Throwback Thursday: ‘Birdie’ by Brenda Carre

On that wind-tossed autumn night off the coast of Inach Isle, the Vision ran aground on the Pinnacles. No rain — just a fetch like a fist. 

Lord Calibari and two of his merfolk came that night to save me. Demons came too, as they will to a place of death and dying. As the Vision splintered down faster than a mind might believe, Calibari and his sisters defied death to pull me and three sailors to dry land with their strong-webbed fingers. 

We were saved temporarily — if you could call it so — from the merciless hunger of the demons.

Yet I was pregnant.

Once ashore, grief-struck, terrified, I went into labour. The sailors who’d flotsamed ashore with me deserted. Base and miserable souls. I birthed my boy on the shingle here by the sea, on a bed of dry seagrass tugged from the high tide line. 

Lord Calibari’s two sisters shed their sea fins to help me, their green faces fierce in the light of a storm-angered moon. Calibari himself stood naked as a lightning bolt, watching for trouble at the edge of the seastrand, those rare-seen land legs of his a white glimmer in the dark.

I looked at the one sister as she gripped my shoulders. I saw the other’s hands between my knees as she knelt ready to deliver my babe. I bit against a piece of manzanita driftwood and pushed my babe out. 

His first wails were drowned by the roar of the waves and the scream of the wind beyond this haven.