Yes, my novels have mermaids! Yeah! I have to say I have a fascination with these beings.
But, in my novels the mermaids are trapped hue-mans, lost in a hopeless world with no voice except that of a screeching cry that try to warn those who see her pass into death. As one of my main characters is later transformed, we hear and see her image as a ‘siren’. Her ghostly image in death appears as a hideous version of a half-woman, half-fish forever trapped by the wrath of her father, Poseidon!
The Siren
“There came into my dream a woman, stuttering,
cross-eyed, stumbling along on her maimed feet.
With ugly yellow skin and hands deformed. I stared at her.
And as the sun revives my body numbed by the night’s cold,
just so my eyes upon her worked to free her tongue
and strengthen out her deformaties,
gradually suffusing her wan face with just a color Love would have desired.
And once her tongue was loosened by my gaze,
She stared singing, and the way she sang captured my mind – it could not free itself.
“I am” she sang “The sweet Siren, I am who song beguiles the sailors in the mid sea,
enticing them, inviting them joy!
My singing made Ulysses turn away from his desired course;
who dwells with me seldom departs, I satisfy so well.”
Dante’s Canto XiX 6-29