Episode 5 - The three mermaids

The Mermaid of the Concrete Ocean: This wistful vignette beautifully conveys the intrigue and longing inherent in allowing oneself to immerse in fantasy. The narrator, a freelance art journalist, has sought out to interview the model who posed for a series of mermaid paintings from an artist now long dead. The wheelchair-bound, now a 94-year-old woman has retreated into her 12th story Manhattanefficiency for a long time. It serves as a capsule for a bygone era. Above the chaise is the previously unknown final painting from the mermaid series: a half-submerged [assumed] mermaid looks longingly back toward the land and a lighthouse. The elderly woman refuses to speculate on the artist’s choice of her, a life-long paraplegic as the model. But she does relate a 70-year-old secret in the form of a tale told to her by the artist. Allegedly, a couple of years before their collaboration, in the summer of 1937, the artist found the upper torso of a woman washed up on the Atlantic City boardwalk by the high tide . . . And it occurs to me then that possibly none of what I’m hearing is the truth, that she’s spinning a fanciful yarn so I won’t be disappointed, lying for my benefit, or because her days are so filled with monotony and she is determined this unusual guest will be entertained. I push the thoughts away. The careful parallelisms between the characters and skirting of fantasy make this a beautiful piece, wrapped in mystery. I welcome you back to yet another tale in the company of Mermaids, with me your hostess Ana Karennina:

A wish to be normal and a life that becomes everything but. A Mermaid’s Wish.   Taem wants to be a normal mermaid, unremarkable, and blend into the background. What she finds is that she is the kind of woman who makes things happen, and while her body is unremarkable, her personality gets her noticed.   Sardu is the prince of mermen who notices the sharp-tongued organizational wizard, and he wants her for his own. The trouble is, how can he get to her with protocol blocking his every path?    A Mermaid’s Wish. Welcome back to another episode of Mermaids, on this beautiful Tuesday with me your hostess Ana Karennina.

https://anchor.fm/mermaids/message “The Drowned Mermaid”, which originally appeared in the magazine, Realms of Fantasy. This story is one of the few that take place in southern California, where he lived for a short stint in the late 90s. Christopher Barzak wrote it after walking along a strip of beach one night, down below a short cliff where these amazingly beautiful houses were perched above with these decks that came out from the cliffside almost like small piers themselves. Down below the decks, though, he noticed groups of people huddle in sleeping bags along the breaker rocks, and asked the friend he was walking with who would be sleeping under a deck in sleeping bags like that. “They’re homeless,” was my friend's answer, and he realized he had had trouble placing what should have been easily perceived because he found himself in a different landscape from the one he was used to back in Ohio. He started to think about the people in the amazingly beautiful houses above the decks, and the people sleeping below those decks, in their torn-up sleeping bags, and thought he saw a large tail flip out in the moon-spangled ocean, which altogether was the elements that led to the creation of this story.

A sexy, sleek-tailed monster. Zantu has evaded the mate-bond for thirty-five years, dodging promiscuous mermaids with vile intents. Unlike mermaids, mermen bond for life, and Zantu refuses to accept the heartbreak most mermen die of. That is, until the glint of gold catches his eye, and a simple salvage mission turns to passion. Now he's bonded to a human. A woman looking for a reason to live. Briana thinks her life is over after the loss of her child. Instead, she falls into the arms of a merman who is anything but cold-blooded. He's wild, seductive, and sets her blood on fire every time he touches her, and soon she begins to need him for more than his magic to breathe underwater. He might just give her a new purpose. But as dangers encroach from every side, Zantu must choose; keep his new mate at his side or keep her safe. Either way, he's sure he'll end up with a broken heart. Content Warning: Explicit love scenes, dangerous mermaids, and sexy merman secrets. Guaranteed HEA with no cliffhangers. Intended for mature audiences.

Good day, and welcome back to Mermaids, with me, your hostess Ana Karennina. Today I want to just have a chat and allow you to enjoy a journey where I share some secrets of the deep. After I will carve up two delicious stories as a Bonus For this episode.

I welcome you back to Mermaids, I am your hostess Ana Karennina.  Kindly allow me to pass my apologies for being absent from Mermaids. Because of my condition, I couldn’t place any broadcast. I understand I have lots of pending pieces, and will work hard to make up for being absent by posting twice a week. But, With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts. I guess “The fact that we are living does not mean we don’t get sick.” For the following story, Rake Up, we can learn that in our daily life, we encounter people who are angry, deceitful, intent only on satisfying their own needs. There is so much anger, distrust, greed, and pettiness that we are losing our capacity to work well together. Greed is a bottomless pit that exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction. Enjoy.

“The three mermaids” describes the life of the ocean nymphs, daughters of the feared god Neptune. By chance, the mermaids arrive aboard a fishing vessel, falling in love with three sailors who love them dearly and wish to have them by their side.

To follow, Skye's Lure number 1 & 2 to follow in later on the episode: Legend of the Mer:  The Retelling. "A lovely tale well told, and something perfect to read along with a hot drink on a grey winter's day. Or with a glass of wine on a summer beach."

When I was a child there was a period of time when my family lived like gypsies. My parents had sold their city house and were looking for a piece of property, far off the beaten path in the foothills of Northern California. Before they settled on an exact piece of land we set up camp at a riverside campground—the four of us (my parents and my sister and I) lived in a beat-up old trailer. My sister and I spent most days playing in the creek that flowed into the river, and swimming in the river, and reading on the sandy shores. It was around this time that my mom obtained a copy of Andersen's Fairy Tales and I was the first subject to the dark tales within. Among the stand-outs was The Little Mermaid, complete with painful stabbing feet. (At the risk of outing my age, this was prior to Ariel of Disney fame!) Needless to say every dive under the clear blue waters I imagined myself to be a mermaid. And so began my love affair with these fabled beauties and beasts. I welcome you back to Mermaids, I am your hostess Ana Karenina. Today I will be reading: The Mermaid of Druid Lake:

My interest in Driftglass stemmed from reading a James Blish short story called Surface Tension. In that story, humans have to adapt to an ocean planet by becoming something more than human, but (if I remember correctly) certain basic human drives remain consistent, such as the need to know what lies beyond the world of comprehension. It features an exotic locale and plenty of vividly imagined creatures, and the undersea setting and the microscopic nature of the neo-humans make it a memorable science fiction story, intended to invoke the sacred sense of wonder. Driftglass is exotic as well, although in a quite different way. In the near future of this world, men and women are transformed by their government into modified amphibious human beings with gills, who traverse undersea depths at ease trying to install oil plants and such like structures deep down in the ocean. It is a far more nuanced take on transformation, and transcendence, arguing (as it seems to do) on the one hand that humans deal with change, even radical physical augmentation, in a surprisingly straightforward way, and, on the other hand, that this inability to understand the significance of what such transformation might entail becomes our own undoing. The central metaphor of the story is the eponymous 'driftglass', which are otherwise ordinary pieces of glass transformed by the ocean into beautiful objects. However, seeing beauty in such things is a tragically human initiative, not conducive to Nature and what Nature might have in store for us. This is emphasized by the ugly covering of black silica on the skin of the aquamen who are brought in after the accident out at sea, by the end of the novel, mirroring the protagonist's fate. Human notions of beauty and transcendence are not necessarily concomitant. However, during the fishing expedition, there is a hint of an exuberant, joyous thrill of the hunt, wherein the human does so while being an 'equal' to that of fish. This can be seen as one of the advantages of such a transformation, which allows the human being to become in a sense closer to his animal counterpart. The aquamen seem at ease in such a setting, suggesting that such a transformation is not necessarily completely at odds with human behaviour either. On the contrary, it reinforces the joy of the hunt, emphasizing what is very much a human endeavour. The tragic consequences that occur a day later, suggest that such a transformation requires surrender to the vagaries of Nature. Transformation does not entail control. This might seem to be an obvious enough point, but it is not a laboured one. What is an obvious gain, a new significance in a science fictional treatment, and the emphasis on 'ordinary' men and women only seeks to heighten such an understanding.