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The Straits of Messina

She doesn’t hate sailors, not particularly. She’d like to talk to one of them, to have a friend. Maybe she’d show him her cave; she’d cover the floor with rushes, rub his sunburned shoulders, lick salt from his chest.

She does get lonely. It’s hard not to, when you can’t leave your little rock, and your only friend is a vomiting whirlpool.

She doesn’t deserve this; her only crime was looking good to a god, one day at the bath. And now she eats sailors, despairing, sullen, always hungry. Dogs’ heads aren’t much good at catching fish.