God Daughter’s Shanty

My father was only a ruddy-faced fisherman's whelp when the ocean goddess emerged before him, all streaming dark hair and garlands of corroded netting and pearls. He knelt to her, respect learned under a stiff hand at his family's driftwood shrine. It pleased her when he ran here and there for her careless orders, fetching first a nosegay of gull feathers and pink geraniums and horned yellow poppies, next building her a throne of sand twenty handspans high. He hunted a week for a blue crab that evaded him while she watched from her new perch, lip drawn between double rows of teeth.

In return, as she considered her right and his gift, the sea goddess caught his curls and dragged him deep to a stinging bed of anemone. The waves broke five times with her passion. Eventually, mouth salt-burned and bloody, he crawled back gasping on the beach. Her slick tentacles had squeezed the life from his left leg, and from then on it hung pale and fleshy, refusing to support him. He got no farther than his doorstep. Rain washed him. The sun dried him in the morning. Silhouetted before the tempered water, the sand throne crumbled back to earth.

He said nothing when his father's boat returned. He only asked for a crutch to hold himself upright. He never joined the men who dared the waves in their wooden vessels, but he kept the house and salted the barrels of fish, and for a little while he hoped he could forget.

In nine months, I was delivered to him in a tide pool, with curls as bright as his and squalls as rowdy as a hurricane.

†

"Why won't my mother visit?" I complained to my father as a girl, drumming hungrily on the table. I would eat raw creatures whole, cracking into urchins and lobsters festooned with kelp. Whale oil had been my milk. I never understood his fear when I played in the shallows, laughing as I breathed water, or his pain when I shrieked and battered other children for their offenses. Soon it was only us two. Bored and lonely, I threw legendary tantrums, the thunder answering me for every howl.

In my sixteenth year, after he caught me kissing a mariner's girl under the pier, my ragged nails stripping her back, my father told me the story of the goddess who stole him away. Like draining ink from a stone came this secret he had endured. I wept so hard that clouds bloomed in the open sky for days on end. I paced along the water's edge and screamed at my mother. For the damage she had done. For how she'd forgotten. For never coming back to us.

I realized then I had to be the one to find her. So I began my hunt alone.

†

I soon discovered I wasn’t the only one after all.

A man with the black and white wings of a great petrel was the first to join me. He'd been living in a tent, covered in his own shit and mud, eating rotten meat thrown to him by bored sailors. He never knew his mother either, whom he'd killed thrashing free of her belly with his talons, or the father who had flown to her bed at the sight of her shiny locket. I washed that broken man clean in the tide. And following the tale of her wild charms, we found the bard's daughter, who'd grown in her mother from nothing more than a song. Her shanties stirred courage into the softest hearts. By that time, from every corner of the coast, the gods' children were coming to us.

We took in the old man born from a turtle's egg, the dangerous woman whose mother was struck by living lightning, and the polar boy who hoped to rescue his father from a grotto of frozen trophies. Siblings, too—some of us met strangers starred with the same curses. Two cloud-dragon brothers embracing and crying a fog that grounded all the ships in port. An outcast in a skin of sloughing algae who clasped her tiny sister's budding green hands like a rope thrown to save her life. I never did find one to match me. If my mother birthed other spawn, perhaps she kept them in her realm. In my weakest moments, that was the life I wished for. Pearls and shark teeth on strings, singing with a goddess to the backing of the storm, never answering to a mortal soul.

But I do answer to one. He walks on a cane and he is waiting for me to come home golden-handed with ichor.

†

Lovely and terrible, the daughter of the sun met me last. My Brightness. We'd taken her for a leper. Shrouded in black, she said the glow of her body could burn and disease. I was impetuous as weather—I asked to see her wholly, and she shrugged her cloak off in my quarters.

I would have taken more than sunburns to have that night again. So I did, and I did, and I did.

Together, we embarked. Behind us, the other children of the gods would guard our mortals. No more mortals raped and stolen for divine diversion. Instead our petrel man will take flight and raise the warning call, so the dragons and lightning woman can slake their rage. The bard will lead the turtle man and the glacial boy and many others with her melody to destroy the shrines that stand in human homes. And if my story will still be told, it'll be through her shanties too.

My Brightness and I sail to seek revenge at the horizon where the sea and sun cross. I bring nets and jars of lightning and knives of ice at the side of a girl who warms the bitter sea of me to mist. Before we kill our divines, we will show them that we found the kind of love they can never understand.

The hot blood in me is stronger than my mother’s cruel salt water: I learned the best of my tricks from the fishermen who tamed her all their lives. To drag her carcass finally ashore can only be our right, and, gods help her, we could have no greater gift.

© 2024 Sydney Sackett

About the Author

Sydney Sackett (she/her) currently edits legislation at the Maryland General Assembly, and pursues prose and 4X space games in her spare time. Some of her work appears in Etherea, Menacing Hedge, Allegory, and Not One of Us. She prefers rabbits over cats or dogs, cyberpunk over fantasy, and boba tea over coffee. The writer can be tracked down to https://sydneybsackett.wixsite.com/website until such time as she’s got a site of her own.