What about a mermaid who haunts the ocean floor, terrified of trawling nets that empty the oceans around her?
Perhaps she has always existed, born a mass of eggs, indistinguishable from fish as an infant, deftly avoiding nets that seem to be around more and more often as she grows. Perhaps the drilling screams of oil tankards keep her closer to the surface, freaking out sailors and deckhands when her only objective is survival, is to feed on krill and cod, to sing in efforts to invite a male of her own species closer, not to doom sailors to drowning deaths.
Perhaps she has to consume those rare gullible men who fall to their demise, as the whale meat her ancestors fed upon in winters past is no longer enough to sustain her. Perhaps human activity has changed the mermaids’ migration patterns, as her generation now travels the oceans in schools, as the world is no longer safe enough for mermaids to venture out alone as they did in centuries past.
Would that not be a tragedy? What tale could she possibly tell? Not one a human being like myself could adequately capture, that much is clear. We live in different worlds - mine a mere landscape damaged by human greed, hers an oceanic environment crippled by the same.
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