Wednesday, October 12, 2011

The Fisherman and The Mermaid


There was once a handsome fisherman, who was afraid of nothing except drowning, who fell in love with a beautiful mermaid. Each night she sung for him under the moon light.
The mermaid couldn't live above the water, and the fisherman couldn't live beneath it.
Every night they meet at the surface, she reaching up from the sea and he leaning over the side of his boat to kiss her red cherry lips.
And every night he felt the kiss a little differently. Sometimes it was gentle like ripples in rock pools, sometimes playful like foam at the edge of the beach, and sometimes wild like the wave pounding themselves against the cliff.
Day by day, breath by breath, he started to taste how dry the air was, and each day he ached for the evening when the mermaid’s kiss would once again wash over him.
The fisherman was happy but love cast a shadow on those it leaves behind, and the shadow is called jealousy. So the fisherman's wife and children knotted together an iron net of wicked, barbed chains and caught the mermaid while the fisherman was fishing else where. They killed the helpless creature quickly with dry knives and burned her body. Since that night the fisherman couldn't find his mermaid. Each time he called for her there were no answer. She never show up again on the sea surface. But he never stop looking for his lost love.
Less than seven kissless nights later the fisherman was found dead curled up in the bottom of his boat like a piece of dry rope. The doctor came to look at him to determine how he had died. He inspected the body carefully and gently. He was a thorough man so he went back to the house and looked at the wife and children too. This made them uncomfortable but nonetheless none of them told him about the mermaid, nor said anything about her murder. The doctor told the cruel family that their fisherman had died of a broken heart. But in his little book he had written what he really knew, strange though it was: the fisherman who was afraid of drowning had suffocated in the dry, dry air, exactly like a fish out of water.

Inspired and taken from The Fisherman and the Mermaid, The Water Book of the Knot-Shop Man
Disclaimers: I do not own the story or the picture

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