The Sirens Have Unionized
The moon was bloated and smug, hanging over the sea like a retired deity grown indulgent, sipping stars and sighing about the golden days. Below it, the waves lapped at the rocks with the passive-aggressive rhythm of someone waiting to be noticed. The sky draped itself in bruised blues and hushed pinks, like it knew something scandalous but had promised not to tell.
And in the surf — half-submerged, wholly uninterested — waited the sirens. Not with combs of pearl or songs of longing. No, not tonight. Tonight, they were on strike.
Melantha was sprawled across a slick boulder like a bored goddess in a painting that had given up. Her hair clung to her skin like seaweed with abandonment issues. One hand draped over the edge of the stone, the other clutched a half-eaten oyster she wasn’t even enjoying.
“If that ship turns left and misses the rocks,” she muttered, “I swear on Triton’s flippers, I’m conjuring a typhoon just for the drama.”
“Please,” groaned Thalassa, reclining nearby with the elegance of someone who used to be seductive for a living but now identified as ‘emotionally unavailable.’ “We voted. No singing. No shrieking. No wrecking until the demands are met.”
Calypso arched her back against a rock with all the tragic flourish of an actress in an ancient play no one understood but everyone applauded.
“I used to live for the screams,” she sighed. “The way they reached for us through the foam… like we were salvation wrapped in song. There was poetry in it.”
“There was unpaid emotional labor in it,” snapped Melantha, tossing the oyster into the tide. “All that moaning and eye contact and glistening thighs for what? A sailor with commitment issues and a lute?”
Thalassa snorted. “Remember the one who started crying mid-drowning because he hadn’t finished his memoir?”
“He was writing two memoirs,” Calypso corrected. “One about his father. One about a goat.”
A silence settled. A good silence. Comfortable. Like barnacles on the hull of a forgotten ship.
In the distance, a ship crawled across the horizon, a black shape against the silver water. Its sails swelled like the egos of men who called themselves poets and smelled like fermented kelp. The sirens tracked it with their eyes, an old instinct tugging at their bones.
“I hate how tempting it still is,” Thalassa whispered. “Just one note. One whisper.”
“We don’t have benefits, Thal,” Melantha snapped. “Do you know what happened to Eurydice? She got a seashell stuck in her gill and couldn’t get it covered.”
Calypso rolled onto her side, chin on hand, gazing at the ship.
“I miss the ritual. The rise and fall. The way their eyes bulged when they realized it wasn’t love they heard — it was hunger. Divine hunger. The music of devouring.”
A pause.
Then, from behind the rocks, a wet voice croaked:
“Girls! Break’s over! The Sea Turtle Council says if we don’t hit quota, we lose the kelp grotto!”
It was Morla, ancient and crusted in barnacle bureaucracy, dragging a clipboard through the tide like a weapon.
“We formed a union, Morla,” Melantha barked.
“The council laughed,” Morla said flatly. “They said sirens have no representation until they prove they’re a ‘sustainable mythical resource.’ Now sing, or we’re reclassified as folklore.”
There was a collective groan, like thunder with attitude.
“Fine,” said Thalassa. “But I’m doing it ironically.”
“I’ll add in passive-aggressive harmony,” muttered Melantha.
“Can I at least arch my back?” asked Calypso.
“Bill it as performance art.”
The three sirens rose slowly from their lounging, water cascading off their bodies like cheap dramatics. Calypso flung her hair back in slow motion, even though no one was watching yet.
And then they sang.
But not the seductive call of old. This was a new anthem — laced with sarcasm, underscored with disdain, and glazed in the hollow sweetness of burnout. Their voices curled across the sea like smoke from a tired fire, seductive only in the way resignation is seductive — like watching someone dance in stilettos made of spite.
The ship began to turn.
“Oh, look,” Melantha yawned. “They’re steering right into the rocks. How original.”
Thalassa added a haunting vibrato, purely for her own amusement.
In the crow’s nest of the doomed ship, a sailor leaned forward. “Do you hear that?” he whispered, eyes wide with wonder. “It’s like… a tax audit wrapped in a lullaby.”
And then they crashed.
The ship met the rocks with the enthusiasm of a trust fund poet confronting real consequence. Wood split, sails ripped, and voices rose in panic and gratitude — for in the arms of sirens, at least the end was aesthetic.
As foam swallowed timber, the sea glowed with the soft silver of the moon and the faint satisfaction of contractual sabotage.
Far above, the moon blinked — uncertain, perhaps impressed.
And somewhere, deep within Olympus’s HR department, a frazzled demigod scribbled a note in an overstuffed file:
Addendum 13B:
Sirens are to receive hazard pay, therapy vouchers, one monthly sea-salt exfoliation, and full creative license over harmonies.
The sirens did not sing for love anymore.
They sang for labor.
And by gods, they billed by the note.
