La Sirena
Flash Fiction Story
By Lorette C. Luzajic
after Island of Dead Dolls photography series, by Rebecca Bathory (England) contemporary
The canals of Xochimilco at dawn. The ahuejote branches waved lazily above the festive flat-bottomed boats, and the winter sun dazzled on the emerald surface of the waters. Maren had told him over and over, of course, but nothing could have prepared Devland for the beauty here.
As the trajinero embarked on the journey, Dev tried to wrap his head around the fact that Maren was, as of yesterday, officially his wife. It had not been easy to find an officiant who would marry them on the island. And it had been even more difficult to overcome the reticence of their circle. Dev’s friends thought Maren was dark and peculiar. And her family felt he was bad luck, apparently carrying some kind of cloud in his aura. He suspected these vague superstitions were mostly about his humble position as a sales manager for kitchen supplies. Maren’s dream was a romantic wedding on the macabre Isla de las Munecas in Mexico City. They married in a small, private legal ceremony last afternoon at the city hall in their home city, then flew across the southern border for their honeymoon. They were determined that no one else interfere with their happiness.
Devland had grown used to Maren’s penchant for magic and poetry. The esoteric and mythic elements of life had been sorely lacking in his own until she entered into it. He’d never read Keats or vampire books before her or thought much about old worlds and castles or curses. Now he felt the universe open to him in ways he’d never experienced, layers and undercurrents rippling all around them. Her beauty was downright ethereal, but that was just the surface. The real magic was in how alive she made him feel, as if every moment crackled with portent and possibility.
A parallel trajinera with mariachi cargo erupted into song, and Dev wrapped his arm around his beaming wife. They soaked up the rising warmth of morning, waving at the merry musicians. After a while, their guide started to fill them in on the legend of Doll Island. Maren had already told Dev the heartbreaking legend of the place they were headed to, a vestige of Aztec chinampas, once feats of innovative agriculture, today draped with hanging dolls. The chinampa of the munecas had left his family to live as a hermit in the 50s. As the story was told, Don Julián Santana Barrera had encountered a tragedy, a young girl floating face down in the sparkling waters. The next day, her doll had washed up on his shore. Devastated, he’d rescued the doll and created a shrine for the little lost girl on his island. In the long years of isolation ahead, Barrera began collecting discarded dolls and fixing them to trees in her honour. Eventually, tourists started bringing dolls and adding them. There were tales of hauntings here, of course, glass eyes moving open and closed, articulated plastic arms waving, muffled whispers and crying babies.
At the turn of the millennium, and fifty years of living off the water, the elderly island warden had been found drowned. La Isla de las Macunas became a tourist hot spot ever after.
Last night, the couple had celebrated their nuptials with ridiculous licuachelas on a patio near their hostel, giant micheladas blending beer, slushy fruits and gooey spices with an outrageous crown of gummy bears, celery salt, and candy ribbons. Maren told Dev breathlessly how she had dreamed of Mexico. They had already gone inside the cathedral on the zocalo, where the saints were covered in gold and heaps of Milagros, tiny charms of appendages like legs and breasts and eyes. Maren told him that the Aztec sunstone had been excavated just outside, the site of ancient sacrificial rituals. The earth still shrouded walls of skulls, she said, and he shuddered at the thought. Prisoners of war picked clean, their bones stacked together.
Only Mexico! Dev had exclaimed lightly, and Maren’s brow furrowed. Oh, no, she said. Death is universal, integral to our stories. She’d enlightened him then: he had not known that Stonehenge was a cemetery. Her own Danish background was more reserved, but no different. She’d told him a terrible tale about a maiden named Aino, how she thought twice about her mismatched marriage and flung herself into the sea. After Aino drowned, she turned into a fish and haunted the sea eternally. It was grisly folklore, Maren conceded. She would prefer the alternate version for herself…Aino as a mermaid rather than a perch.
The island felt ominous when they landed. Dev indulged Maren as long as she needed to roam under the dangling boughs of lush leaves and dead babies. He could hear Maren laughing along the shore, ahead of him as he walked slowly, talking with their guide. I don’t believe in curses, he said, and the boatman chuckled grimly. It doesn’t matter who believes, he said matter of factly.
After a while, Dev couldn’t hear Maren at all. He heard a strange humming from the trees, faint howling cries that echoed over the waters. From the worry on his face, he wondered if the boatman heard it, too. They called out for Maren but there was no reply. They hurried to catch up with her, to no avail. Dev’s beautiful bride was floating like Ophelia among the foliage in the canal, her fiery tresses feathering out around her, scales and fins already forming from her limbs under the water.
Lorette C. Luzajic’s flash fiction is widely published and anthologized, taught in workshops, nominated, awarded, and has been translated into Urdu, Spanish, and Arabic. She is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review and The Mackinaw.
Lorette C. Luzajic
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