In a Glass Grimmly by Adam Gidwitz

He laughed plenty and told stories and seemed to be liked by all. But there was something about him. Something sad. In the pauses between stories, or when his big-bellied laughter died away, she saw him sigh or look down at the table heavily. She didn’t know why she hadn’t seen it before. Once, he caught her looking at him. She smiled quickly. He broke into a broad grin. This time, when he looked away, he did not sigh.
     
    ----
    Jill ran down to the edge of the rocks that night and told the mermaid that she knew who it was that was trying to hurt her. The mermaid nodded sullenly. “What good will that do, though?” she asked, and her lips and her face and her eyes were so sad and fine they made Jill want to weep. “He will not stop.”
    “I’ll make him stop,” Jill said. “I swear it. I swear it.”
    This time, as the pink began to streak the eastern sky, the mermaid blew Jill a kiss. Jill felt it on her cheek, like soft sea foam.
    ----
    The next afternoon, Jill made her way down to the little hut by the sea where the red-bearded man lived. She knocked on the door. There was no answer. So she went around to a small shed that stood behind the house to look for him there. The door stood ajar. Jill looked within.
    Hanging from the walls of the shed were dozens of rusty fish axes and harpoons, each covered with fish guts and algae and filth. Covered, that is, save their edges. Those shone sharp and clean.
    “Hello there!”
    Jill turned around to see the red-bearded man sitting on a stack of peat bricks against the wall of the house, mending a fishing net. “Why, look who it is!” he said, and his face lit up.
    “Hello,” said Jill. “I hope I’m not disturbing you . . .”
    “Why no! I love some comp’ny while I tend me net. Sit!” he said, and gestured with his foot at an upturned bucket, still wet with the innards of gutted fish. Jill looked at it and remained standing.
    “Was it you that lost your daughter to the sea?” Jill asked, even though she knew the answer.
    The man’s wide smile faded. He looked at Jill and his eyes were hollow. “Aye,” he said. “’Twas.”
    Jill looked down. “I’m sorry,” she said.
    He nodded and sighed.
    Jill looked back up, straight into the man’s eyes, with a gaze sharper than a fish knife. “Are you trying to catch the mermaid?” she asked. Her mouth was set and her face was hard.
    The man looked at her funny. “Lass,” he said at last, “no man can cast such a net as can catch a mermaid.”
    Jill did not let him out of her gaze. He looked back down at his work on the net. “This poor rope and twine can no more catch a mermaid than you can catch the light o’ the moon,” he said. He began mending again. After a moment, Jill again said she was sorry for his loss, and started back toward the village. But after a dozen steps she glanced over her shoulder. The man was watching her darkly, keenly, from under his heavy brows. She hurried up the hill.
     
    ----
    That night, Jill waited impatiently for Jack to fall asleep, and then, as soon as the mermaid’s song began, she hurried down the steps and out the door of the tavern. As she slipped out into the night, she kept an eye on the little hut by the sea. Its door was tightly shut against the wind and the spray. As she made her way down to the rocks, though, following the sound of the mermaid’s song, she thought she saw the door open just a crack. She stopped. She looked closer. Yes. The door to the bearded man’s house was now standing ever so slightly ajar. Jill kept walking.
    When she got to the little harbor, she walked on past it, farther out onto the rocks. The waves crashed around her feet as she climbed the slippery, craterous black crags out over the sea. At last she found a good footing.
    “I didn’t want him to see where I meet you,” Jill whispered to the wind. “He’s watching me right now.”
    As if in answer, the mermaid sang,
Never cry no more
again, and her song caught on the