Mermaids | MissMeliss.com

The skies are green and glowing,
Where my heart is, where my heart is,
Where the scented lunar flower is blooming:
Somewhere, beyond the stars…
Beyond Antares.

To their sisters of the seas, the mermaids of Earth, and their air-breathing landbound human cousins, Antares is the biggest star in the constellation known as Scorpio. Some legends even refer to it as the scorpion’s heart.

It is also the place where the mother-heart of all space sirens beats. When they are created, they are bathed in Antares’s heat. When they love, they are blessed by Antares’ light. And when one of them ends her last dance with the spheres, they escort her home and bid her farewell as she begins a new journey, beyond time, beyond space… beyond Antares.

Astral mermaids are often seen as fictional creations, frivolous fantasy beings who hitch rides on the tails of comets, treat asteroid belts as steppingstones, and slingshot themselves off the rings of planets

They play on a field of immeasurable size, but they also love deeply and when they mourn, it is with reverence and respect, casting a green veil across the starlight with their tears. Sometimes, those tears are visible to mortals. We humans call them the aurora borealis.

Every so often, there is a mortal being inducted into the siren’s sisterhood. Our linear, finite lifetimes necessitate that this happens only when such a person has finished her last song. When that happens, the sirens come to guide her past their mother-heart to a place where time has no meaning.

Forever, as the song goes, is just another journey. Nichelle Nichols, beloved by so many of us here on Earth, is the latest mortal to be invited to take it with the sirens. We wish her well as she moves beyond Antares, surrounded by the love of her family, her friends, and her fans.

Then let the years go fading,
Where my heart is, where my heart is,
Where my love eternally is waiting
Somewhere, beyond the stars…
Beyond Antares.

Image Source: e online

“Beyond Antares” written by Wilbur Hatch (music) and Gene L. Coon (lyrics)

“Beyond Antares” performed by Nichelle Nichols

This is an unfinished piece written just before dinner last night. I was working on something different, but related, and this is what happened instead.

His arrival was always heralded by raindrops.

He would open with a tease, a tickle. Just a tiny hint of drizzle. If she didn’t immediately rise to meet him, he’d turn up the waterworks, make them into a soaking rain over the place in the sea where sirens dwelt between gigs.

Harmony would lift her face and arms into the cascade of bubbles, give a flick of her tail, and twist and turn in the newly oxygenated water. It was common knowledge that sea creatures got a little giddy during rainstorms, after all.

Spiraling upward through the frothy water, she would break the surface just in time to catch phase three of his greeting to her: a single arc of lightning that sent electricity humming through every fiber of her being.

And there he’d be, floating on a mattress of soft fog, just above the peaks and troughs of her beloved waves, her man. Her god. Oskar. Today he was sporting hair and a beard that matched the slate and granite colors of the rocks that formed her favorite jetty, and eyes that were the same bruised-purple as the sky before a storm.

They didn’t talk much, when they were above. His voice was the sound of a sledge-hammer, booming and forceful. It made the waves break far from shore and scattered fish in all directions.

As to her voice. Harmony was a mermaid. A siren. Her voice was meant to lure sailors to their watery deaths. When she used it on Oskar, she was never sure if he was staying with her because he wanted to, or because her voice was somehow compelling him.

Then again, when they were nested together on his bed of fog, they didn’t really need to speak to communicate, especially once they’d determined how thick the bed had to be before it was considered ‘land’ by the elemental magic that allowed her to split her tail into legs.

But when they were in her world, below the waves, then it was a different story. Her voice had no power over him when they were beneath the waves. And his…

Have you ever been swimming and been surprised by a thunderstorm, or been diving and felt a motorboat go by? That’s a taste of the way Harmony experienced Oskar’s voice underwater: feeling it more than hearing it. It was tangible, a physical grumble that was best appreciated when one of them was draped over the other.

Harmony had never planned to fall in love with a thunder god. The bird and fish who fell in love had it easy compared to Oskar and herself. But when they were together, when she was wrapped in his arms, and he rumbled sweet words to her or she felt his joyous laughter, she knew it was worth figuring out.