The merms weren’t dumb, just feral. Wild things whose wild had disappeared. Or overheated. In our good moments, we felt bad for them. We imagined them imagining their watery homes, their windswept rocks, their transfixed sailors. We wondered if they missed weightlessness. If there were things you could only think at certain depths.

— Kelly Magee, “The Merm Prob”

I picked up a copy of Gulf Coast’s Archive Issue last week and, let me tell you, it’s good. The issue features the winners of the 2015 Barthelme Prize, judged by Steve Almond,  essays by Traci Brimhall and Andrea Lee, a selection of poetry curated by Eduardo Corral, and stories by Leslie Jamison and Stuart Dybek. So basically, you can’t go wrong. But one piece that stands out to me in this uniformly stellar issue is Kelly Magee’s “The Merm Prob,” a brutal, funny story about what happens when a peaceful seaside community is overrun by a group of vicious, sex-crazed mermaids.

If that description alone isn’t enough to make you want to pick up a copy right now, there’s more. Not only are Magee’s mermaids a welcome antidote to the familiar image of the seductive siren, they also raise some valid questions about the logistics of mermaidery. If you keep a mermaid in your swimming pool, will it wreak havoc on your filtration system? How do mermaids reproduce, exactly? This is a story that commits to its premise and explores those consequences in sharp, concrete detail.

Magee handles the cascading ramifications of the mermaids’ arrival with wit and careful language. The voice of her collective narrators (the women of the town besieged by the mermaids) is reminiscent of George Saunders’ deadpan, jargony narrators, and much of the humor of the story, as is often the case in Saunders’ work, comes from the protagonists’ understated telling of the bizarre events at hand.  But the matter-of-factness of Magee’s narrators belies  a subtle longing they have trouble expressing, and uncovers a seam of unreliability that runs through the story. This, I think, is what endears me to “The Merm Prob” most. It’s a story that surprises not only the reader, but even the characters telling it.