He looked out from his stone window toward the deep blue of the ocean below, in his hands the last of his possessions. Solemnly, he had been playing to himself in the hopes of a miracle, but he was dejected. Unworthy of any such thing.

With a heavy heart, he mourned his fate, secluded to his impermanent room. He had failed to save his family once again.

Eyes downcast, full but too tired to cry, Wren strummed his guitar, thankful that they had laughed when he asked if he could keep it. “What’s the worst he could do?” one guard joked to the other, “hang himself with the string?” It was a tempting idea, for Wren would rather go out on his own than by the king’s orders.

However, peculiarly, as he continued to play, rapid bubbles came towards the surface from below the waves, and before his eyes emerged a head.

“Who are you?” the mermaid asked, with a giggle.

“I could ask you the same thing,” Wren said back, a small smile on his lips as he looked towards the creature with pleasant confusion.

The mermaid smiled back, coyly. “What is that in your hands?”

The young man held up his old guitar. “A thing to play songs with.”

“Will you play one?”

“Will you sing?” He positioned himself to strum.

The mermaid twisted around the water, its tail shimmering in the moonlight with all the colors of the inside of an oyster shell. “Play for me!”

He began to play by heart the story his mother used to tell him when he was small. It was the tale of a young boy on a journey to find something new, and his reward was that of power and immortality. When he was a child, the story was too much for Wren to wrap his mind around. Now, however, watching the mermaid dance around in the waves, Wren can’t help but smile. He hadn’t smiled this much in a long time, and his face began to grow sore. However, he continued playing, the old strings of the guitar having cut into his fingers from lack of practice.

When his song ended, the mermaid clapped and cheered. “Another! Another!” the mermaid begged.

Wren chuckled, holding a hand up to wave off its pleading. “No, no,” he said. “Not tonight.”

The mermaid sunk back into the water until the waves hid everything below its eyes.

“Sulking won’t get you anywhere,” Wren said.

The mermaid resurfaced enough to talk. “...Will you teach me to play?”

Wren tilted his head to the side. “How am I supposed to teach you if you’re all the way out there?”

The mermaid backed away, then swam fast against the wall of Wren’s cell, leaping into the air. He’d heard of salmon jumping high into the sky over waterfalls, but as he watched the mermaid’s tail- of which, deep down, he knew was a mass of muscle- slam hard against the window, awe struck him through the chest. The mermaid clung to the bars of his window, hair long and wet and wild.

“Can I come in?” the mermaid asked.

He blinked, once, twice, not sure what to say. “If you can figure out how.”

With a melty grin, the mermaid’s body turned into a shining puddle, slipping in through the cracks of his window before rematerializing on his floor. The mermaid looked up at him from the ground.

“For a few minutes,” the mermaid pleaded. “Please, teach me!”

Wren licked his lips in absentminded thought, a small plan bubbling up inside him. With a slight nod, Wren agreed- his heartbeat swelled up into his throat. Until the moon sat at its peak in the sky, he taught the mermaid to play.

“Ah,” the mermaid said, suddenly. One of the strings had cut into the mermaid’s fingers, soft from never having played the instrument and thin from being in the water.

“Don’t worry,” said Wren as he dug through the things on his bed. “I can fix everything…”

The mermaid offered him its wounded hand, looking up at him expectantly. Wren’s heartbeat clouded his mind as he approached the mermaid, the thing he had been waiting for. This was his last chance at an escape.

Wren leapt to cover the mermaid’s mouth with his blanket, tackling the mermaid to the ground.

“Ah! What are you doing!” the mermaid shouted, but Wren muffled the words with the blanket, suffocating them away. His eyes widened at his own actions, working purely off of adrenaline.

“I didn’t think it was true,” he said. “But I’ve been patient enough… I’m not letting you get away.” With the mermaid writhing in his grasp, Wren sliced open part of the mermaid’s tail with a sharpened scrap of metal from the prison bed, careful not to make a fatal puncture. The blood loosened his grip as the mermaid made to crawl back toward the window, a handful of flesh starting to fall away from its tail. Wren scooped his arms under the mermaid’s body, throwing both of them back to the ground as the mermaid slammed its limp, bleeding tail wildly. Wren held the mermaid away from the moonlight to keep it from changing back to water, his whole body weight wrestling it flat against the cold stone of the floor. “The secret-” he gasped out between ragged breaths, “to immortality… I should thank you.” He laughed, the kind of laugh when everything is wrong, the kind of laugh that makes a person sick. “I won’t be dying tomorrow when they hang me.” He’d never been one for raw fish, but he’d never been one to die, either.

The mermaid went limp in his arms.

“Don’t play dead,” he said, scolding it after swallowing its flesh. Even if he couldn’t prove his innocence, he could finally escape his conviction. He released the mermaid from the blanket, then cut the cloth into strips.

The mermaid hissed at him, clawed at his arms as he wrapped the mermaid’s wounds.

“Go off if you want,” he said, trying to sound dismissive. “Makes no difference to me, now.”

The mermaid did, falling from his window, still glimmering as bright as before. He held the cut off scales in his hand, an exhausted, empty sigh leaving his body as he watched the mermaid swim off into the starry ocean.