If what the network taught me about how a siren listens for her ancestors ever worked, I still wouldn’t know when I’d found her. We lived in neighboring states my whole life, she in Oregon and me in Cali, but we never met. Unless you’re a siren.Īnyway, I have another problem: I wouldn’t know Gramma’s voice if I heard it. It doesn’t really matter when what the world believes about you isn’t a matter of life and death.
IS THERE A WAY TO READ FIGHTING FANTASY BOOKS ON MY PHONE MOVIE
I guess it depends on what movie or song or TV show shaped which decade. Do sirens’ voices return to the body of water near where they were born, or close to where they died? Do sprites have a physical body and are they just too quick to see, or are their forms entirely ethereal? Do elokos have to be self-obsessed phonies, or have I just been lucky to know that exact type? The problem with mythos is that it varies too much for any one interpretation to be believed. Even if sirens’ voices really do return to the water, they probably don’t go to chlorinated bodies of it. I mean, I’m at an indoor pool with all its colorfully elaborate water features that nobody is enjoying because my play-sister’s the only person doing laps. Here, Portland not here, the Southwest Community Center, specifically. If the mythos is to be believed-and as far as any nonmagic people are concerned, most of it isn’t-I should be able to hear my grandmother here. The story goes that sirens originated by the water, that once we used our calls to damn seamen, and that when we die, our voices return to the sea. The problem is I don’t know exactly what I’m listening for.
It was one of the first things I learned when I finally found “the network,” so despite my lack of results thus far, I close my eyes now too. It’s never made a difference but it’s part of the ritual, and I guess it must mean something that I did it even before I knew there was a way for living sirens to listen for their dead. I always close my eyes, and today’s no exception. I’d stand on the cold sand, burrowing my toes beneath the surface as though there’d be some warmth there, and I’d listen.
Back home I went to the beach on more than one cloudy day. It feels redundant to be at the pool on a rainy Saturday, even though it’s spring, and even though it’s Portland, but maybe I’m just more of a California snob than I want to be.