Now

The office siren:

•  fills a plastic cup from the water cooler, sprinkles in salt from a shaker on her desk. With one webbed pinky she stirs in the granules. It still doesn’t taste like the sea.

The office siren:

• is definitely the one who brought fish for lunch, left it open in the shared fridge, though she will not admit it. Fish is far from her first choice. Her colleagues should be happy they’re not in the fridge, chopped into pieces, in a Tupperware with her name on it.

The office siren:

• takes too long in the bathroom, until the boss puts her on a ‘performance improvement plan’.
  • He suspects her of being on her phone. Really she’s sat cross-legged in front of the porcelain bowl of water before her, staring at the hole at the bottom, which must lead to the sea, yes, as all flowing water does;
  • and when she finally unsticks her damp thighs from the tile and stands up at the sink she holds her hands under the spout for minutes, shuddering with want, her hands tremble and the webbing in her fingers wobbles, jelly-like, and it’s all she can do to resist stripping bare and sitting beneath the downpour, the tiniest waterfall.

The office siren:

• is called in to the boss’s office to discuss her future with the company. The boss is a mean man, wrinkled neck all jowl and gristle. He smells of aftershave and alcohol. Only a decade left in him, or maybe two;
• crosses her legs to hide the place he stares at when she wears a pencil skirt. He wants to drill holes in her. He does it with his eyes.
  • What are you doing in that bathroom, he asks her, and puts a meaty hand on her thigh. Maybe I should go in there with you. Maybe you’d like that, he says. Then we can take as long as we want.
  • her eyes go blank as his hand comes to rest on her thigh.
  • why why why why why did she leave the sea?

The office siren:

• works late one night; is the last to leave. The boss sees this and congratulates her on her initiative; he will mark it in her performance improvement plan. Why don’t you call it a night, he says. I’m about to head home. I’ll walk you out.
• gets her coat and umbrella, though the latter is just for appearances, she prefers to feel the wet on her face, her pores opening to drink;
  • and when the boss walks with her, there’s his hand on her lower back; he guides her down the stairs, she can feel the warmth his body radiates. It’s stale.
• lets the rain fall on her as they cross the street to the parking garage;
  • sweet rain clean rain innocent rain,
  • the rain is watching,
  • the rain knows she must do what she must;
• takes great pains to muffle her steps in the concrete empty of the parking garage; so that the wet shlok! of her finned feet in kitten heels does not echo strangely;
• waits as the boss opens the door to his car for her to get in. She puts one webbed hand on his, looks in his eye; her hair is wet with rain, her skin is wet with the cycling of water, she smells the boss’s veiny neck, the blood under the aftershave, he asks if she’s alright and she opens the black hole of her mouth; she is a whirlpool of sound, the song is a gyre, it spirals downward into her throat, the origin place of that sweet music which he feels suddenly he must find, she is singing him closer, closer now and into her mouth, her wide-open mouth.
  • The music does not stop;
    • not when her jaw lowers to let him enter;
    • not when her mouth widens to let shoulder follow neck;
    • not when he hangs, half-enveloped, from her lips, stretched so thin with the taking of him that they crack and bleed;
    • not when her slick gullet lets his feet slip inside, her agile tongue flicking off his shoes and spitting them onto the floor of the garage with a leathern clatter;
    • until her stomach goes to work, tightening and cracking and juicing and sluicing, a meal seasoned with ink and aftershave, but mostly with vengeance, with vengeance.

The office siren:

• walks out to the little pond behind the stand of pines and the company sign. There are ducks swimming on it, two drakes and two hens. They dart between raindrops; they dance in the ripples. The arrival of a siren does not bother them; they are water-things, all of them;
• takes off her kitten heels, peels back her stockings, unbuttons her pencil skirt. Unpins her knot of hair and lets it cascade to her toes, past her breasts and the stomach which swells from her meal like a snake, like a pregnant belly.
• shivers with relief as the fins of her feet touch the water. She wades into the middle, lets the murk take her. She sinks down to the bottom and lets her hair trail upward to the light, lets it grow toward the sun like seaweed.

__________

Katharine Tyndall (she/her) grew up on an old farm in Wisconsin, USA, and moved to Germany over a decade ago. Her work has been featured in ECO24: Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and is forthcoming in Wigleaf, among many others. She was a 2025 finalist for the Grist Imagine 2200 climate fiction prize, and is a graduate of the Granta Writer’s Workshop. You can find her at tyndall.earth or in the forest looking for fungi.