ㅤㅤㅤ"Your father will be alright in the morning, dear."

Melody's mother closed her bedroom door and locked it. What would she do if there were a flood? Let her our first thing – she had promised her that. But what if water pushed furniture against the door or seaweed clogged the keyhole? And the window? There was a terrace below, which she already knew how to scale; besides, there was no reason to believe the sea could hurt her.

It was all her own fault. It would never have happened if she hadn't snuck out to see the diplomat that evening. The seventeen–year old had been questioned endlessly afterward, but she hadn't revealed just why she slipped away.

Not yet tired that particular night and in need of something to vent her spite on, Melody lit a candle and rummaged through her drawer until she found her diary. She flipped through past pages, a too dramatic and melancholy history: found a loose bar in the seawall … out of love with Alex … Pa's been coronated … and frustrated with not knowing what new to write haphazardly yanked on the drawer and dumped its contents onto the carpet. That was when she noticed a ray of light spilling into the oily interior of the chest.

It was a gap in the wall. Melody pushed her head in and discovered the source of the light: the summer moon was reflecting off the ocean into the long corridor leading to her room. Then, her ears pricked up as she heard the orchestra tune. A distant brass blared from the direction of the ballroom and vibrated the warm air inside the empty hall, a titillating repose: the Friday dance had just passed the midway point.

Any such event, under the imposition of her parents, was a bother when she was younger, but in recent weeks she found a powerful and wilful conviction to attend. She wriggled in the hole and realised she could fit her whole body through if she stripped. The familiar feeling of rebellion stirred in her heart as she slipped into her nightgown, and she made to hurry, wild to see him again. The diplomat, so stoic as he was, always left early.

Melody watched from the banisters. Around two dozen people milled about the ballroom, and of course she was interested in none of them: she saw the bright reds and golds of men's suits, here and there the pinks of girl's dresses, and the occasional ruffled purple of the ethnics. They moved sluggishly across the floor, lagging behind the music, and Melody's eyes moved with them, trying to spot him.

In a space of the room cleared from people the diplomat stood solemnly alone: tall, neat, aloof, with an air of competence the others couldn't hope to match. He stood in naval uniform with natural silence, his head high, his mint eyes unmoving, his nose pointed straight ahead, and his slow–rising chest making him seem immune to time. Held between his index finger and thumb was the foamed glass of perry, and because it was always half–filled he might have never sipped it, just as he forever stood in that same spot, half–heartedly on land.

She knew not where he came from, and when he would return. Forced once to attend a consulate gala, she had encountered him for the first time in a courtyard break, and a giddy nanny whispered the two eternal facts into her ear: his name was Myburgh, he was the youngest ambassador of his nation, and she knew she didn't care…

The full long toll of an abbey bell coursed across the deck, and Melody watched her mother step out onto the floor. A servant clapped his hand against his vambrace, and the room was totally silent. All the attendees raised their heads in unison to the snap of the driftwood heels and then, her mother's demure–toned announcement. But Melody was too far to hear what it was, and as soon as the guests began to clear she was gone.

She only witnessed her in the last flash of moonlight, while she walked away: the handkerchief padded beneath her eyes, and the moment she passed Myburgh. He had looked back at her, and his stony expression broke into a radiant smile.

That man – could it be even he's fallen for her! Melody had seen that gaze before, towards the same person, at every party and every forum, and each time endowed another imaginary sentiment upon it, until she was finally certain that Myburgh's smile was anything but innocent. Every advisor had told her otherwise, but she only reluctantly believed them. Now, thrust into the agony of envy, she did not even stop to wonder the cause of her mother's tears.

Silence weighed down the castle, and Melody began to walk back to her room. But then a strange idea assailed her – any announcement so grave to necessitate emptying the palace her father would have given himself … she had a sudden feeling of dread as she huddled in the dusty drapes by the window, opposite her father's door. The thought soured her ecstasy from seeing Myburgh, and she played out the scene of sprinting forward and flinging the door open; it was here that she came to whine about duties of state – it's better you don't come so often to your Father's room anymore with that excuse about wanting to watch the ships; this could be contagious, dear – here that her father would puff air into his unfilled cheeks, and tell her stories of noble worldliness to soothe, of enemy armies burrowing holes in the castle walls to escape the advance of the righteous foe. He would always be here, he never left…

Melody heard the slap of a wooden heel in the corridor and dashed behind the fabric. But she had tumbled too far backwards, and the breeze from the open window touched her dangling neck. She would never forget the queer sensation she had when, turning around, the warm blue line of the sea appeared below her, and the aroma of gift fruits baking in the holds of the dignitaries' yachts detonated, and she trembled and was exhumed…

She decided to climb down and swim. Upon surfacing, the abbey bell rang again in the sky, and she looked up at the window: no–one stood in it and her escape had been covert. Far away the nobles descended the coast in their carriages, and the cove, circumvented on either side by the castle and the remnants of the seawall, was mysteriously silent in the shade of the camphor trees.

On such moonlit nights merwomen swam up to these trees and squeezed the scented oil out of the low–hanging buds, rubbing it into their hair – a rare fragrance water didn't diffuse. But today the merwomen hibernated in preparation for their solstice festival, and the water was still as taut silk and tinted an opaque opal by the stars.

Melody learned the sea only stilled when there was love. Once, she had witnessed the reflection of a couple in their clandestine spot dapple betrayingly across the waves. But the moment the crescents of their lips joined, the image became clearer than ever.

That evening Melody lay awake for hours, fretted by visions of what unfolded. But what fret her afterwards was a glistening envy. Since then, she resolved to never step down when the ocean had been calm, unless it was her turn – and even if the ripples were motionless now, she was still somehow convinced of her own rule.

A branch broke, and she noticed a man lingering below the canopy. Could it have been the same couple she observed that day…? Melody crouched, and approached in the concealment of the jetty boulders. She walked over a waistcoat folded on a rock, but noticed no bodice beside it: only the glass of perry glimmering from nestling in the sand. An upward stick jut in her way, and she tripped. Looking up, Melody saw the lone man halfway in water, illuminated a shining silver by the moon, and he noticed her back and for several moments did not move. Then he sighed, which might have represented his weariness with the too–acidic perry, with being discovered, or with his entire inhuman condition.

It was the diplomat. He said, "Princess, you do not look like you are yet grieving. Have you not heard the news? Nevertheless…" What in his tone told Melody he was apologetic? "…I must defy your mother's order to vacate the palace. There is something very important I have to tell her, which cannot wait. But watch so long. I am going to return to perfect purity…"

Then, Myburgh swam.

Adroitly, nimbly, he jet through the water, and twirled. He passed an algae reef, and tilted through the nettle of its cephaloid colours. An overturned anchor blocked him, and his legs wagged as one and he rose through the spurs. Melody had never seen anyone swim so nobly as he did, not even the mermaids: and when he lay on his back he appeared to balance the world on the scaled fusion of his knees. A dividend where his two feet should have been – she was sure the light had played a trick on her eyes. But it was strangely undoubtable from that angle: Myburgh's waist began with a navel, and ended in a vermillion fin.

Melody was choked, wet, ecstatic; barely conscious of the frenzied woman's voice from behind. The voice, waveringly beautiful underneath, came to breaking and touched her cheek. "Melody," it said. She placed her hand of top of theirs. "Oh, Melody, where have you been?" She asked what was wrong. "Melody, your father is dead. It was only moments ago. I'm sorry I didn't let you see him. I only worried that it was contagious…!"

But she was fixated on Myburgh. Even if it wasn't her own tears on her face, she saw reflected in crystalline a memory of recent.

On one of the final evenings there had been a courtyard party, and she joined her father on the overlooking balcony and abruptly announced to him, "I've fallen in love."

Without moving his eyes from the dance, he asked, "Is he in this crowd?"

"Yes."

"Is he a good man?"

"I don't know. He has to be."

"Does he take off his hat when he talks to women?"

"No, he doesn't wear one…"

Melody's father looked at her, smiling, and she realised the magnitude of how she had been tricked. "There's only one man like that at this party." He pointed unashamedly down at Myburgh – he still held his glass of perry – Melody blushed. "And how do you know it's love if you've never been in love before?"

"I have been. Alex."

"That wasn't anything. Tell me really."

Melody answered like a poem begrudgingly memorised, as truthfully as she could:

"It only feels as if I've seen him before. Long ago … very far away … but no matter how far, we had been destined to meet again. Perhaps it had been at a perry farm, or in a principality by the sea…"

Her father said simply, "That's a similar feeling to when I met your mother." He went back into the room and fell onto the bed, the exhaustion of disease suddenly apparent. "But I will say the same thing I've always said to people in love: be unashamed!" She interpreted this as a heroic encouragement to go forward and proclaim her affection to Myburgh. In the same bed two weeks later, her father succumbed to the dehydration of Cholera, and died aged thirty–nine in the company of his wife and two young servants, tormented by the sores of bloodletting attempts.

Melody remembered the words but in a confused way. But at the end the single command remained with her – unashamed! – and so she began to weep, for the first time that day, unashamed, as she only did when she was alone. Until that moment she had never been fully aware of the ratio of life and emptiness that changed every time she entered her father's room, that continued to change until the moment it was zeroed by death. She wept for the first time since learning of his sickness, and for her solitude and rage, and when she looked past her drizzled arm at Myburgh, wept only because he watched, on two feet planted in the sand, contrary to her dream. Eventually she forgot why she wept, and wept because the sea remained motionless, and she had no idea why. Romance must always prevail, she was thinking, but in a moment like this, it should at least have the decency to involve me! Only then did she remember that she wept for her dead father, and that while she wept, unashamed, she had thought more about Myburgh than she did of he, and the ashamedness of being unashamed was what made her weep most of all.

Clutching her daughter in her arms, the mother had lifted her head, and noticed the diplomat examining them from the lapless banks.

"Didn't I tell all of you to leave?" She was suddenly angry. "We are grieving. I'll give you one last chance to go. Then, I'll call the guards."

When he did not move, she raised her chin in preparation to shout. But before she could pronounce her vindication, he placed his hand over his heart, unashamed and dignified, and the wave that sustained his life finally crashed.

"Ariel," Myburgh said, "I have waited for this day for over twenty years, since the final time we played together as man and mermaid in the camphor groves, to tell you my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love."

Melody stopped crying when she heard the confession. Her mother's arms had loosened around her – she could feel the quivering and the anger.

But Myburgh waited only plaintively for the reply, stretched across a warm stone. He was totally casual, and at that moment she admired him: "If this is what it means to be unashamed, this is just how I'd like to live my life." I guess I'd do anything to reach that point, no matter how awful!

I would greatly appreciate comments. Thank you!