Pearl

"My name is Pearl and I'll love you the best way I know how, but I've got so much wickedness and sin."

***

As the moon filtered in through the salt encrusted window of their seaside home, Pearl gazed at her lover.

Having just come in from the port, he had promptly fallen asleep after eating supper and making love.

Pearl gazed down at him and marveled at his beauty. Perhaps, perhaps this is what drew her to him. His beauty shone and almost blinded her. She remembered the first time she had settled her cold, murky eyes upon him from under her world of water. His lean build, his tanned skin, his ease of movement.

She loved how he moved. He had such a fluidity about his every gesture that she couldn't help but think of a river, a brook, an ocean calmly rippling. Even in the throes of passion, his every action imitated the smoothness of water.

That night, when they their limbs and souls intertwined (had Pearl a soul? she had always liked to think so), Pearl allowed herself to dig deep into the sweat-slicked skin of his back. She dug deep into his flesh, drawing blood that stained her fingertips.

Now, her fingers slowly smoothed his hair from his forehead. The house creaked with the howling of the winds. But beneath the gales, she sensed another call, the song of her kin.

Her frigid blood began to sing within her veins. She wished he would open his eyes once more, so that she could see his eyes, a deep blue, a warm blue, a blue that she had never seen even in her sea.

She bent over him, cradling his face in her arms, and watched as her black waving hair covered his neck and face, like seaweed entangling and strangling him.

And as she buried the dagger deep into his breast, she choked on her heart.