did. They dyed their hair white to convey maturity, but my hair was a natural cherry red. Curiosity, the innocent kind that asked what I would look like with white hair, tickled me. Another idea of who I was before I was Killick entered my mind.

We finished dinner, though I kept scraping the cream off the side of the pan long after the siren had been eaten. She offered the cot to me because it was now too dark to go out safely on a one-person vessel. The meal sated me so that I was now restful, the cot seemed much more attractive than it had been hours before. She put out the fire so that the cabin was dark. I watched her silhouette settle into a cocoon of cloth she had pulled out from underneath the cot.

I stared up at the ceiling of her cabin. The cot was more comfortable than the one I had on my boat, perhaps it was the most luxurious bed I had ever been in. When I whispered it out loud, it sank in that I ate the bird that aimed to consume me. There was a moment when I was in a real, personal danger of being devoured. I feared that I was now desensitized to being a prey animal as this was not the first time I had been preyed upon. When a person is reduced to something to be consumed, I found out one day as I was looking in the mirror, they view themselves from the perspective of the creature they expect to consume them. I feared I only knew who I was as far as the siren had.

It was my desire for answers that kept my eyes wide open. This woman knew who she was, and she could tell a little bit about myself within the few hours we knew each other. I envied her sureness, however guilty I felt for it. It was wrong to envy her, I thought, she is older than me and had more time to understand herself. I sensed she was awake, so I asked her.

“When did you decide to be a farmer?” I asked quietly, and clarified based on what I could understand, “A siren farmer.”

“We don’t decide,” she said, “we know.” Her voice was not hushed like mine; it was her cabin, after all. “Every child back in our town, the first one you see when you get back to shore from here, loved sirens. We learned the same stories as all the tourists who came into town craving siren meat: the wax in the ears, great sailors reduced to whimpering messes at the sound…” She trailed off, briefly, but continued, “We all wanted to be part of that thing that made our town great, so I begged my mother and father to find someone who would mentor me.”

I didn’t say anything. I imagined how the community looked when she was young, when schoolchildren learned folk tales and played pretend.

I thought, then the words came out by themselves, “I didn’t decide.” The truth stumbled out afterwards. “I had no other choice.”

It felt painful not to be able to see her as she was quiet, but she asked, “You got no parents either?”

“I got no memory.” I forced a little laugh out of myself. “I stole a boat from men who found me washed up on shore.”

“We call it the Gorehouse.” Her voice trembled, a strong cliffside letting off a cloud of dust and pebbles. “We’ve seen men drag boys in there, and they take the bones back to their families.”

My voice bounced back. “I don’t know. I ended up in the water.” I questioned then why I could still feel my bones in my body. Perhaps I survived because I had no family to bring bones back to.

“Stay with me,” she blurted out. She sounded frightened, and so I was frightened. “You’ll be safe here. You’ll be one of us.”

The silence spoke when I didn’t. I hugged the pillow she provided me. I closed my eyes. Between the dark of my eyelids and my imagination, I saw myself covered in siren feathers, wax in my ears, wringing the necks of the little goddesses. I would walk over the stones easily, my feet intimate with each of the blackened rocks. The cabin would always be there for me, and every night I would cook dinner for myself and the woman. My boat would be a distant memory, as would my knowledge sailing. I saw myself, as old as she was now, sitting at her deathbed. It would be the same cabin as the one we were in now, but then in a lonely second, it would become my cabin.

“Sleep it over,” she whispered, soft and gentle like the mother she was, “You have time to decide.”

In the morning, the sky returned to milk-gray. The woman, back in her feathered coat, put the wax in my ears while I was still asleep, so I did not know if the sirens were singing. My decision was made sometime in my sleep: I shook my head. There must have been a mournful look on my face when I did so; she touched my face, tilted my head down, and kissed my forehead.

I held her hand as she guided me through the stony shore. The sirens watched us, but did not move. I learned later that they were almost always brooding on their nests and would refuse to leave. This is how they learned to call their prey to them, individual voices combining into a choir of hunger. Small meat cubes were scattered around them, just out of reach from their necks, so I wondered then how many animals they kill to sustain the sirens here.

My boat was intact, as the woman promised. I went to check my catch from yesterday. While it hadn’t yet gone bad, I suspected it would by the time I made it to the port. I pointed at the fish, then the sirens. The woman nodded; I think she had already thought the same thing. We hoisted the net off the boat and towards the sirens, who puffed up their feathers to intimidate us.

We dumped out my catch—the woman only made it so we dumped out half, she wanted to keep some for herself. She tossed one fish, and I the next. The sirens had been reduced to silly creatures rather than the ethereal beings I believed they were the day before: they stretched their necks, tilted their head to grab a fish, and used gravity to pull the whole thing down their throats. I accidentally hit the fourth siren in the face with a fish, it blinked, regathered its senses, and went to pick up what I had bounced off its head.

The woman and I did not banter, since neither of us could hear. When we finished feeding the sirens, I noticed she was making gestures towards the hill behind the sirens. I looked up and realized she was communicating silently with another coated woman, this one younger than her. Both gestured and pointed at me, so I was somehow involved in the conversation.

It must have been agreed between the women that I had to leave before it got dark again. Once they finished communicating, the elder took my hand again and walked me back to my boat. She smiled and waved as she unmoored my boat, and I smiled and waved back. We knew this was an isolated encounter, that we would likely not come across one another again, but by smiling and waving we would not make this a painful goodbye. When I reached the port, it was dark and I had nothing to sell. I wandered into a bar and I bought a drink.

I went to the town the siren farmers came from many years later, after I watched the Gorehouse burn and after I found myself. I would tell her I learned my true name. Perhaps I would even ask for hers after all these years. My lover thought I was curious to try the siren meat when I suggested a vacation there. He asked me if I feared them, and I teased him because I knew he did. I met a woman on the docks who looked like the one I met years back. She told me her mother would return to town by the end of the weekend, that it was mating season for the sirens so she had to stay longer. I don’t mind the wait, I told her, I have time.