Sea Grief by Ashley Van Elswyk
They say she’s in the wind,
in a sky-home made of clouds,
dancing on sunbeams and moonrays;
but our bodies are flesh and scales
and saltwater sorrow, bitter tears,
and her body is seafoam
mixed with stray hairs, shorn
locks trembling in the water,
seafoam in our mouths, swallowing
our sister, the only way to hold her
through our failing fingers, the dagger
she refused passing from one
hand to another to another,
none of us knowing where
to place it
until one of us throws it upward,
slicing the waves—
clean blade plunging into the sand,
it pierces
the footprints of newlyweds
admiring the sea.
Bio
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.
Author's note
“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.
