Siren Song 

Everyone knew that sirens lived in the sea. It had never occurred to them that they might be in a lake. 

   If it had occurred to them, they wouldn’t have suspected that lake. Black and dead, more sludge than water. But sirens cannot leave the water. There was no way for them to escape their home once it started to fill with the leftovers from the factories and the plumbing and god knows what. 

   So they were stuck there, in the bitter black not-quite-water. There weren’t any ships to sink, and they reveled in this, if nothing else. (There used to be small fishing boats, but there was no point when the fish were all gone.) Sirens aren’t purposeful in the destruction that follows in their wake. They are a peaceful people by nature, but the songs of death escape whether or not they want them to. And they don’t, generally. 

   The lake did start to get a reputation, after the first three bodies. 

    Even without the boats, people still came to the water. Why they would do that, the sirens didn’t know. There was nothing to see. Nothing but death. And death certainly came for them, when they heard the siren-songs. 

   The folk in the town - city? It was certainly dirty enough to be a city - decided it was a killer. One of their own, turned against them. They blamed the woman who lived closest to the spot where the bodies were found (closest to the siren den, but they didn’t know that). Mob justice isn’t pretty, and the body count went up. And kept going. 

   They blamed each other. They kept coming to look at the spot on the lake, where everyone else had died, and then they would die, and the sirens just kept singing against their will. The people on the land would point fingers and then start to point sharper things, things that cut through flesh and hearts. It wasn’t long until the whole town was painted red. And then it was quiet, save for the sounds of mourning songs mixed with the soft hope of a new life, free from people.

Lillian Mendiondo is a sophomore in the Literary Arts program at Lafayette High School. They like to write in all sorts of genres and forms, especially creative nonfiction and micro fiction. They do not like writing about themself in third person.