Step Right Up and Hear the Siren's Song!
First, they dropped the siren into a sound-modified booth that stripped her song of its temptation. Across the top of the siren’s booth, they painted, “Can you resist the Siren’s Song?” in lascivious red. Another rigged game.
Then the siren lost her voice altogether. “Use it or lose it,” her mother had warned through puffs of smoke. Without the power of her song, she was just a woman in a box. Nothing special. One glance inside and all people saw was a depressed woman on a stool with nothing to do all day.
To liven things up, they installed a button that played an AI-generated vocal. This allowed people to insert a coin and tempt destiny. When a couple approached, the man vowed to love none other than his beloved. To refuse the siren song that even Odysseus could not. As the song played, he stared into his beloved’s eyes for as long as she could hold it. But when the woman looked into the booth, she saw the siren pressing her lips together so hard they were white. She saw the still muscles in the siren’s thin neck, the sweat dripping from her unkempt hair, the darkness under her eyes. The siren’s eyes met hers, and the woman saw a childhood friend, her cool neighbor in college, the milk carton girl. The woman approached the glass and pressed her hand against it. Hello. It wasn’t jeering or demanding. It was simply there. The siren matched her. Hello. The glass between them cracked.
Chelsea Stickle lives in Annapolis, MD with her black rabbit George. Her flash fiction appears in Monkeybicycle, The Molotov Cocktail, matchbook, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and others. Her debut chapbook Breaking Points is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press (fall 2021). Read more at chelseastickle.com/stories and find her on Twitter @Chelsea_Stickle.