I’ve been around for a while and this is the first time I’m seeing something like this. I’m wondering if I picked up something nasty or if this is something that other people are seeing.
“You see, it’s a well-known fact that the coasts are lousy with ‘em,” said the old fishing captain, with the semi-circle of children sitting around to hear their adopted uncle tell them stories around the campfire. This was the annual tradition around the homestead, something that had been passed down through the generations. Getting this next generation ready to set sail for their first time on the boats. A sort of good-natured hazing designed to make them cautious and aware of the dangers that the sea had always presented to them. “Sirens, yeh getta keep an ear out for their song. Get too close and thern song will pull yuh into the rocks. There you’ll crash upon the rocks and find your ways the the abyss below.”
Fascinated by the tales that the old sailor was spinning, their eyes transfixed, and every mouth was agape in fear. Well beyond his prime, his grey stubble and sun-baked skin gave every ounce of authenticity that someone could look for in a teller of tales. Had the telling been outside of this village, the adults would have been absolutely aghast at him telling these stories as though they were true. But this was not that place, and those were not those people.
“You see, sailors and boatmen only come in two stages, young and old. The ones that can’t make it as sailors, the ones that die out on those waters. They leave behind their families, and sometimes a wife can’t take the troubles of missing him, and in a fit of madness, they will run into the waters to try to claim them back. But you see, it doesn’t work like that; the sea offers to keep them together, only it doesn’t give the husband back, but he takes the wife too and makes her sing to call her husband home. Sometimes it works, but all too often it makes more widows.”
Part of the story was true; there had always been sirens on the coast of the small towns. Small villages spread over the ten miles that lead to the small fishing village. But everyone in the village knew how to co-exist with their ocean-bound neighbors. They had all become close through time but not too close in their relationships. It was said that they were so good at the work that they managed to make sure that not a single boat not intended to get to the island had ever landed on its shores. There were other parts of the story that were mostly true; it wasn’t always wives sometimes, it was husbands, though that seldom made it into the stories. Some reason that detail always seems to fall off.
But nothing on earth was as effective at getting them to shut up as outshining them. If you want to upset a siren, all you have to do is break out some old blue eyes at the right key, and they will listen to you all day. That was the secret of the village, something that they never let the outsiders know because with that secret, the sailors that would approach the shoreline, not knowing how to deal with the sirens, would run their boat ashore and die in the process. They had functioned like a blessing and a curse to the village, but more than anything, their mythology and existence had become just a part of the village.
But tomorrow, the kids would take to the water with their parents, and they would see them firsthand and probably get to meet some of them. But for tonight and only tonight the ghost stories would keep them in the mood and build the excitement for tomorrow's journey.
Please get it out of your mind that there is anything here about justice… it’s not about justice, it’s about power. It always has been, the continued fake shock of this only continues to be unproductive whining. There is no one that is confused about this, there are those who see it for what it is and those who are willingly ignorant.
I was listening to this one live, and it was great to hear somebody finally holding people to the fire. Unfortunately, it’s on NPR, which means none of the people who need to hear it are going to.