It feels like my body is burning at the stake, my spine nailed to its post, my misery its fire. The darkness is overwhelming. I can smell my hair singed from heat, hear my skin crack as it starts to blacken and curl and split. The sweet vapor of my juices wafts up my nose, or is it the stink of linoleum? What's happening? Is this some sort of siren hell and I'm stuck in its hottest room as punishment? It's certainly not siren heaven. Perhaps I'm balanced in that divine fold between life and death, the one that rips open as soon as you enter. The afterlife. One of the three destinations where Canosa is supposed to bring those who pass.

The only thing I know for sure is I'm hot. Before my vocal cords dissolve in this brilliant blaze, I want to utter one final cry. It starts at the edge of my lungs, speeds through my trachea and larynx, and promptly dies on the back of my tongue, stifled by a wall. I'm gagged.

My whole body shakes in a burst of dry coughing. I'm certain that if I was dead for real, coughing would be the last thing on my body's agenda. My throat constricts in another spasm and I make funny whooping sounds through a bundle of cloth stuffed into the cavity of my mouth. I press on it with my tongue and try to register the sensation fully, to make sure it's real. It tastes of saliva and bitter cotton, soft and rough at the same time, with a million fiber endings grinding into my tongue which, in turn, feels as if it's made of sand paper. My lips sting, stretched out to the biggest O shape they can make; the gag pulls the skin tight all around my jaw, unhinged to near breaking. There is tape over my mouth, and the odor of its glue tickles my nostrils. 

I groan, breathing through my nose. It feels like I'm passing fire as each inhale and exhale burns with blistering air. My chest is aflame and my gills feel cracked and dry. They ache the way an open wound would, each nerve ending assaulted to the point of screaming. If I were a lobster, this is what it would feel like to be thrown into boiling water and cooked alive. Except, there is no water around me, not a single drop, not even the tiniest bit of moisture that I can pick up with my skin. None. This must be my own private hell. 

The darkness begins to recede. I think my vision must be returning to normal. There is a grayness that comes to view, with a blue undertone. Sky? No, this must be my eyelids penetrated by light, because it doesn't feel like I'm actually seeing anything. My eyes feel closed. At least, I hope they are. My eyes are swollen shut, heavy and hot, and it takes a few tries to make a slit wide enough to see through. Blinking several times, I produce a smidge of a tear to moisten them.

I'm laying on my back, on the floor of a room the color of chalk, like it's been bleached and is now a bit dirty. My eyes hurt from being dry, so I close them, take another hot breath, and look again, determined to find out exactly where I am. 

On my second try, I understand a simple truth that chills me to the bones and breaks my skin into goose bumps. It's not just any room I'm in, it's padded. There are a series of square pillows covering walls the color of washed out sand, reeking of synthetic leather. I'm afraid to flex my arms or legs, not willing to discover whether or not this is truly my fate; a madhouse where crazies are locked up, bundled into straightjackets that won't let them move. I concentrate on one thing at a time. I have to focus on the facts.

The room. It's the size of a typical bathroom, or a prison cell, depending on how you look at it. It's six by six by eight feet, almost a cube, and I'm smack in the middle of it. At least it's not dark. On the ceiling, about six feet above me, a single round fluorescent light shines through a net of protective wires. The light it emits is soft, as if filtered through a cloud. Everything about this room is soft—the foam on the walls, the floor under my back, even the sound. Rather, the lack of it. Each of my coughs comes out hushed and disappears into the dead silence.

This room, no, this cell, is soundproof, perhaps specifically designed for locking up sirens. Yell all you want, nobody will hear. Not like I can test this theory, thanks to the gag.

I wheeze.

The floor shifts and I sway, noticing that it was gently moving all the time to a tender rocking motion, but I was too focused on the walls and the lighting to notice, mistaking it for my own dizziness. Does this mean I'm still on the boat? The word vaguely makes sense, pulled from the farthest banks of my memory and presenting me with an image of a trawler, a gigantic overturned insect gliding across the ocean's waves. Whose trawler is this and how did I get here? I can't remember.

I suck in air through my nose and cringe at the stench of fake leather. Enough diddle-daddle, let's see what's happening with my body. Breathing rapidly, I turn my attention to my fingers. They're stuck tight against my elbows in a cup hold, yet I don't feel like I'm holding them. I try to move one, then another, and can't; they all feel numb. My whole body is numb, as if it's not there. I try to lift my head and look. Tough luck, my neck muscles don't cooperate. Shifting my gaze down doesn't help either, my eyeballs burn like they're about to turn to lava and I can't see anything beyond the faint outline of my nose and jaw.

Finally, I decide to try something else. I tighten my abdomen—those muscles seem to be working better—and, with an audible grunt, I tense into a string of will and tilt my head to the left, scraping the floor with the back of it until it's as far as it will go. There, in the distance, blurry, are my feet that I can't feel. The length of my body is shrouded in the semblance of a cotton sheet, several cotton sheets, layer upon layer. It takes me another minute to tilt my head back and to the right. Same thing.

Great, Ailen Bright, you're the first siren pupa.

Off-white cotton, perhaps the same material that fills my mouth, holds me in a cocoon. Imagining who did it, how long it took them to wrap me up like this, and whether or not I'm naked underneath, makes me want to puke. Forget about the trawler, I'm an insect here, an ugly larva cleaned with ocean water, washed with shame, and rinsed and dressed in layers of gauze. I flex my hands again, finger by finger, like I'm playing a piano. Though in real life, I never got a chance to try; my father forbade me because of his hate of noise and all things musical. I could only tap on the bathroom floor while locked up, pretending I'm a teenage virtuoso, one of those prodigies you see on TV. I would tap Siren Suicides songs and sing to them quietly, afraid that he'd hear.

My father. That's it! His face was the last I saw...where? Did he put me into some kind of floating asylum?

"Let's see here," I mumble into cloth, but it comes out more like, "Uhuhuheee." I don't mind it and keep talking, to feel sane.

"My name is Ailen Bright, and I'm a sixteen year old siren." That much I remember and, in my heart, I know I'm right. "I'm a siren and that's all that matters. I have awesome—as Hunter would say—powers, and I can get myself out of this mess." Pause. "My father is a siren hunter and he wants to kill me. We were on a rowboat wh—" Hunter? What happened to him? Later. I'll think about this later.

I try to bend my right forefinger first. It won't move. Pathetic. How about middle finger? No luck. All right, if I can't move my fingers, arms, or legs, maybe I can bend using my stomach muscles? They worked well about a minute ago. I patiently wait for the boat to lurch, to coincide with my inertia, so that I can roll over.

Here it comes. The floor tilts lightly and I arch and contract like a leech pinned under a stick, gaining momentum, turning, turning, hanging on my left side in that moment of not knowing whether I will make it or not. The boat bumps on the wave and I flop face down.

My nose hits the padded floor and I retch into the gag, overtaken with hunger and revulsion at the smell. I strain my neck and turn my head left so that I can breathe, or at least avoid inhaling this synthetic rot.

It takes an eternity for me to repeat the roll. Again. And again. The padded cell revolves around me like a kaleidoscope, a cube of mirrors supposed to contain a multitude of colored bits of glass. Instead, they're colorless and it's only me inside. I'm in the land of "I don't know why the fuck I'm here and maybe I don't want to know."

I'm mad, lying on my back again, staring at the ceiling. Being mad doesn't help me get out of this situation. However, I can't help it. I'm fuming and my mind's blank, no thoughts in it, nothing, only fury at my helplessness.

A minute goes by, but it feels like an hour.

Breathing through my nose is getting harder. My gills are dry to the point of lacerating. One more flex, just one more. I need to get out of here somehow, I need to!

Facts, Ailen, facts, focus on facts.

I take a moment to glance around. It's the same every which way I look, nothing new to see, no openings of any kind. Where is the door? Somehow, they must have gotten me in here. The wall on my right is within my reach, only a couple feet away; if only my arms weren't tucked in safely under the cotton bondage. The floor shifts once more, and I roll flush with the wall, using it for support to lean away a little, my back about a foot away. I bend my knees as much as the cocoon allows, and hit the wall with my feet. Once, twice, three times. I pause to breathe and nearly black out from the effort, noticing the feeble trickle of my energy seep away. But my legs moved, and it gives me hope.

I grunt in anger and hit again. Nothing. No sound, no movement. Not even the tiniest vibration. The smooth cotton on my feet slides over the equally smooth fake leather and doesn't give me any traction. I curse under my breath. How many layers of foam are there?

The constant rocking of the floor intensifies and makes me dizzy. It appears the weather outside is as mad as I am. I try reaching out to the clouds, but without my voice, I'm nothing. Maybe that's why we're both frustrated.

I lift my head off the floor and shake it.

I know what I hate—I hate these walls. I hate my cocoon. I want to break out. I bite into the gag and hit the wall again, pause to rest. Repeat. I ignore the ringing in my ears and the rainbow circles of my blurry vision; closing my eyes, I concentrate every ounce of will on making a noise, at least letting them know I'm here, I'm still alive, and I'm kicking.

A storm. We hit a storm. Its soughing wind gush walks across my skin in a march of goose bumps. I can feel it even through these walls. For one strange instance, I like the fact that the cell I'm in is padded, because it shakes madly, throwing me from wall to wall, and all I can see is its imagined kaleidoscope in my mind's eye, turning, revolving around me, as if someone is peeking through its lens, amused but bored.

I roll away from the wall, now back to it again. Queasiness bears its sticky fingers into my stomach and I lose it in a series of empty puking spasms. Time turns elastic and I forget where it started, don't know if it will end. Maybe it's an unbroken circle. Another hour goes by like this, or two? What was it that needed to be done here?

The wall. Hit the wall, and maybe try your voice again.

But my throat sears with fire when I attempt to sing. So I bend and stomp on the wall one more time with as much force as I can muster. The shock from the hit pricks my feet with needles.

Something gives.

The temperature inside my cell falls a few degrees. I don't know if it's due to my exertion, or some control outside of this room. A foreign noise breaks through the matted silence. I don't dare breath as I concentrate on the noise.

An echo of...jingling keys? Yes, it's metallic, like keys on a ring.

I'm blank, tense, staring at the spot on the wall where the sound is coming from. It continues to amaze me and scare me with its clarity. It's definitely not imagined.

A turn of the lock, a click, and several revolutions of what sounds like the hand wheel you see on bank safes in movies. Maybe I'm wrong but, whatever it is, it's large and heavy. One more gentle, metallic din, and I see a vertical line grow from a shadow to a slit to a door opening inside. It swooshes against the high threshold of the room, reminding me of rubbery latex gloves brushing each other.

I was hitting the wall on the wrong side. Directly across from me, six feet away, a door opens. It's a rectangle with rounded corners, set at about six inches off the floor.

There is no immediate soul melody, and the burned tang of butterfly wings on a flute solo enters my hearing. It's off-key. It floods me in a wash of memories, drowning me in images of being caught, the trawler in the ocean, Hunter's kiss, Canosa tipping our rowboat, the net, and the terrible drum rolling us out of the water and onto the deck. I see the image of Jimmy, the tall fisherman, followed by Glen, the fat one whose soul Hunter helped me devour in one of those onboard fish processing freezers. Papa. And then me, letting him blast me with his sonic gun, willing to see how far he intended to go.

There is hurt in him, I hear it. An old patina of pain. That means he still feels. It's what I wanted to see for myself before giving in to my overwhelming desire to rid this world of the siren I've become, since I'm unable to stop killing, and before I turn out like Canosa—hateful, bitter, grim.

A waft of cold air rushes in; I nearly choke on it as I greedily take it in through my nostrils. The dark rectangle of the door opening widens and I raise my head to look my father in the face, straight in the eyes, bright blue against the dimness behind him.

Hello, Papa, you came to check in on me, I transmit with my eyes. What a treat. You'd be surprised to find out that, on some level, I have missed you.

A mask of indifference planted firmly over his features, he holds my gaze, carefully steps inside, and shuts the door behind him with a clank. This is the first time I can't see what he's wearing, don't notice the style of his hair or the smell of his cologne. They don't matter anymore, not even his grimaces that I usually try reading, to know how to behave to avoid his anger.

I'm so afraid of you, Papa. I've been afraid of you my entire life. You're worse than my most horrible nightmares, because nightmares fade away in the morning. But you're real—flesh and bones—and you always seem to find me, no matter how far away I run.

Perhaps he detects what I'm trying to say, because he pauses with his hand still on the door that has no knob, now flush with the wall and invisible. I don't exactly see his hand there, I kind of feel it, a skill I acquired from years of being slapped and hit, to know exactly where his hands are without looking.

There is nothing but his two dark pupils that burrow into my consciousness with vivid hate. This time, it's unmasked, borne from a deep place inside, perhaps one that's beyond mending and that was torn out a long time ago, maybe when he was child. A horrible, empty hole that he didn't know how to fill with love, so he filled it with hate, because keeping it empty hurt more than filling it with anything at all. To survive. Yet there is something, something that still kindles, and I latch on to it, holding his gaze, talking to him in my own silent way.

You know what? There is something I never considered in my constant terror. It never even occurred to me until I died and was reborn as a siren. But I know it now for a fact. I take a breath and swallow, which is more like my throat contracting because of the gag. He still studies me, unmoving, as if waiting for the punch line. And I deliver.

As much as I'm afraid of you, you're afraid of me, too.

At this, I exhale, feeling like I've just practiced a speech that maybe one day I'll be able to make in real life.

My father keeps digging deep into my eyes with regard.

Three seconds, that's as long as I last. I can't stand looking into his eyes anymore and avert my gaze. He wins, for now. The air in the room shifts with both of our certainty on this account.

Grief floods me. To my horror, tears of understanding cascade down the side my face, staining my left cheek with rivulets of salted water, gluing my face to the fake leather on the floor.

He's afraid of me, but he has a lifetime of experience turning his fear into violence. No, it's not just me; siren or not, it doesn't matter. It's women, all women. He's terrified of women.

Oh, Papa, I wish I could heal you somehow. Hopping back onto the highway of sorrow, I close my eyes, willing my lids to hold in the running water. Good luck. Tears keep streaming down the left side of my face, pooling below my cheek in a tiny puddle.

That thing that's gone, that place that's been torn out of him, I know what it is. I've known it all along. It's his soul, even before it was stolen by Canosa. It was mostly gone before she made him fall in love with her. She simply put the last nail into his coffin. His mother...his own mother must have damaged him before that, the woman he never mentions, the grandmother I never knew. She drove him to seek the love of a cold undead creature instead of real live woman. What level of betrayal must a son feel when it comes from his own mother? What kind of hurt would that inflict on his ego, and how permanently would that screw him up? For life. I grind my teeth as far as they will go into the gag, wishing she was alive, wanting to tear her apart. I want to yell in her ear, "You bitch! You give it back to him, now! You give back to him what's his, you hear me?"

In this moment, I realize something else...the futility of my attempts. There is no use dying in front of him in hopes of playing some morbid joke on him or to hurt him. It won't work. He doesn't care and would rather see me dead, when he gathers his courage to actually do it. Because I represent his fear and, perhaps, I also look a little bit like my grandma. There is only one thing I can do—keep singing to him, and hope to rekindle more of his soul.

I need to keep singing, despite my fear that he'll never hear, afraid that he's permanently deaf to me. He's not; he heard me once, on the boat at Lake Union, so he can hear me again. It's not that he doesn't want to. It's that he can't, on his own. He needs help. There is no apparatus that can receive my signal and transmit it into an intelligible wavelength that his brain can then transpose into a jolt of his heart so that he can, in turn, interpret it as a feeling. Into the one, and only, feeling that's worth living for.

Love.

I have to keep trying, even if it means dying in the process. I will know that I did everything I could and will pass in peace. He lets go of the wall and takes a step toward me. His eyes are empty. Finally, I know why.

Papa, I won't give up on you, I swear. I know everyone has in the past, and I'm sorry. I give you my word. I'll fight you, just to make you see that I mean it for real, okay?

I don't know if he got my message or not, as he closes in on me. There is only one way to fight his emptiness: by reflecting his emotions.

He squats next to me and raises his hand.