On summer nights, when the air has gone cool and the ocean cooler still, I settle my aching limbs down at the docks. The dropping temperature goads the fishes to the shallows where I wait, makeshift fishing pole in hand and tackle box in my lap.

My siren stalks me from the water, as she has done for countless seasons now. I do not need to see her to know that she rests just under the sluggish waves and jumbled pools of moonlight. She rolls together a melody of clicks and whistles and hums. Her song fills the night, carving out my chest and turning it into a hollow home for her ilk: the crabs, gobies, and urchins. If she had her way, sea salt stalagmites would cluster on my ribs and drip from the pearl-white bone.

I wait, bare feet shifting on the worn planks holding me above the dark water. The wood is ash gray, bleached by the glaring sun over decades, its support beams bubbled with barnacles.

When she eventually breaks the still surface of the water, the waves are lulled into silence. The moon catches on her nacre skin, illuminating her and drawing the tides around her. The sea swaddles her waist, lifts her up to the pier, and adorns her body with sparkling seadrops before receding back toward the tarry pluff mud below.

She is left standing only a breath away from me. At her oyster-mangled feet, minnows flounder and flop as slim slivers of silver that reflect splintered shards of the moon. Usually, I’d scoop them up as easy bait, but tonight I stare down at them and will them to slip through the slats of the dock. It is all I can do to avoid meeting her gaze.

My siren has grown increasingly bold over the years, but my weariness of her has remained stagnant. I am as scared of her now as I was during my girlhood, when I first spotted her beneath the waves. At the time, I could only make out her round, lidless eyes and her black-toothed, multi-rowed grin. That had been all it took to empty my lungs of air and send my heart sinking down into my stomach.

Here, I can behold the siren’s form in its entirety, her seaweed hair and slick skin and the gills gashed into her bony sides. She is close enough that I can smell her, salty and marshy, rotten and sulfuric. The sensation chokes me, but I cannot slow my breathing enough to stifle it.

“Come,” she croaks, voice scraping and raw. My own throat burns as the word leaves her cracked lips.

I shake my head. I want to step back, to distance myself from both her and the water’s edge, but am paralyzed by fear. “Not yet,” I manage. “Another night. Please.”

She is no longer a blurry creature of the deep: she is real, she is here, she is now. As she stands before me, I wish that I had been braver in my prime, that I‘d slain her when my bones weren’t so brittle and my muscles hadn’t yet worn thin.

Desperate, I flip through a mental catalogue of dead-ended ideas: my fishing knife has sliced through cartilage and scale alike but would be useless in trying to pierce the tough, shell-like material of her flesh; a shuck may be able to crack into the seams of her joints but would not withstand what lies underneath; I could entrap her in a cast net and leave her to bake in tomorrow’s searing sun, but I doubt I’d be able to keep a steady enough grip on her slippery, writhing body long enough to do so.

I am left helpless under her expectant gaze. There’s a distinct saltiness that permeates the humid air. It rusts the hook on my line  and leaves a briny taste in my mouth. I say again, in only a whisper, “Another night.”

She does not need to speak for me to know that she will not wait for that night to come. Her smile—silent, gnashing, with rows of sharp teeth speckled with chum—widens. The resulting expression is uncanny: her empty, bulging eyes do not narrow to compensate for the grin, and her cheeks remain sunken and stuff.

She outstretches a hand, her webbed fingers flaring. Ink and ocean water drip onto the planks below. I do not reach to accept the gesture, but I don’t back away either.

“Please,” I try again. The whisper is weak.

She takes a sopping step forward. Though we’re in the open air, the space feels small. Night folds in on us, pulled in like a current as her slimy hands find mine anyway, then slip up my shaking arms and around to my back. For a moment, her brackish embrace is all there is.

Then, images of the marsh flood my mind: shores swallowed by breaking waves; cordgrass tangled in the sea breeze, periwinkle snails suctioned to their stalks; dunes dotted by the vibrant reds and greens of pickleweed; shark teeth from millennia past washed up in tidal pools; blooms of jellyfish lacing the shallows.

There are more visions than there are grains of sand, and they come all at once. The sour smell of rot permeates each of them, but it’s not unpleasant—the scent has followed me through a lifetime. It emanates from the rich, mucky pluff mud that painted my skin as a child and crusts into the wrinkles of my skin now. It serves both as the marsh’s mother and its reaper, its birthplace and its resting grounds. I know now that it will be mine as well.

In her gentle hold, my reluctance corrodes into resignation, then crestfallen acceptance. The dock creaks beneath me as a lean into the siren.

From my first encounter with her, I had been terror-stricken by the end that would be delivered upon me. Each time she emerged from the water, I was swallowed deeper and deeper into a sea of my own dread. I’d been drowning in the heaviness of my mortality. I know now, though, that this is not the end—it is an inevitable transformation.

When the tide goes out, I allow the siren to take me with it.