I’m new to Substack, but what I was originally drawn to was its potential for sharing serialized fiction. I haven’t even dived into exploring what this platform has to offer in terms of fiction yet—in fact, the farthest I’ve gotten is a quick Google search for “serial fiction on Substack.” What I took away from my meager research was that you should definitely have a completed draft written before you divvy up whatever it is into smaller portions to post at some regular intervals. I’m not one to be intentionally subversive, probably stubborn is a better word—I guess I just have to learn my lessons on my own, but I’m just going to entirely ignore that likely wise and very correct advice.
You see, as I mentioned before, I’ve been working on this contemporary gothic novel (it’s got witches and multi generational curses and other paranormal creatures, and it’s just bonkers) on and off—between pregnancies and miscarriages, naptimes and daycare hours—for the last four years. I am obsessed with it, I am committed to it, and I intend to complete this draft of it by the end of 2024 (hold me to that!).
But I just want to. Finish. Something. Now. Just to prove to myself I have the follow through necessary.
Get it off my desk, like Taylor.
Just to be clear, I’m not serializing the promised Practical Magic meets Buffy novel here, but I have a short story that I started a while ago that maybe deserves some love and attention. It has mermaids too, so this summer is the time!
Do I have a full story written? No. Of course not. Is posting the first half of this story to Substack and sharing it with all of you just the incentive I need to finish it? That’s what I think!
So here it is, the first bit of a short story, to be shared in 1200 or so word increments, weekly-ish, until it comes to some hopefully satisfying conclusion. It is all for free, of course. Please send words of encouragement, praise, and/or your preferences in the style of a choose your own adventure book (because that could also be fun!).
June is seasick as she stands on the deck of the ferry boat that will take her back to the island. She feels the familiar weight in her stomach, the wetness of her tongue, and it reminds her that she does not belong.
Siren Island was once hers. Her dad reminded her of that on the last voicemail he’d left.
I need your help now, Junebug. It’s time for you to come home.
But home isn’t supposed to feel foreign. Or rather, home makes June feel like a foreigner.
As the choppy water shoulders up against the boat’s hull, the line of the horizon bends to kiss the bow, and all the objects that had been so loyally solid only moments earlier give in to the irresistible undulation. Everything melts willfully; only June resists, unswayed by the ocean’s affectionate overture. She takes a deep breath of salty air and tries to remember the feel of solid ground beneath her feet.
Closer to the front of the boat a coltish boy holds up a pair of binoculars as he stands on his tip toes and wraps his arms around the ledge.
“I think I see one, Max!” a man shouts, arbitrarily pointing at the water. “Hurry up, don’t miss it!” He teases his son. The father allows his son another moment’s strain as he continues to try to muscle himself into a better viewing position before he hefts the boy up by his armpits.
“I don’t see it,” Max says. “Where is she, dad? Where’d she go?”
“She must have dived under again, Max. They’re fast swimmers, remember? Keep those binoculars Grandpa bought you handy. You’ll need to be ready at a moment’s notice if you want to catch a real mermaid.”
June has to roll her eyes at that. There hasn’t been a confirmed mermaid sighting in well over a hundred years, not since the existence of a mythological creature required more substantial proof than the drunken testament of a fisherman washed ashore. Grainy photographs of aggrandized ocean debris or a pixelated image of what could be a face on the ledge of a rocky inlet just didn’t cut it these days. And yet, it always amazes June how even the most pragmatic residents of Siren could so heartily indulge in such whimsical hope despite the futile evidence to support it.
It’s not that mermaids didn’t exist. June wasn’t bitter enough to ever utter such nonsense as that, although she recalls some of her more conservative neighbors preferring to whitewash that particularly gruesome episode of the island’s history. It’d be more accurate to say that they didn’t exist anymore.
In just a few minutes— as she assures herself— June is going to step off this boat and the port will welcome her as it has all the other twisted tourists and morbid voyeurs who have come to the island over the past century like carnival spectators hungry for a glimpse of once vicious beasts, now toothless and tamed, to see what was once wild and magnificent mastered into submission.
How simple it all could be if she could truly be as she’s always felt: an outsider. She would buy a cone of handmade ice cream at the candy store, rent VHS tapes of movies she would have no desire to watch on the mainland, rent a bicycle without gears and circle the coast, buy groceries from the market and be charmed by its meager offerings.
She would visit the museums, the old fisherman huts preserved as historical sites. She would brush her fingers along the indestructible threads of moonlight hair braided into fishing wire or weaved into casting nets, and sweep her eyes across the glass covered display of boning knives tipped with pearlescent sea scales, almost imperceptibly small. She would purchase what she would be told is a genuine sharpened incisor wrapped in copper wire and hung on a black cotton cord like some common quartz crystal, but she would decide upon leaving the gift shop that it was too ugly to ever actually wear around her neck.
She would find it all to be quaint, and then she would leave again.
“Junebug!” She hears her dad call to her just as her feet find the shifty dock. She has a sudden urge to get back on the boat, but a wave of nausea encourages her forward.
“Junebug, over here!” June’s dad reminds her of a music box she had as a child; the ballerina’s smile was painted on, but she twirled interminably in an arabesque to the morbid melodies of Tchakoivsky. June’s father is the only man she knows who could look so miserable while smiling and waving both arms from behind a wooden barricade in the ferry parking lot. June waves back and she thinks she even manages a comparable countenance.
“Hi, Dad.” June squints and shields her eyes from the late morning sun. “You didn’t have to meet me here.”
“Well, you won’t stay at my place, so the least I can do is give you a lift to the house. Are you sure you don’t want to just stay with me? There’s a guest bed. It’s clean.”
“I’m allergic to cats.”
“Since when?”
“Since the third grade, I think, if I had to pinpoint a specific time.”
“Right,” he blows out a puff of air and smiles sadly. “It’s good to see you. Let’s get going.” He takes the bag from June’s shoulder even though he walks with a limp now and rarely in a straight line. June doesn’t argue.
The drive along the shoreline is short and quiet, neither of them knowing what to say. June watches the water on her right, the waves crashing over rocky jetties and lapping into the sandy inlets; it’s always moving.
The house is tucked away on a shaded road. There’s an ocean view in the back, but only from the balcony off the bedroom on the third floor. That was where Grams slept.
The property looks darkened somehow, even with the summer sun so high in the sky. The front lawn is overgrown, a sight that makes June bite her tongue to stop from speaking aloud the accusations in her head. The path from the mailbox to the porch is narrowed, crowded by menacing weeds like creeping thistle and white flowering bindweed.
“It’s a bit…untended. Maybe I should have warned you.” June’s dad looks sheepish from the driver’s seat.
“It’s alright, Dad. That’s what I’m here for, right?”
“Well, no, Junie, that’s not right. That’s not why you’re here. I mean, is that why you’re here? Is that all?”
“No, of course not,” June says, thinking she must not have been biting down hard enough.
“Well, I’ll leave you to settle in. You know how to reach me.”
“You’re not coming inside?” June asks, but the disappointment in her voice is more in herself. She’s out of practice expecting the worst of people.
’“Oh,” he says, like he hadn’t even considered it. “No, I have some things I need to take care of. There’s still some paperwork to be signed, I think. And my suit.”
“Your suit?”
“I had it dry cleaned. Can you believe it still fits? Well, it mostly fits. I wasn’t sure how it should be. I haven’t worn a suit in…oh, I don’t know—”
“Six years.”
“Yes. I guess that’s right,” June’s dad says, now averting his eyes. “So, anyway, I have to pick it up this afternoon.”
“Fine. Let’s meet for dinner. At the Inn? Six o’clock?”
“Sounds good, Junebug. I can pick you up!”
“That’s alright. I can walk,” June says as she kisses her dad’s cheek. He smells like old memories, like summer evenings and the Red Sox radio broadcasts, like tobacco and Budweiser. “I’ll meet you there.”
WHATS GOING TO HAPPEN????????
Ashley, your writing is so beautiful! I absolutely loved this and can’t wait to read the next installment. 🧜🏻♀️