1.

The first time Silicia sees her barely counts as a meeting, because she only puts it together months later.
It's a muggy Saturday morning and she is 9. The diffuse light of the rising sun dances on the ocean's waves as she climbs over the promenade's handrail. Her hometown's rocky shore is strewn with thick patches of sharp-edged pacific oysters and slippery algal meadows that sway like millions of tiny green feathers when the tide comes in.

When Silicia makes it down to the water, her clothes are dirty and her hands scuffed up, but she doesn't care. She has just found out that her parents are divorcing, and this is the first place she could think of going after storming out on them. Down here she's still visible from the promenade, but unlikely to be found, which is enough.

She huffs out a few laboured breaths as she watches the fishing boats go out to sea across the bay, the steady crashing of the waves against rock soothing her.
Right by Silicia's foot, there's a crack in the rock large enough for a few barnacles to have made a home there. Their cirri flick out again and again as the ocean drives debris and foam over the tiny tide pool's surface. She thinks it looks like a peaceful existence.

A little while later, as Silicia is considering dangling her feet into the ocean, she catches a movement out of the corner of her eye that stands out against the water's persistent motion.
It's only the flick of a tail between the rocks, a little further down the coast. She thinks it might be a seal, at first, though seeing one on the rocky part of the beach is rare. Curious, she takes a halting step towards the spot, but just then her mother calls her name from above and so she turns to her instead.

2.

It's only a little under a year later that she finds herself at the ocean again, this time at the outskirts of town. Here, the land slopes down gradually, the cliffs and rocks peter out and make way for a slim sandy beach. It's usually boring, because the deeper water right in front of it prevents anything interesting from being washed up, but it isn't today. Today, she has snuck out to visit the wreck of the ship that ran aground here in last week's storm.

It's a small private sailboat. The way her mast has folded over the hull lets the sea breeze play in her sails, slapping the lateen against gleaming white wood with a crack, crack crack. Half her bow is resting below the water's surface. There had been talk of repairing and refloating her, but the town had so far been unable to locate the ship's owner, which has given the local children a window of time in which to explore the unattended wreck.
Silicia pulls herself up onto deck by the shiny metal handrail that runs partway down the ship's sides. It's warmed by the sun and slightly sticky from the sea water that has dried on it.

The wooden floor under her green sandals is littered with small snails, the same kind as live en masse on the lower parts of the rocks; their tiny bodies forming a gradient from where the ocean swallows the ship's aft to the stern which sticks up into the sky. Silicia makes sure not to step on any of them, because they can't see her coming and scuttle away like insects can, so it wouldn't be fair.
The heavy door to the cabin is shut, but its lock has been inexpertly destroyed already. She peeks inside at soggy carpeting and general disarray, and disappointedly lets the door fall shut again. There is a mystique that surrounds a shipwreck always, but it shatters like a dropped snowglobe in her hands when she sees how modern it looks inside. Shiny metal and an inbuilt sofa do not hold a candle to what she imagined she might find inside.

Just because she can, Silicia clambers onto the boat's roof, smiling into the wind that whips her hair to and fro. Jumping down, as it turns out, is scarier than climbing up, but she manages to carefully lower herself back onto the deck and from there back onto solid ground now she's seen all there is. It's no wonder she is the only gawker here.

She startles when a voice calls out to her from not too far away:
"Little girl," it says, "down here."

There behind the boat's hull, a woman's face watches her from the water. She looks severe, with small eyes and low-set eyebrows, her mouth wide and ever so slightly curved down. When Silicia spots her, she smiles, but the movement doesn't raise the corners of her lips much beyond forming a straight line.
There is kelp in her dark hair, falling around her shoulders like it grew right from her head.

"Who are you?" Silicia asks, creeping closer. The woman is swimming closer, too.

"Sweet thing, you put too much stock in names..." she admonishes.

"Who, me?"

"You. Humans."

"But," Silicia says, not understanding. Then when the woman pulls herself onto the sand, she can see for herself that she isn't human. Her torso trails off into a flat white belly like a flounder's, and her body ends in a wide, brown spotted fish tail.
She doesn't look anything like the mermaids in her story books, and although she is ashamed of herself for it, Silicia cannot stop staring at her- at it?

The fish woman preens under her undivided attention, rolling her tail to make the scales shimmer in the sun and flicking her fins.

"You're a mermaid," Silicia finally stutters out. It makes the creature smile.

"Nooo, no," it singsongs, "I'm a siren. I eat little girls who come too close to the water."

It lunges at her and Silicia shrieks, turning as quickly as she can manage on the sand to bolt. The siren's laughter follows her, and although it surely cannot follow, she doesn't stop running until she reaches her father's house.
He asks her what happened, but wide eyed and panting, she cannot find any words.

3.

Silicia is an ill-tempered teen by the time she dares step foot onto the shore again. She has convinced herself that sirens aren't real, can't be real, because stories about mythical creatures are for children, and a child she is not.
She's just looking for a place to be away from crying old people and distant relatives who claim to know her because they held her once when she was a babe. Her grandfather's funeral has been miserable, for all the reasons except the one expected at the event.

So she shucks her glossy black dress shoes at the edge of the promenade and delights in the tender fabric of her skirt tearing and getting muddy as she clambers over the rocks. She is so, so tired of being dragged around like a pet dog where ever her parents please.
Feeling very rebellious, she lets her bare feet hang into the surf. It's a warm day, and the cool water feels nice after standing all morning.

Then something grabs her ankle and yanks.

Crying out in fear, Silicia throws her weight back, only just succeeding in staying on the rock, although her hips clear the edge and the bottom of her dress gets soaked. Frantically, she kicks, but after the one yank, her leg is released without a fight.
A head surfaces next to her, far too close for comfort, and she recognizes it immediately. Up close, the siren's eyes are pure black with no iris to speak of and her skin is rough and thin, nothing like the texture of human skin. It fits somewhat oddly over her bones, hinting at an unfamiliar distribution of muscle and subcutaneous fat below. And again the creature is laughing at her.

"Don't worry, little girl, you are way too small yet to be a worthwhile meal."

When it grins, numerous needle-thin teeth glint at Silicia from between its parted libs.

"Then why did you do that?" she demands, shrinking away when the siren hoists its upper body onto the rock next to her on strong arms.

"Because it was funny," the creature answers, and Silicia's fear turns to anger.

"That's so mean! What the hell!"

The siren only keeps on laughing. It wiggles its body and stretches out on the warm rock like a cat in a sunbeam, blinking up at her with sodden lashes. It's beautiful, shimmering in the light, but no less scary for it.

"You may call me Mira," it offers, unbothered by Silicia's glare, "Since you asked the last time we met."

"Why do you enjoy scaring me so much, Mira?"

"It's in my nature, little girl. Why did you come here, if I scare you so?"

Silicia bristles, but getting up and leaving now without seeing this encounter through is not an option. So she says, "I'm curious."

"It's in your nature," Mira tells her. She tells her a lot of things that afternoon, about the nets of fishing boats and the seasonal change in the ocean's currents, about lost whale calves and sailors who fall from their ships and are eaten by the denizens of the sea. Silicia in turn tells the siren about her parents, the big run down townhouse in her mother's home town, about her friends from school and about forests and meadows far away, but she feels woefully inadequate by comparison. Her little world ends in the alley behind school and at the on-ramp to the highway.
Nevertheless, the creature listens with rapt attention like no one has ever quite listened to Silicia before. It is enchanting, being the focus of Mira's attention, and as the daylight begins to run out she knows she will come back.

And come back she does, the day after and the day after that, and for all the rest of the week until she has to get on the train back to her mother's place. But Mira doesn't show herself again.

4.

The very next summer Silicia skips down the wide stone steps to the cordoned off bathing area at the edge of town with a backpack full of trinkets and walks all the way along the beach until the sand gives way to rocks, and finally she's at the spot across from the commercial piers where she climbed down half a decade ago.
She has grown a few centimeters and gained even more in confidence, and so this time she is determined to bring Mira something that will be interesting enough that she will come to meet her again.

It is a scorchingly hot summer's day, only a thin ribbon of clouds trailing along the horizon and sweating tourists everywhere. Silicia fears that with all the ruckus her siren might not show, but once she leaves the sandy beach behind, the people get sparser and sparser. Still she keeps going for almost two hours before a splashing sound next to her gives away she is no longer alone.

"Little girl, you came back," the siren's melodic voice greets her, her head bobbing in the water a meter out. Her dark hair glints in the sun, spread out around her like an oil slick. Silicia clambers down to sit at the edge of the rock eagerly, with her feet in the water and her sandals still on.

"I'm not little anymore."

Although she tries to sound contrite, Silicia fails utterly to wipe the smile off her face. It's been a rough year for her in school, and thoughts of her graduation and future are beginning to weigh her shoulders down.
The siren's head tilts, gaze turning analytical. It makes her look even less human, and that gives Silicia an odd little thrill. Just like the protagonists of the children's books she grew up with, she has a supernatural secret that's just hers and neatly apart from everything that sucks in her life.

"Too little still to be worth eating," Mira concludes, and then she finally lets Silicia tell her about the things she brought to show her. Their own private cultural exchange program at the water's edge, she thinks.

When the sun's path overhead has lead it behind the city at the girl's back, Mira presses a seashell into her hands as a goodbye. It's flat and oval, and it shimmers like a rainbow as Silicia tilts it in her hands. She's a little dizzy from not eating all day when she gets up, but all in all, she goes home happy that day for the first time in months.

5.

Although her siren has never showed up twice in a row before, Silicia comes back the next day armed with a sandwich and more knicknacks in her backpack. The rainstorm that finally broke in the night has rendered the whole town slippery, although the rising sun is already drying the concrete and leaving the negatives of shadows on the rocks at the beach.

She nearly breaks her ankle climbing down, and the waterfront is littered with heaps of torn off kelp and algae just waiting for someone to slip on them.
Even if Mira doesn't show, it's such a beautiful morning that Silicia would be fine spending all day walking the beach alone.

But surprisingly, she does show. As Silicia loses her footing on the rock, a hand shoots up from the water to hold her other ankle in place, and she catches herself on her hands instead of falling backwards into the sea.
She drops into an awkward crouch, frowning down at her palms. There are little bits of grit and crushed sea shell embedded in her skin, and small rivulets of blood have welled up where it's wholely scraped away, merging into streams that run down to her wrists and drip into the water.

When she looks up, she finds the creature's gaze fixed on her hands as well, pupils blown as her eyes track the path of Silicia's blood. And suddenly, she remembers that she's a siren, not a mermaid. That she says she eats people, and that she's said it enough times now that Silicia doesn't think she's joking anymore.
There's an incoherent apology on her lips as she springs to her feet, almost overbalancing in her haste, but Mira doesn't move to steady her again. Instead her head tips up very slowly to look at Silicia's flushing face, expression unreadable.

With a nervous laugh Silicia fumbles around in her backpack until her fingers close around one of the things she brought for Mira. She thrusts the little plastic toy at her and flees.

+1

She's 27 when her father dies, and it's been a decade since she's even set foot into his house in the town by the sea. Being there again is strange without him, like he might round the corner to the living room at any second. It's hard and it's unfair, but it's not a unique experience.
And she could have handled it no problem, if it hadn't been for the reading of the will a week later.

She has his house almost completely cleaned out when she finds out that she, his only daughter, won't inherit it, or any of the things he promised her as a child would one day be hers. His girlfriend of 8 months looks at her with pity, wringing her hands in her lap uneasily. Silicia has nothing to say to her. In fact, she has nothing to say to anyone, and no one stops her as she stiffly stands and stalks out of the lawyer's office.

The waterfront is deserted when she arrives shortly before sunset, suitcase in tow. She'd been expecting to stay for at least a month, so it took hours to gather together her things and fit them back into bags already stowed in the attic, not to mention to dissolve her 'keep' and 'donate' boxes. The whole thing makes her feel sick - one last betrayal. As she stands on the promenade looking out over the ocean, she can finally breathe again. The cold, salty air burns in her lungs but she inhales deeply, coughing at the irritation in her throat.

It's hard wrestling her suitcase over the handrail, but she manages it, even if not everything in it necessarily survives the drop down to the rocks. Silicia could not care less right now. Determinedly, she starts off in the direction of the docks, her luggage clattering against the rocks behind her as she drags it along mercilessly.
Eventually it gets too annoying - she is so insatiably exhaustingly angry she cannot be bothered to deal with things like being an adult right now. She abandons her life's posessions by the side of the wall and strides on, hands shoved into her pockets against the evening chill.

The water darkens to an endless black expanse when the sun's light is swallowed by the horizon, but Silicia doesn't stop even with visibility diminishing fast. It's at least a two hour walk to the edge of town from where she set off. Not wanting to risk human interaction, she passes the docks and sticks to the shadows while workers pass overhead.
The houses get sparser and sparser as night falls, but there are no stars to be seen from here, only the reflection of the moon on the water.

"Girl," calls a familiar creature from the sea, and Silicia finally stops, sinks to her knees on the rock and spills her woes and tears to the dark silhouette on the water.

Mira listens, pressed close to the edge of where ocean meets stone until she hoists herself up on strong arms to embrace the crying girl.
Her skin is as cool and slick as it looks, and her hair sticks to Silicia's cheek. The smell of salt and fish drowns out everything as a clawed fingers encircle her wrist to stop her hands from shaking.
Silicia leans into her, tips them back. The cold water is a comfort as she is pulled down to the bottom by loving arms.