I remember the taste of iron before I remember the shore.

The sea had been singing beneath me — a low, tidal hymn — when something tore through its throat. Nets, perhaps. Hooks. Or the sudden refusal of water itself. I woke with sand jammed into my gills and salt drying tight across my scales. The tide had retreated like a coward.

The air did not flow the way water does. It scraped against my tail.

They found me at dawn.

Sundry white shapes against the sun, with fabric like bleached sails wrapped around their bodies. Their boots pressed crescents into the sand as they approached, whispering in scattered bursts of speech. I attempted to greet them, beginning the opening note of a soft trill, but the sound tore itself apart in the arid morning.

One of the shapes bent down. His shadow swallowed my face.

“Specimen located,” he said. The others turned their heads to look at me, squinting. Now they were all hovering over me, the same way starved seagulls eagerly watch something helpless wash up onto the shore after days.

They adjusted black shells over their ears — headphones, and quickly made haste and lifted me with gloved, boxy hands. My tail dragged a furrow through the shore, erasing the mark of my presence. 

I searched their faces for recognition. Awe. Fear. Anything.

Evening came quickly, and they carried me into a building with long winding hallways and fluorescent lights that imitated the moon and its reflection over the water. I watched them bind my wrists with tiny strings before I was submerged in water again in a scanty tank. This was not the water I knew — it lacked the salinity, the sprawling coral, the clownfish that whirled around the reef like frantic archivists. They soon pulled me out, laying me on a slab colder than the ocean floor before tying straps around my waist, the base of my tail tied so tightly I felt the straps bite into my scales. 

I wanted them to know I was lost. I began to sing to them – a soft hymn of explanation that could tell my story. I sang of vast untainted lands, unexplored caverns, coral cities, tall mountains, sea froth, my name, my home.

Their faces did not change.

“Observe the movement of the jaw,” one of them said, peering down at me. “Acoustic mechanism appears intact.”

“Begin documentation.”

One of them reached toward my side. I wanted to take his hand, embrace his broad figure — I missed my mother. His fingers hovered over the opalescent sweep of my scales.

He quickly nudged my arm out of the way before pressing a sharp, jagged instrument beneath the edge of one, and pried. 

The first scale came loose with a reluctant wrench. Pain bloomed, and I gasped as the room tilted.

“Fascinating pigmentation,” someone murmured.

They placed the scale into a translucent glass dish, then proceeded to pluck another. And another. Each one left behind a pale wound. With every absence, something loosened inside me: a shoreline, a lullaby, the exact cadence of my own language. I felt my heart and chest stiffen. My vision begins to lapse.

A woman calls out to me: Honey! 

Was that my mother who had come to rescue me? I wanted badly to cry – of happiness, pain, anxiety, fear. But sirens do not cry. I needed someone to take my hand and sing to me. 

“Specimen exhibits heightened physical response,” the lead one said. “Restrain further.”

My eyes fluttered awake as the room came into view again and I found the woman gone. They tightened the straps around my waist.

I felt my body compress against the slab as my own blood began to sizzle out of my exposed wounds. I began to squeal in pain — and then there it was. My scream turned song —  it is so potent that the notes scrape raw against the air. My suffering rehearsed in song, written in my own blood. I watched their eyes as they chattered, the cadence of my sound they could not hear through their headphones. They had armored themselves against me.

Time dissolved beneath their lights. They measured my tail. Counted my ribs. Pressed instruments to my gills and frowned when I choked. They drew blood from me vial after vial, and held the samples up to the fluorescent sun for inspection.

“Salinity unusually high,” one noted.

They chided me and asked questions in tones sharp enough to cut: 

“Origin?”

“Intent?”

“Duration of migration?”

I couldn’t make anything out of their questions, but I knew something was wrong. I begged them to mark my words. That the current had twisted wrong. That I had followed a path my ancestors once traversed freely. That I wished to be reunited with my mother.

They repeated their questions, slower this time. When I did not answer, they marked something on a clipboard and moved on.

The youngest among them lingered sometimes by the edge of the table. He removed one shell from his ear — just slightly. A sliver of openness, which enamored me with great hope. I began to sing again — a single thread of sound, fragile as spun glass, stretched thin across the sterile light.

Before the note could unfurl, the lead scientist snapped, “Headphones on.”

His breath hitched. The thread broke.

“Acoustic output remains untranslatable,” the lead one concluded. “We must isolate the source.”

Isolate the source.

They gathered closer. Their shadows overlapped, a cage of limbs and instruments. Cold metal pressed beneath my chin, tilting my face toward the panels of bright lights.

Panic is a current that morphs the body to stone. They forced my mouth open, which by now, was so parched I couldn’t utter another word or syllable.

“Intriguing structure,” someone whispered.

A gloved hand traced the column of my throat.

“If the song cannot be comprehended externally,” the lead said, “we will extract the organ responsible.”

Extract.

I felt the word thud against my ribs.

A hoarse laugh escaped me: they do not realize a siren’s song does not live in flesh alone. It lives in water. In echo. In the way the tide answers back.

They began to insert something long and silver between my teeth — it glinted like a blade fashioned from moonlight. My vision blurred as they plunged the instrument deeper. I could almost — almost — see my mother again, her iridescent tail trailing off into the deep blue. I felt the metal begin to claw its way through my intestines, and then abruptly twist.

My body convulsed once, twice, from the enormous pain.

I then felt a sudden uproar — a noise propelling from my chest — lunging out of my ruptured throat and out my mouth. The song tore free from me. Lyrics inscribed on my heart since birth that now swam deliriously around the room like panicked coral fish evading predators hungry for their meat. Misers of song and syllable. They carried pangs of unresolved trauma and grief and salt and the bellowing roar of a thousand waves beating against the cliffside. They told the story of every ancestor who had crossed the ocean believing the shore would be kinder.

The scientists did not flinch, their shells on their ears held firm. They leaned closer, intent.

“Record the frequency.”

“Stabilize the subject.”

I felt something inside me loosen, then rupture. Warmth began to flood my chest — I was bleeding, profusely.

They withdrew the instrument, slick and lacquered with my crimson red and something pale, something soft and pulsing weakly in the air-conditioned duct-borne chill.

“Extraordinary,” the lead breathed. “The vocal organ.”

They placed my organ into a glass container. 

Through the haze, I saw them remove their headphones.

They stood very still; they waited in silence. One of them tapped the jar, the piece of me in it quivering.

“Play back the audio,” the lead ordered.

A machine beside me strapped to the strings around my wrists began to hum, and a recording crackled to life. A thin, distorted whine began to emerge. I did not recognize my voice — it was a melody so flattened, emptied of tide and ache and story.

“Non-threatening,” someone concluded as they nodded their heads. “Biologically fascinating, but acoustically inert.”

My vision dims at the edges now. The room recedes. I feel the straps, the cold, the absence of where my scales once bathed under the naked sun.

They catalogue me in numbers. In diagrams. In sterile phrases.

They will never write my name.

Outside, beyond the labyrinth of straight walls and the humming lights, the ocean continues its patient breathing. It does not come for me.

The lights in the room dimmed, and the door swung shut behind me.

A day has already elapsed since the operation, and I feel my body beginning to rot, and my organs beginning to fail from the loss of blood. 

I watch as flies creep through the tiny crack in the window. I watch as the maggots crawl through the huge gaping vents below me and onto the slab. Flies and maggots eat away at my body, and I am awake to feel all of it. The maggots crawl in lines, they tickle the surface of each of my scabs, and they congregate in lines between the folds of my brain. It is no different than watching sandcrabs stand in line where the tide recedes to herd trapped algae. They eat away at my brain until they reach the memory of ​​my mother tucking me beneath the coral while the tide sings of the distant Flowery Land.

I understand, at last. 

They did not fear my voice.

They feared only what it meant.

So they took it, leaving me to die.