Sea Grief by Ashley Van Elswyk

Ashley Van Elswyk is a queer Canadian writer of fiction and poetry, and editorial assistant at Biblioasis. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in From the Farther Trees, Idle Ink, Not Deer Magazine, and the anthologies Eros & Thanatos (Quill & Crow) and Kaleidoscope (Cloaked Press). Outside of writing, she enjoys silent films, collecting old postcards, and spoiling her cat. She can be found on Twitter.

“Sea Grief” is about separation and mourning through my imagining of the immediate aftermath of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” I wanted to portray grief from the perspective of the mermaid’s sisters, who did everything they could to help save their sister from dying, only to lose her anyway. Meanwhile the prince and his new wife—the causes of the mermaid’s death—continue happily with their lives, admiring the sea without ever knowing their connection to it and the effect they’ve forever had on its inhabitants. Beyond grief, this is also a way of understanding the feelings of helplessness that come from loss. I’ve always been interested in exploring “what next” in stories, especially when the answer isn’t as satisfying as we’d hoped, and I enjoyed writing these sisters having to cope with knowing their sister is no longer with them in the way they want—whether she is sea foam, a spirit, or gone in every sense—and that there’s nothing else they can do now but either seek revenge or move on. To that end, I left the ending a little ambiguous regarding the dagger in the sand. Is it a bitter abandonment of the dagger, a continuation of their sister’s rejection of violence, or an omen of revenge to come? There are choices, but none of them are definitively right, and won’t bring back what they’re missing.