Aleah Calum

The smell of salt and water filled her nose as she walked along the beach, the sunset spilling its colors across the horizon in layers of red, orange, and gold that shimmered over the restless waves. The seagulls had grown quiet, their distant cries drowned beneath the rolling crash of the tide. The ocean’s pulse echoed all around her, steady and timeless. Near the cove, splashes broke the water’s surface—subtle but purposeful. To anyone else, they would seem like nothing more than fish scattering, but Aleah knew better. That was the signal: the communal curfew for the mermaids and sirens. The sea-dwellers had their own rhythms, their own laws of safety, and when twilight fell, they vanished from the open shore into the depths.

Her bare feet pressed into damp sand that clung stubbornly to her skin, leaving a dotted trail behind her toward her little setup: a single umbrella, a beach towel now dusted in salt spray, and a canvas bag filled with notes and supplies. She stopped for a moment and looked around. It always puzzled her. People claimed that a beach sunset was breathtaking, the kind of sight that pulled whole crowds of tourists down to the water’s edge. And yet, she was alone. No laughter, no families, no one clutching cameras or phones. Just her, the gulls, and the vast horizon bleeding fire into the sea. It should have felt lonely, maybe even strange. But to Aleah, the solitude was a gift—it meant no one to interrupt her research, no curious stares over her sketches, no scoffs about “childish fantasies.” Only the wind whispering over her ears and the ocean singing its endless lullaby.

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Aleah’s fascination had been planted in her childhood like a stubborn seed that never stopped growing. Myths and stories of sirens had captivated her before she could even read, tales of ocean people with tails that shimmered like jewels and voices that could bring sailors to their knees. She devoured every scrap of lore she could find. Her teachers told her such creatures didn’t exist. Her parents shook their heads, gently insisting that mermaids and sirens were nothing more than symbols, mythological footnotes from ancient Greece. And her classmates—oh, her classmates had laughed at her. “Rubish,” they called her obsessions, mocking her drawings, her costumes, her wide-eyed insistence that the ocean still hid secrets.

But ridicule never killed the flame. If anything, it made her grip it tighter.

At school, her art projects inevitably spiraled back to the sea. She painted herself into every scene—sometimes as a mermaid perched on a rock with scales reflecting moonlight, sometimes as a siren with gills etched into her neck and webbed fingers barely visible above the tide. Halloween gave her the same chance again and again: once she’d stepped into the skin of Ariel, Disney’s shimmering princess, but most years she leaned into the shadows—costumes of sirens imagined in the verses of Homer, wild-eyed and otherworldly.

Her parents had once indulged her obsession, though she never forgot how complicated that felt. On her tenth birthday they traveled to Atlanta, where the Georgia Aquarium had unveiled a new exhibit. In one sprawling tank swam a cluster of mermaids, their tails flashing green and gold beneath artificial lights. Across from them, in another enclosure, drifted sirens with duller colors, their haunting eyes fixed on the glass. Aleah had pressed her nose to the window, awe and heartbreak warring in her chest. To see her beloved ocean-dwellers was a dream come true. But to see them confined, robbed of the endless ocean they were meant for—it hurt. She left that trip with more questions than answers, more hunger than satisfaction.

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Years later, the girl who had once dressed as sirens and painted seashell crowns had become a marine biologist, her fascination transformed into a career. And so here she sat, perched on a tide-washed rock, pencil and paper in hand, sketching between notes of discovery. Her latest: around a third of the “mermaids” found near rocky yet calm shores were not mermaids at all but tropical sirens. Unlike their cousins, these sirens bore muted hues and carried a peaceable nature. Their songs were not snares to ensnare or control, but melodies woven of curiosity and calm. They did not lure; they simply sang.

Aleah paused her pencil, the curve of her lips rising into a smile. The sketch before her was only half-done, but already she imagined the details—the gentle tilt of the head, the faint shimmer in the scales, the softness of the gaze. Another friend, another story, another fragment of proof in her lifelong pursuit. She glanced back at the horizon where the sun melted into the sea, painting the surface with liquid fire. The waves hissed against the shore, and the occasional splash whispered that not all had yet retreated.

Her fingers brushed across the page, smudging the graphite into shadow. For a moment, Aleah let herself wonder if one of them lingered just beneath the waves, watching her with equal fascination. She leaned forward, her voice carrying over the surf, soft but certain.

“Don’t worry,” Aleah whispered, as if to the sea itself, “I’m not here to capture you. I’m here to listen.”