The Little Mermaid Who Hated Cutlery

✦ Story Aesthetic ✦

Seven forks are too many.

🫧 Desperation doesn't make you stupid. It just makes you incredibly willing to sign contracts with witches who have questionable taste in decor.

I had never seen a cave try so desperately to look creepy.

Mira's grotto was large, damp, and full of details that, taken individually, might have inspired a flicker of fear - skulls carefully arranged along the walls, black candles dripping wax into vaguely sinister shapes, a darkness that thickened in the corners as if it had decided to move in - but that, put all together, mostly gave the impression of someone who had read the description of "evil witch's lair" once and had tried to recreate it from memory, with approximate results.

The skulls, for instance, were all fish. Not particularly large fish, either: mostly mackerel, with a couple of herrings placed higher up, probably to give a sense of hierarchy.

<Like the decor?> Mira asked, noticing where my eyes had landed, with a tone that betrayed a completely misplaced pride. <I did it myself. Gives the right idea, doesn't it? Power. Mystery. A touch of... danger.>

I couldn't answer her - not yet, I would only lose my voice later, during the negotiation - but if I could have, I would have asked her why "danger" included a floral curtain hanging awkwardly over what I suspected was the entrance to her personal pantry, visible right behind the cauldron.

Mira was actually called Ursola - I had learnt that from my grandmother, who always spoke of her with a mixture of disdain and caution, the way you talk about a distant relative who always turns up at weddings uninvited. But the first day I had arrived at her grotto, still uncertain whether it was really the right choice, she had corrected me straight away.

<Ursola is a stage name,> she had said, waving a hand as if to shoo the very idea away. <Too dramatic. I am a professional, darling. My name is Mira, and I mean business.>

I should have been suspicious immediately. In my experience - limited, I admit, to three hundred years spent almost entirely underwater - anyone who feels the need to specify that they mean business, usually doesn't.

But I was desperate, and desperation, I have discovered, is a terrible judge of character.

I told her - with the voice I still had at that moment, and which I would soon bitterly regret losing - what I wanted. Legs. The world above the surface. The prince I had saved from drowning two weeks before, and whom I hadn't been able to stop thinking about since, not so much out of love as out of a kind of obsessive curiosity that in retrospect I should have recognised as a rather serious warning sign.

Mira listened to it all with the air of someone who has heard that same story many times before - which, I suspect, was exactly true - nodding in the right places, murmuring <mm> and <I see> with a timing that seemed more rehearsed than felt.

<I can do it,> she said at last, when I had finished. <Human legs, human voice - no, wait. Human voice, no. I need that.>

I blinked.

<For the spell,> she clarified, as if it were obvious. <Power must be exchanged for something of equivalent value. You want an enormous gift - a whole body, practically, rewritten from scratch - and I need something just as big in return. Your voice is perfect. Beautiful, everyone says so. Such a shame you have to give it up, but,> she added, with a shrug that was meant to look apologetic and failed completely, <business is business.>

I should have asked her more. I should have asked her exactly what she intended to do with my voice, where it would end up, whether she would give it back if it all went wrong. Above all, I should have asked her about the other mermaid she - I only realised in that moment, replaying a detail I had let slip by too quickly - had mentioned while rubbing her hands together.

<I've done this other-> she had said, before quickly correcting herself. <Once. Just once.>

I asked her none of this. I was too busy imagining legs, dry land, a prince looking at me with eyes different from the ones he used for his sisters - and that, I now know, is exactly the kind of distraction that professional sea witches thrive on.

<So,> Mira said, rubbing her hands together again, this time with an enthusiasm that, retrospectively, should have worried me a lot more. <Shall we begin?>

I nodded.

It was the last decision I made with full awareness of what I was doing.