Bound by the Siren’s Coin
A hidden coin in a Florida spring awakens a long-dead pirate bound by a siren’s curse. As the water begins to call to her, Uma must decide whether to break the tether or lose herself to it forever.
The Coin in the Spring
A bug stained wooden sign near the entrance warned visitors not to swim into the darker sections of the run.
STRONG CURRENT. NATURAL CAVES. STAY WITHIN MARKED AREA.
Uma had seen the photos before coming to Florida—clear blue water, limestone shelves, cypress roots curling into the banks like wrinkly fingers—but the real thing still caught her off guard.
It was bright and inviting, like someone had cut a piece of sky out and dropped it into the earth.
The spring looked unreal in the late afternoon light. It resembled crystal glass tinged with green and blue hues.
Uma sat on the weathered dock with her sandals kicked off beside her. Around her, families laughed, children splashed, and a group of college girls took turns filming one another at the rope swing.
Spanish moss hung lazily overhead. Somewhere farther back on the trail, she could hear the squeak of bicycle tires and the hum of cicadas beginning to rise with the heat.
This was exactly why she had come to the springs, to feel an escape from her routine day to day.
The last year of her life had felt like a confined, clinical room with no windows.
She spent many nights falling asleep with her phone still in her hand and waking up with a familiar hollow ache in her chest. Her mother called it a phase, and that burnout is inevitable when you're succeeding at something.
Uma privately called it the feeling of becoming a ghost in her own life and a slave to spreadsheets.
So she had taken four days off, driven inland, rented a little cabin outside Orlando, and promised herself she would stop thinking so much.
At the springs, she stood and walked to the edge of the dock, peering into the water.
The limestone shelf below was visible in startling detail. Silver fish flickered through beams of light. The shallows were warm where the sun reached them, but the center of the spring held a colder blue, ancient and untouched.
There was something shining down there. At first she thought it was a bottle cap or a trick of sunlight against stone, but when she shifted, it flashed again—small, round, and unmistakably gold.
It could be worth thousands. She thought.
Uma glanced toward the families nearby. No one seemed to notice, so she took a breath and dove down.
The water closed over her with shocking clarity. The sounds above dissolved at once into a soft, suspended hush.
She kicked downward, long hair trailing behind her, and reached toward the glint caught in a crack of limestone near a tangle of roots.
It was a beautiful golden coin. Unmistakably old, eye catching and expensive looking.
Even underwater it glimmered. The coin was worn around the edges and there was a tiny hole punched near the top where a thin chain had been threaded through. A small red gem she couldn't identify was embedded in the middle.
The coin looked less like old money and more like something someone had once worn against their skin.
Only then did she see the way it had been fixed into the stone.
Uma wrapped her fingers around it and pulled when she did, the temperature dropped so fast it hurt.
Her lungs clenched and the sunlight seemed to dim.
For one impossible second she had the sickening sensation that the water beneath her moved and something brushed her wrist.
Then a man's voice, deep and distant as if carried through miles of sea, moved through her bones.
Crush it now.
