Siren's Secret. Debbie Herbert

slowly turned. All of them fell silent and looked away. He wanted to say Fuck off, but he wouldn’t give the cashier an excuse to ban him from the store. Instead, he settled for banging the door shut behind him. The attached bells gave a satisfied clanging at the violence.

      He was in a crappy mood today, when he should have been calm and in control. That’s how he had felt after the first hooker, anyway. The second one...well, that was a problem.

      What the hell had happened out there? That—that thing had risen up from the sea. She—it, whatever—had seen him, knew who he was and what he had done. Somehow he had to find her again. He couldn’t let a witness live. Big mistake dumping that second bitch at sea. He thought no one would ever find the body. Unlike the first one he’d left in the shallow salt marsh. That had been clumsy and ill-planned.

      Images from the night before consumed him. Sure, he’d had a few beers before getting on the boat, but he wasn’t stinking drunk. He knew what he saw and that was no scuba diver. When the woman disappeared with the body, he’d seen a giant fish tail emerge.

      Melkie threw the bag in the bed of his rusted-out Chevy truck with his other recently purchased supplies and drove out of town, onto the white sandy roads leading home. In the past, he would have taken Rebel with him, but he got sick of the ugly jokes. Ignorant hicks.

      He’d found the dog abandoned on the roadside years ago and had taken a shine to it. At first, Melkie thought the stray resembled an overgrown rat, but he checked the library’s internet and found it was a full-bred hairless Chinese crested. Try telling that to people in the bayou.

      His thoughts turned again to the woman at sea. Either he was crazy or that woman was truly a mermaid. He brooded over the mermaid possibility.

      Bayou La Siryna had as many mermaid tales and sightings as some places had their resident ghost hauntings. A few locals claimed to have seen strange creatures at night, half human and half fish, swimming deep at sea. Some scuba divers once claimed they’d seen a topless mermaid with long blond hair swimming close to the marsh grassland savannas that lined the shore. All stories Melkie never believed.

      Buildings changed from redbrick structures to clapboard shacks with dirt floors that smelled like a combination of ripe soil and mice droppings. At last, his neighborhood was heralded by a faded hand-painted sign reading Happy Hollows, nailed to an oak tree.

      There was nothing happy about Happy Hollows. He flipped off the sign, as was his custom. Tired shotgun-style houses lined the streets, in various states of disrepair. He pulled into an unpaved driveway on a dead-end street. Rebel yapped excitedly by the peeling handmade picket fence slapped together from scrap wood.

      A smile tugged the corners of Melkie’s thin mouth for the first time today. Rebel spotted the biscuit bag and ran in circles, delirious with joy.

      “Shut that ugly mutt up,” a neighbor hollered from a front porch crammed with broken kids’ toys and other unidentifiable junk.

      “Fuck off,” Melkie hollered back. He didn’t have to pretend to be nice around this place. Niceness got you nowhere with these folks; instead, it was viewed as a sign of weakness. Melkie had learned early on not to take anything from anyone. Ever.

      Melkie stomped up the rotted steps and onto the porch, arms laden with bags and boxes, carefully avoiding spots where pieces of boards were broken or missing, exposing sand and weeds four feet beneath the foundation. He opened the screen door, but Rebel pushed up underneath his feet and a cardboard box fell out of his arms. An explosive noise of crashed glass erupted in the box like a miniature self-contained bomb. Rebel whimpered and ran away, skinny tail tucked between his legs.

      “What the hell was that?” his neighbor screamed from across the street.

      “None of your business,” Melkie yelled, kicking the mess to one side of the door. The box of broken Mason jars, used as insect-killing jars, joined the cast-off collection on his porch—a broken washing machine, plastic beach chairs with missing slats and who knew what else.

      Melkie perked up at seeing the brown package tucked between the screen and front doors. As he checked the mailing label, his mouth curved upward.

      He whistled for Rebel and the dog followed him inside. Melkie headed straight to the fridge and pulled out a beer. His unemployment check was running low, but he always had a cold one for himself, a biscuit for Rebel and his ever-increasing insect collection.

      Only ten steps from the den, he entered the cramped kitchen with its battered pine cabinets. Another eight steps and Melkie would pass through a tiny bedroom, leading to a bathroom with only a toilet, a rusted-out tub and sink. Another ten steps led to the final cramped bedroom, barely large enough for a mattress and dresser. This pathetic, rotting dump was all his. Mom’s last legacy. The sisters were long gone, escaped as soon as they’d found some pussy-whipped dope to take them away. But he was still trapped here. For all its miserable worth, the house was a way to live rent-free.

      “I don’t owe nobody nothing, do I, boy?”

      The dog leaped on Melkie’s legs, clawing for his treat.

      “Coming right up,” Melkie promised. He peeled off his sweaty T-shirt. Opening the kitchen drawer, pulling out a dull knife with a cracked wooden handle, he cut open the bag and threw a biscuit on the ripped linoleum floor. Normally, he liked watching Rebel tear into the treat with his buck teeth, the few remaining ones jutting out at crazy angles. But today he stared at the knife gripped in his palms.

      His knife.

      Anger rose in him, fierce and hungry. Melkie tamped it down, refused to let it interfere with the gratification in his latest package. Pulling up a chair to the table, Melkie cut open the box and spread its contents onto the scarred Formica. A hurricane of colors lay hodgepodge before him, but he focused on the largest specimen—a black spicebush swallowtail with a robin’s-egg blush fanning its hind wing and the forewing bordered by white dots. Beautiful. The butterfly’s delicate antennae and proboscis had survived shipping intact.

      He dug out supplies from a plastic container and set to work, pinning the specimens with stainless-steel insect pins against a white styrene foam board. Rebel barked and whined, but Melkie shushed him with an impatient flick of his hand. At last pleased with the arrangement, Melkie slipped the foam under a shadow box frame.

      It took a good twenty minutes to find the perfect location amongst the den walls covered with similar arrangements, mostly butterflies but also mountings of praying mantises, grasshoppers and dragonflies.

      As soon as Melkie drove in the nail and hung his latest creation, Rebel barked and ran to the kitchen for another treat. Melkie tossed him one and Rebel gobbled it up with his yellow misshapen canine teeth.

      The anger returned as he palmed the kitchen knife. His prized knife was gone. He’d seen it stuck in the tail fin of that thing at sea. He grabbed a six-pack and settled into the den’s old recliner with its ripped turquoise vinyl upholstery. He gulped his beer in long swallows, brooding over the lost knife. It was what he had used to cut out both bitches’ eyes. It was special. It also happened to be the only gift he ever remembered getting from his mother.

      A big beautiful knife in a worn leather case.

      “Here, kiddo,” she’d said, casually tossing it in his direction one Christmas when he’d asked her where his presents were. “It belonged to your dad. He told me it was a gift from his father.”

      Melkie had grinned, fingers closing over the family heirloom. Violent vibrations hummed in his hand as he held the knife.

      It had been the best Christmas ever.

      Rebel jumped in his lap, jolting Melkie from the memory, and dog and owner stretched out to watch a police drama on the twenty-inch black-and-white TV set with a rabbit-ears antenna. No cable in this backwater hellhole.

      Melkie petted Rebel’s mottled skin before raising an arm to flip on the window air conditioner. Between the loud hum of the AC and staring at the fuzzy speckles on the TV screen, Melkie sensed the tension ease out of his lean body. He’d just