The fractals first appear an hour after the strike, like the pristine edges of snowflakes stained into skin.

There was a storm. The thunder made the house shake.

Running down her arms like rivers, they branch out into smaller and smaller segments. Nature’s tattoos, the fossil of an electric charge.

The phone rung, quivering in its hook on the wall.

Lightning’s flowers, the nurse calls them. Lichtenburg scars. Beautiful red ferns with blister blooms that burn so brightly she forgets her own name.

Her sister said she would call at six thirty. She promised to answer.

Ruby_ _roots, painted across her shoulder. Cracks in the bubbling skin that feels like it might just melt all the way off.

She picked up the phone. Its cord jittered like static. __ Her eyes can barely focus, the scars’ stinging is so sharp. Like hot hoarfrost clinging to her body. Every second is another eternity—she wonders if she will ever truly heal.

_And in a flash, her mind went white. _

Ash looked down at her hands. It had been centuries since she devoted her mind, body, and soul to Blaze. She had done it for Mara- her best friend. She had done if for her two wonderful children. She thought Blaze would bring Mara back to life once she joined him. She thought the power she would get from joining him would let her be able to protect her children. She was wrong. He pulled her away from her friends and family and didn’t do shit to bring Mara back. He changed Ash in ways she could never have imagined. She felt numb. It had all started when she walked into that fire, taller than a house, and finally pledged herself to Blaze. That’s how she got the scares that painted her body. There were burn scares scaling up and down her hands, arms, torso, legs, neck, and face. She didn’t care, though. Not anymore. Anymore she didn’t seem to care about anything at all.

A scritch a scratch a little mark

A dimple a pimple a dot

A scar A bruise a permanent tear

Purple blue green

Was it a cat Was it a car Was it another person

Did you fall Did you amke a mistake Did you break your arm on a date

A scar is a scar Beautiful and bruised You are ok

A scar is a scar and I still love you Scars in all

(note: this is a sequel to Siren, more to come!)

While the crew often had their resting hours in the night, I kept the opposite schedule. After all, the seas were always most treacherous after the sun fell past the horizon. It made those who dwelt in the depths of trenches and old wrecks braver, more curious now that their darkness had infected the space above.

The sky was moonless and cloudless, and so gave the impression of being surrounded by thick, imposing black. Only the distant pinpricks of starlight and the glow of oil lanterns shimmering off the waves could be seen beyond the ship’s wooden body.

But in that black, I sensed them. The hulking, writhing presence of my kin. Keeping far below to not stir the water, but still close enough to listen to the song. Maybe bored, maybe restless.

The unfortunates on the night shift shuffled around tiredly, many clutching small mugs of coffee. If they knew of the numerous monstrosities that lurked below, they might perk up a bit. But they didn’t know, and they didn’t care to. That was my job.

Kielman came up the stairs to the quarterdeck, knocking on the railing to not startle me. Her face was pink from the chill breeze, but she hadn’t bothered to put on a jacket, just a woolen cap on her shaved head.

“Hey, Naya. Don’t let me distract ya. Only here to give you the winning from the bet.” She slipped a handful of coins into my pocket, the weight tilting my dress slightly askew. I gave her a toothy smile, and she returned it.

She remained there for a while, looking out into the black with me. I changed my sleepy lullaby to a human song I’d picked up years ago, one about picking flowers in the mountains.

“I like this one. Reminds me of home.” Kielman said brusquely.

I looked back at her and shrugged. Sometimes, we talked in this halted, mute way, especially on slow nights.

“Bet it’s the same to you as your songs are to me, seein’ as you’ve never seen mountains.”

I nod, slowly. I gesture down at the deceptively still water.

“They like it too?” She asked incredulously.

I nod again.

A hearty laugh. “Well I’ll be.”

I wave my hand through the air, mimicking the way the song’s notes swayed high and low.

“Yeah, like waves, I ‘spose.”

She copies my movement, and I catch sight of a scar, rippling messily from her wrist to her elbow. I look away, but she notices my noticing and rubs her hand over it.

“Got that lovely thing from one o’ them. Sharkturtle attack, before ships started hirin’ your ilk. Ain’t the biggest in the sea, but they’ll sure fuck you up and put enough holes in your hull to make it look like a strainer.”

If my tongue wasn’t busy with the song, I might’ve told her that I’d once had a sharkturtle as a companion, back when I still lived as a wild siren. I can imagine how it would paint the line between us deeper. In our comraderie in betting on a poor boy’s foolishness, maybe she, too, was starting to see me as a human. Maybe I was being too human.

Better that I sing my own unearthly music for the monsters below, not play with human songs and notions of nostalgia. Better they don’t forget I have that monstrous blood in me, even with a beautiful face and a sweet song to go with it.

As the silence stretches between us, in all that is brewing but unsayable, she pats my arm and turns to go.

“I’ll leave you to it, then.”

Some small string of kinship tugs on my heart. But my kin are the bodies below, the man-eaters and tentacled things, not the sailor walking forlornly back down to the deck.

TW: c-section trauma

A shiny line crossed her lower abdomen, jagged and dark. The width varied, created by an uncertain scalpel. She dragged a finger along the uneven crease, her nail indenting further. The skin of her stomach seemed to push back, jarring her sliding finger, sticking every few millimeters. The scar felt fragile. Thin. As if it wouldn’t take much pressure to slice her open again. 

She shuddered at the memory, pulling away her shaking hand and her drifting thoughts. She moved it instead to rest on the swaddle of her sleeping baby and her surroundings came back into focus. She could feel the coarse park bench through her thin, flowing skirt. The sky was clear and the sun warmed the parts of her it hit through the fluffy deciduous branches, a slight breeze reminding the people it passed that it won’t be this warm for much longer. She took a deep breath, smelling the gyro place on the corner and soaking in the sounds of older children playing in the grass. She could feel their desperate hold on the summer. The growing wildness of children can never tame the passing of time. 

She glanced down at her baby, sound asleep in his tram, locked in place beside her. He had gotten so big already. Her other hand absently, gently, rubbed her stomach. She huffed at her automatic pull to engage with the moments of his birth. She felt drawn to her undoing, to the reminder of the day she was split open and ripped apart. There was no escaping these thoughts. There hadn’t been for months.

No one can prepare you for the moment your plans dissolve, where one minute you’re laying in a warm hospital bed, waiting patiently for the doctor to tell you it’s time to push so you can meet your beloved baby… then the next minute alarms are going off and you’re being rushed away on a rattling cart to a cold room, aware enough that something is not right, but not conscious enough to scream. Her reality had been ripped away from her so suddenly, just like her baby had been ripped from her womb. She remembered vaguely seeing her husband’s panicked face, the one where he thinks he’s being reassuring but there is clearly terror coming through his eyes.

She took a staggered deep breath, bringing herself to that park bench once again. Her fingers tapped the top of her thumb, alternating stimulus to ground her.

_Pointer–ring–middle–pinky, pointer–ring–middle–pinky. _

Her therapist had told her to take moments like these and delve into the emotion when she could, when she felt safe, to process the feeling instead of repressing it. The last, and only time, she had indulged so recklessly, her husband had found her curled up in a freezing bath, unable to remove herself from the water she had drawn hours prior. 

_Pointer–ring–middle–pinky, pointer–ring–middle–pinky. _

Her limbs had stopped responding after she revisited in her mind the surgery she never wanted to have, the sensation of her entire body going slack, of being dragged under involuntarily because her body had failed her and so medicine had to intervene, all the while mentally clawing toward a consciousness she would not obtain on her own. 

Pointer–ring–middle–pinky, pointer–ring–middle–pinky.

She had remembered the sound of her own pleading, her endless cries turned to shrieks, as she felt nearly every part of what happened to her body. No one else could recall this, of course, because she was unconscious on an operating table. Silent and unmoving.

Pointer–ring–middle–pinky, pointer–ring–middle–pinky.

She hadn’t slept for what felt like weeks, either due to having a newborn or the recurring night terrors that racked her entire being with a similar level of agony to the original event. Therapists and therapies, medications and treatments, were all a whirlwind as her husband desperately tried to find a wisp of the woman he married. Weeks of torment turned to months of hard work and healing. She was much better now.

Pointer–ring–middle–pinky, pointer–ring–middle–pinky. __

“An emergency c-section due to complications” they could not fully explain. Her eyelids fluttered as her fingers moved faster, the grip with her other hand tightening ever so slightly around the up and down of his steady, deep breathing. She took a moment to match his breaths until she could feel her heartbeat and fingers slow. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Once she felt stable, she gently settled both of her hands on the tops of her thighs, palms up, open and inviting to the energy of the light around her. She again grounded herself, rubbing her fingertips this time against the sleeve ends of her buttery soft sweater.

An abyss floated directly under her, threatening to swallow everything that might have once been her. But for now, she was again present, alive, and a mother.

I touch it. Grazing it back and forth with my thumb. It’s a line. Abrupt and slightly distracting. In the dark I can mistake it for a line of muscle. It’s a shadow rather than a real thing. It’s a line rather than an indentation.

If I close my eyes I can imagine a babe. A few days old. Pink with brand newness. Smaller than my stomach it was cut on. I can not hear me cry because I don’t think I did. I can see me in my mothers arms and my dad’s concerned face.

What I wish never to see is me as my mother. Holding my own daughter in the same way. With the same line across her stomach and the same look on my husband’s face. What I want and what god wants… is hopefully one in the same.

But when I dance at night. Freshly bathed and smelling sweet. It’s a shining wave that touches me.

For most of his life, The Pirate engaged in risky behavior. All bets were off when you raced up behind a moving vessel, some with anti-piracy protection like nets, water cannons, or even armed guards. A slip or a fall could lead to instant death. A wrong choice could lead to being hung up and maimed and instant death. The work of an assault rifle aimed at you could lead to bullets and instant death. In all, it was a lot of short-lived bad experiences that added up to death. It was a dangerous work environment.

Despite loving every minute of the thrill, both The Wench and The Captain grew increasingly alarmed by The Pirate's thrill-seeking behavior. As he voyaged into his early teens, both parents, no strangers to the danger themselves, suddenly grew more cautious. The Wench herself oddly became the protective mother.

For one particularly dangerous boarding, The Wench finally put her foot down. There was no way in hell she would let The Pirate go with The Captain on this one. And while he begged, pleaded, and eventually threw a fit not worthy of the maturity of his thirteen years plying the high seas in the family's criminal endeavors, The Wench was not budging. When she had come to a decision, no one overruled The Wench. At almost five feet, she was tiny but terrifying when angry. So, The Captain gathered the crew and set off without his son. The whole adventure went according to plan.

That was not the same experience for The Pirate. While at home and looking for some way to alleviate his boredom, he had been hanging out with his friends in town. A driver lost control of his vehicle, and The Pirate was pinned to the wall at his favorite Pho place. The damage was severe, and he had lost his right forearm. What were the odds?

The Wench had made the decisions she had made for all the right motherly reasons. And neither The Pirate nor The Captain had ever blamed her. What were the odds that it would happen? But The Wench never forgave herself. In trying to keep The Pirate from danger, he had been hurt worse than anyone in The Crew had ever imagined.

The scar ran from upper left side of my forehead to just below my right eye and had sunken deeply into my skin with a burning sensation. It was blood red and made it so I was unable to open my right eye now. Probably for the better, that way both my eyes to have to witness this hideous scar every time I saw my relation.

For weeks now, dark shadows had flown over the clouds of the kingdom. My kingdom— well, soon to be kingdom, I was the prince and my mother had grown deathly ill. Without her there was painic everywhere. Know one new what to do, and now it was up to me to defend the kingdom and everyone in it.

I wasn’t sure, though, if the dragons where going to attack or if they where just scaring us. But, whatever the reason they had to be taken down before it was too late. There was only one way to kill a dragon and that was with an elven sword. Swords so rare that the common man would kill for one. And as a gift for becoming allies with the nearby elven kingdom, they granted us one. But this was a one shot kind of thing. Of If I don’t wound or kill the dragon, then it will know I tried to attack it and kill me. And I shall be the one to slay it.

That was my intention at least. Slay the dragon, become a hero, I was so arrogant, so full of pride that I was blinded by the truth. I failed to slay the dragon and it didn’t kill me, but instead took over my kingdom and left me with a scar across my face as a reminder of what happened. It’s my fault I was blinded and that was my defeat.

It ran from just below her hand up to the tip of her littlest finger. The jagged line pigmentless, throwing into sharp relief the warm coloring of her skin.

The defensive wound never failed to fill her stomach with the ghost of her primal fear but she supposed she should count herself lucky. To this day she couldn’t imagine why the man had attacked. The police had said the drug induced mania had made the man so desperate that he was prepared to kill and loot in order to attain his fix. The only certainty was that if she hadn’t blocked his sweeping blade with her flesh she wouldn’t have a scar. Dead women do not heal, nor does the life in their womb.

She looked at her son then, full of pride and love so large she thought it might burst forth from her and sweep the land of all its dangers. She wished it would. Looking at the little boy of 2, she felt thankful for the scar and knew that she would take much worse and far more often.

During the attack, the man saw the woman block his knife with her bare hands. He scurried away in fear of the woman, for to block the blade, his drug addled mind told him, she herself must be made of iron.

He was right.

Isn’t visible Ain’t hidden Is a large part of my identity Is common May not be important to you, but it’s the world to me Is not quite me Is not embarrassing, but I still don’t want to talk about it Would be a conversational downer Isn’t offensive Has no shape Is mine