Teens Write Fanfic: They Thought She Was a Mermaid and Drowned Her to Prove It

For Teen Week, we reached out to three teenage fan fiction writers and asked them to write a short, politically focused piece of fan fiction. In this story, Megan, a 18-year-old student from the UK, reimagines contemporary xenophobia through the tale of a mermaid ostracized from her community.

_Megan's note: I wanted to write a story about a girl who people think is a mermaid and they drown her to prove it. It's about otherness and people's wariness of difference, and also about slut-shaming. _The extended metaphor of the mermaid is a message that no matter how different you think someone seems, at the end of the day they're still flesh and blood—the same as everyone else. I want it to encapsulate the mentality that people seem to have about foreigners and the fear that some have about people they see as different. It's also a reimagining of the hate crimes I've seen on the news since the Brexit referendum.__

When they are called, the police marvel at how her skin was still pink despite being left on the shore for hours. But nobody came forward to claim her. They decide she is bad luck, a bad omen for the superstitious fishermen who found her. She has unnaturally light hair, piercing eyes, and a mellifluous laugh at such a young age. "She's touched by the fae," the villagers say.

Eventually, a temporary home is found for her. "It's just temporary, mind you," her foster parents say, "I've got a bad feeling about this one."

Everyone watches her as she grows up. She returns to the sea; she dips her toes and chatters to the tide. Her foster parents ask if she could possibly act more like other little girls.

The other children are scared of her. When she sings they clap their hands over their ears, terrified of being hypnotized. Afterwards, they run away. Confused, she wonders what she did to drive them away.

Soon, she is not a little girl anymore. She becomes a woman with saltwater in her hair and sand between her toes. She grows up in many ways, but she's lonely. The fishermen see her at all hours, playing like a child on the beach, amongst the tourist families who watch her with caution. "She's a slut for wearing that swimming costume all day," the fisherman say. "It's disgusting." They call her a siren.

At home, she bares her teeth and looks in the mirror, but she only sees girl-teeth grinning back—no shark or piranha in her smile. After a while, she comes to like the idea of being a creature from the sea.

In school, teachers ignore her answers and scoff at her work. Her notebooks are stolen and scrawled on. "Go back to the sea, bitch," they write.

The boys are told to watch themselves around her and the girls check for webbed toes as they change for gym class.They say she's a witch; a devil. Sometimes, they make her cry and watch curiously. As her shoulders shake, they wait for tiny pearls for drop down her cheeks.

One day she opens her locker and a wave spills out: claws swiped from the market, fish heads, bright pink guts that leave the corridor smelling like an angler's apron. As they pour out, children take pictures and giggle.

It's the summer after that they catch her, walking home late from the swimming pool. She has her headphones in and is deaf to the footsteps approaching. She is defenceless when they gag her. She is defenceless when they check her body meticulously, inch by inch for scales, webbed toes, or fingers. She is defenceless when they hold her under the water, waiting for her tail to form.

They leave her at the bottom of the cliff, snapped and shattered like a delicate conch.

The funeral is fast; the inquiry short. It was suicide, no doubt. There is no obituary or family that claims her, just guilty souls who watch the coffin descend into the ground.

The summer she dies, the catch is rotten. The fish come back blackened as if by oil. The crabs are worse; disfigured with soft shells and little meat. As the nights get shorter and the days colder, people forget about her. "She was just another attention whore," they say. Mermaids are like that, aren't they?

Illustration by Dan Evans