In summer, the lovely
girls would come out to the pier
to be ogled at by the boys under the docks.
Their teacher’s warnings
of disappearances along that part of the coast
failed to dissuade
them.
Though searchers were always sent out on the rocks,
this fishing town seemed resigned to a cryptic fate.
The truth beneath the silence had seeped through and bloomed into nervous minds.
Heedless, one night the twin sisters snuck
out to the pier.
They dared each other to make excursions further down the rocks.
But they’d never known the kind of terror they’d soon suffer.
A half-drunken
sailor in his skiff heard the twins’ screams echo over the waves.
From the crack of a
sea cave came their cries at the things that pulled them
in.
Old men in the tavern
listened to the sailor’s tale with glistening eyes,
shook their heads, turned
away.
They pretended ignorance
of the cavern’s changelings,
as they were sometimes called in whispers.
Meanwhile, the slippery things restraining the sisters in darkness stood awestruck.
The sisters’
similarity astonished them.
Many digits poked
one sister’s face, then the other.
A synchronized droning said: “We drink you.”
One twin, hearing
her sister sobbing as digits pricked her face,
tore loose in defiance.
She heard the things’ frightened gasps.
Using this fear, the
twins would come to command the cave—
as they too began to change.
