Day 769

I found a mermaid once in the marshlands over my neighbour's fields when I was younger. There'd been rumours for a while that there were fish underneath the thick scummy weeds that clogged most of the water where the bulrushes hadn't reached yet. Someone even took a shaky photo of this white thing that looked more like damp paper than the fin that they claimed it to be.

They look nothing like the stories, at least this one didn't - there wasn't much human about it really,save for the eyes. It had eyes like a person but the rest of its face was like a flattened shark. It could still smile though but I really wish it hadn't, nothing prepares you for the sight of so many teeth in so little mouth space or for how wide the mouth can stretch when it spoke.

It's size in general must have been well over twelve feet from top to tail and just like the photo it was albino with large pinkish eyes and sickly light green frog-like skin. Enormous gills ran down both sides of its torso and fluttered gently, half in the water as it leaned on the more solid side of the marshlands.

But the day I saw the mermaid was the day they found eight cows from the fields slaughtered and half eaten with another one missing entirely. Of course I didn't know that at the time and continued to have a very nervous  one-sided conversation with a being who had more teeth than I had hairs on my head (or so it seemed at the time).

I tried to get away as quickly and politely as possible - not even thinking to take a photo but more concerned with getting inland where I thought it couldn't go. That following morning I was called downstairs by my parents who stood by the back door looking confused and worried. They asked if I'd been near the marshes and if I'd met any strangers there. I didn't count the mermaid as a stranger, I half thought I'd made it up until they showed me a basket made from bulrush with a little note inside it saying:

To a little human girl with good manners.
Farm house with two cats.
Troon, Scotland.

Inside the basket was a necklace made from cow's teeth and, if my sums are right, it contained the full sets from six of the nine deceased cows. My parents told me to hang it above the front door and decorate it with the reeds from the basket, even now they still have it hung up greeting everyone who comes in.

They say that ever since I put that there the cows in the area had been safe and thriving more than ever. Something about the threefold law and faefolk that I never quite listened to until I went back to the marshlands and saw that mermaid again. It had spent all of these years doing us, doing me a kindness by leaving our cattle alone and alive and now it's my turn to pay that back.

Threefold.