The Selkie
“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”
William Shakespeare
Her right toe swings above the ripples circling the dock. The brown brine below calls to her. If only she could dive in, she would chase the schools of fish in the cool water, snapping herself up a snack. A motion more natural than this upright walking required of her as a woman. A chemical singe tortures her toe, she pulls her foot back up toward land.
The water is becoming her enemy.
As far as Sealene can tell, it has been three tide cycles since she and the sea parted ways. The moon, rising into the indigo sky, sustains her with its constancy. The webbing between her slim pinky and ring fingers split this morning. She isn’t sure if this new skin will stitch back together, or remain severed. But the moon is sure.
One other thing is certain, Sealene has still not found her skin.
The first day she tried ripping the shack apart to find what he had taken from her. While knocking over fishing traps and tool boxes outside drying in the sun her new flesh had seared into a deep coral color. Only the insides of the fish that she and her sisters used to eat were that color. All night long she had writhed and whimpered with the pain. He had dampened cold clothes to draw out the heat, placing them along her naked body in the places shaded the deepest red. “Only babes burn in the sun this badly.”
She is no baby in his eyes. He had seen a woman that night, and his determination to make her that is infuriating. The pain is too great a memory, knocking over her courage each time she tries to leave the shack while the sun is in the sky. If only he would stop trying to convince her that this is their home.
There is no searching in the nights either, because, well, she does enjoy the revelries of night. Sealene relishes when the dense fog creeps in from the sea and hugs the grasses of the field. He will lead her outside into the saturated air, and they will chase one another. The condensing moisture dampens the clothes on her body until they stick like skin to her breasts and thighs. She covets his pleasure at her. His eyes wet with desire. Those moments are when she feels most like herself. Who she used to be.
Sealene pinches the soft inside of her arm. Another day apart from her sisters because she succumbed to his seduction last night. The sun splits the horizon in the east. Another day trapped in his shanty willing the sea to swallow her up.
“Sealene, why do I find our bed cold each morning?”
She hopes he did not notice how her spine straightened up at the clomp of his boots on the wooden slats. Her fear will not be his to possess. Being of the sea, Sealene has faced more fearsome foes than him. And her love for the ocean is much greater than any affections for her fisherman.
“I do not belong in your bed.”
“Yes, you do,” his fingers slip into her silvery locks, “we are in love.”
His gentle caress is as sweet as the warm currents that move around the coral banks. Their bodies fold into one another, swaying with the slow movements of the dock. If he were born of the sea, he would be a walrus toughened by battering and pushing his way into spaces he didn’t belong. Lovable in the way he bullied his way onto the beach or floating driftwood.
She smooths the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. Her pelt had been nothing like his skin. Delicate fingertips touch her own face, but she feels no puckered hide.
“Please let me go. I will always know where to find you.”
Grey waters spill across his irises. A storm of suffering passes in her horizon.
“You will stay with me. It is the better life, I promise.”
Shivers course her spine where the cold air replaces his body. He steps down into his boat, and an engine roars to life. Diesel exhaust is another thing that burns her. A tempest surges inside her chest. How dare he contain her like his daily catch? What power does he believe he wields over her to snare her by the lips and keep her on his lines of promises?
He faces her while the boat motors away. Willing her to wait for him upon the shore. And she must, because she cannot survive in the ocean anymore than he can without his boat. She returns to his shanty, two rooms and a dull sooty fireplace. This is not better. The sea is expansive, and it sings to all who enter its waters. The palette could never be sampled by one fish or man alone. Colors, tastes, textures.
Sealene chokes on the dark of hopelessness. This feeling that forces her to sleep all day and perch on the pier during the night. It rises and sucks her down deep.
Her eyes see the hearth smoking from a dying fire. The night had been warm when he had drifted off to sleep. She hadn’t needed a shawl or blanket to keep herself warm on the dock. When had there been a fire?
Sealene moves to stir and cool the coals. The iron poker sinks into a dense matted clump at the back of the hearth. Her arm jerks back. An animal must have crawled in too close to the heat and perished. Sealene prods the pelt, her fingers working to pull the fur from the spent coals. A piercing siren’s scream shakes the cabin. Seagulls caw in response, shaken from their perches on the dock.
Sealene knows this skin. Knows it like the back of her own hand. The damaged seal pelt, charred by radiant hot coals, is her’s. Terror and fury swirling into a hurricane of pain cause her body to quake. She feels searing loss. Her sisters. The silk of her seal skin. The sea.
Tears as salty as evaporating ocean water drip drop onto the floor around her toes. How could he say that he loves her?
A memory washes over Sealene. Crouched behind a rock, naked, she had watched a man pick up the pelt so tenderly that her heart skipped. His adoration and wonder had disarmed Sealene. This gentle fisherman was not like the other men that she and her sisters had observed beneath the water’s surface. Land animals who wielded spears and nets as if these tools were extensions of their arms.
For three nights, she and her sisters had crept about his shanty plotting a way in to retrieve her skin. They had been in disbelief when he washed the pelt with sweet smelling soaps. She remembers that fantasy she had now, of him washing her tangled and windblown hair.
“He is rather handsome,” her youngest sister had teased, “for a man.”
Eventually the selkies became bored waiting around for the fisherman to abandon his prize. Her sisters returned to the waters one by one. Celeste had waited until it became too dangerous for her hiding around the beach during the day. Sealene encouraged her twin to return to the ocean knowing she would remain confined to the land.
How could he have set her skin ablaze? He loves her, or so he tells her every night. And she knew he loved her skin. Nothing else was as protected as this possession of his.
Possession.
Sealene cannot return to the sea without her fur. With a start, Sealene sees the truth. Her fisherman had not wanted her to return.
Sobs shake her spine, until she falls into a deep sleep, spent by her sorrow. The shanty cools without a fire in the hearth until the fisherman returns. Sealene wakes feeling him brushing away the strands of hair across her face. He is smiling, unaware she has discovered his act of betrayal. What is that look, if not love, in his kelp green eyes?
“You’re so cold. How could you stand it laying here on the floor? I’ll grab you a blanket.”
Sealene does not speak, instead studying him as he moves about his small home. He looks so comfortable here. It takes all of her focus not to bump into things or stub her toes. Being on land is so unlike swimming, all the extra weight.
All his extra weight added to her.
Night after night, he tries to pull her out of her misery, and she rewards him with more silence. She understands it confuses him, the way she copulates with him in bed. The animal instinct inside her is the only thing stronger than sorrow.
After dark, when she feels her fisherman’s arms slacken around her as he drifts off, she leaves the warmth of his body. He sleeps deeper now. His concern for her leaving has lessened. He shouldn’t be so sure, a smirk twirks the edges of Sealene’s lips, once a slippery seal, forever and always she will be.
Her toes slide through the wet grass as walks to the pier. The moon is a mirror ball in the sky, dazzling the scenery with shimmers and shine. With the water low, receding from the shoreline in low tide, Sealene is sure that her sisters will hear her song. Stepping into the water until it covers her anklebones, Sealene begins to sing.
Out of the waves, we arrived
To dance and frolic and be
Seal sisters upon a moonlit beach
Curly haired girls, forever my three
I’ve shed my skin to walk on land
Now I’m trapped by his love of me
Hear me sisters, send a rescue
Before the waves of grief drown me
My fisherman holds me fast in his net
Come help your selkie sister return to the sea
Soprano notes float above and below the waves for as long as Sealene can stand the agony to her skin. She calls for her sisters, night after night, despite her prior warnings to them.
Two months pass, and the fisherman holds Sealene’s scarlet and scaly feet in his calloused palms.
“The water does this to you?” he asks.
When she wakes, a pair of his waders are waiting for her by the door. The boots feel clumsy and rubbery on her feet, but they prevent any more burning. She is grateful to him, for not forbidding her from entering the water. The beach is their solid ground. A sacred space bridging the water to the land. He can sense her fulfillment being out there. And she notices that he spends every waking hour as near to the water as possible.
This night, she slips off the boots and allows her toes to sink into the swirling sand. In and out the grains dance with the water. Her sisters are near, she senses them. Sucking air deep into her belly, she begins her song.
I’ve shed my skin to walk on land
Now I’m trapped by his love of me
A harbor seal pokes her head above the water. Any person would have mistaken it for driftwood, or a splotch of dark water. But Sealene recognizes her instantly, and she goes silent. She scans the yard behind her. The shanty is dark, and the air still.
Sealene slips into the water, her breath hitching at the salty burn at her eyes. Swimming out to her sisters, it takes only a few seconds to remember the movement. A woman and two harbor seals swirl and twirl creating wakes in the water.
Flashes of fins and legs and tails and arms appear in the streaks of moonlight. Sealene doesn’t want this to end, but her lungs scream out their frustration. She points toward the beach, and they squeeze in around her buoying her to shore.
On solid ground, she gasps and sputters. Her sisters peel off their skins revealing milky white flesh, never before touched by the sun. It stuns Sealene, how beautiful they are. Mezmerized by their ample curves and chestnut hair dripping salty water, she forgets her condition.
“You are so skinny!” her eldest sister says.
“How are you even finding anything to eat when you are trapped on land?” the youngest of the three asks.
Sealene sees it for herself, how transformed she has become. The fat, from an endless buffet of fish, is gone from her cheeks and arms. Where she shivers in the cool night air, her sisters do not. Their creamy skin glows under the stars, but her skin is tanned and ruddy from waiting in the sun for the fisherman. Worst of all, is Sealene’s hair. In a fury one day, trying to untangle the knotted tresses of windblown hair, Sealene had shorn it off with a fillet knife. Down to her scalp.
Her eldest sister shakes herself, snapping to the present. Strapped to her waist is a parcel, fastened secure and safe. Undoing the clasp, she pulls a bundle free.
“Sealene, we’ve found a way for you to return to us.”
Slender fingers unfold the skin of a harbor seal that is flecked with umber spots as if splattered by a paint brush. The pelt shimmers, more precious to her than gold. Sealene can smell it in her sister’s hand. The scent pulls forward memories. The youngest sister slips her arms around Sealene and leans a head onto Sealene’s shoulder.
“Please, don’t tell me you came to my beach just to heap on more sorrow.”
The eldest of the three seals staunches up, “Yes, our Celeste is gone. But her death does not have to be in vain. I will not lose two sisters. We’ve saved her pelt, and bring it to you to wear. Return with us.”
Sealene unfurls the coat and lets it cover her sadness. A last hug with Celeste, her twin, the skin fits as her own. A graceful swimmer with streamlined features, her sister was the better of the two of them. Sealene startles at seeing her eldest and youngest sister gaping at her.
“Why aren’t you transforming?” the youngest asks, “the sea witch said that all Sealene would need to do is put it on.”
Sealene shrinks into the fur as a steely gray gaze transform her elder sister’s face. Ice cold eyes study her. Nothing upsets her more than a well-thought-out plan falling through. Her eyes widen as they settle on Sealene’s midsection.
“The witch said it would transform a selkie who possessed nothing belonging to the land.”
The sisters huddle on a damp beach. Each one comprehending this revelation in her own time.
Sealene hadn’t known, but she isn’t shocked by her sister’s illumination. Her body had been moving in peculiar ways, lately. And while she felt herself thinning, there had also been a sensation of absorbing mass.
The youngest of the three, still unsure, asks, “How can you know this?”
A sigh parts the lips of the elder. Always exasperated when asked to explain herself.
Sealene cuts in, “I hadn’t considered—”
“Of course, you hadn’t!”
Sealene reels back, blinking her shock.
“You never do.”
The youngest of the three, reaches timid fingertips to touch the fur of the fourth.
Sealene is confused by this layered exchange, and also silenced by her sister’s chastisement. She tries to meet her youngest sister’s eyes. She will not meet the scorn of their elder.
Finally, a wetted face looks up at Sealene.
“She died heartbroken for you.”
The anger, the sadness, the weight of this exchange crashes over Sealene. She would never see her twin again. Pulling the last piece of her sister tight around her, she dips her head in sorrow.
The eldest swipes a hand over her cheeks, angry at the betrayal of her true emotions. “How did we gain so much distance between us? Was it really one man that did this?”
Sealene thinks back to the day they had come ashore. The reason for their seaside revelries as her fisherman calls them. They were not there for a celebration, although that did come later. The selkies had come to land to settle an argument between them. What life was best? Land or sea?
“What will you do, sister?” The youngest pets her shoulder, eyes fixed on Sealene’s stomach.
“We will have to inquiry with the sea witch.” The eldest sister answers instead.
And they slip on their skins and swim far out past the reef. Sealene welcomes the silence. She has always thought better alone, even when Celeste and she were closest, nearly joined at the fin. They would spend long hours swimming in silence to clear their heads when life as a selkie became muddled. Land or water? Legs or fins? Fish or man?
Sealene and Celeste knew they couldn’t live without one another. But a tension existed. Their seal mother had told them, it felt like the two parts of her selkie heart had split when her seal pups were born. One half had gone to Sealene, a lover of land. The other half into Celeste, happiest in the ocean. Neither was ever truly satisfied as a selkie. That was their shared bond.
Rubbing her legs in the warm sand, swaddled in her sister’s skin, Sealene sits in the sacrifice of her sister’s love. Celeste had wanted her to come back. More importantly, Celeste wanted Sealene to love the sea just as much as she.
Now there is a seal pup. Or a babe? Sealene has to consider this future life growing inside her womb. Does her fisherman know? Has he sensed what her sisters had? It won’t be long before the truth is known. Sealene’s time to consider the future is limited.
A full tide cycle passes before her sisters arrive on the beach, singing their arrival. Calling Sealene from her bed beside the fisherman. Sleep is all Sealene wants these days. Her body feels heavy and mercurial. But she rouses from the warm coverlet and warmer body next to her.
As she leaves the shanty, she remembers to go back for the fur she has kept a secret. Her flashlight flicks back to her fisherman still sound asleep. Sealene slips over to the floorboard she loosened, settling it in its place over the fur. Tucked underneath the wood, in a linen wrap, is her twin’s gift. There is no time for sentiment, Sealene runs from the cabin, the adrenaline waking her senses up.
Five selkie stand on the sand below her boardwalk. Strands of curls whip around their heads in the night air. A storm is coming. They chose this night to cover up the sounds of their song calling for their sister. The number of them shocks Sealene. How did they manage to gather so many ashore?
Clasped tight to her belly, Sealene clutches the fur for comfort. This feels more like a council than a rescue party. They have not come to comfort or resolve her situation.
“Sisters, selkies,” Sealene starts.
A silver-haired woman, Sealene has not seen since her mother died, steps forward examining her and the seal pelt.
“The sea witch sent us,” a crackling in the woman’s voice reveals just how long it has gone unused. “History keeps repeating itself.”
Her sisters look so tired. So sad. So miserable. What has robbed them of their joy, Sealene wonders.
“Any time a selkie mates with a man, the selkies dwindle in number. One half-selkie born on land, is one less selkie born in the sea.”
A brindle-matted woman contributes, “Your child will be born human. And one of us will be unable to carry her child.”
Her elder sister steps forward, hand resting on Celeste’s fur. “Or a selkie’s child will be lost.”
Sealene’s mind spins and swirls. “When? When did Celeste die?”
She is calculating, counting, figuring. When did she conceive?
“This isn’t about Celeste,” her sisters come closer. “She perished, a victim of being a seal with natural predators. Her fate could have been any of our’s.”
The silver selkie adds, “This is about our kind. We are dwindling. And you have added to that burden.”
“What are you asking of me?” Sealene wonders out loud.
“Return to the sea, the way Celeste wanted.”
“And my baby?”
“The man will care for his own child. And you will go on to be a selkie. A maiden of the ocean.”
Her youngest sister sees it, the small ember of resistance, that sparkles in Sealene’s eyes. And to sway her sister, she parts her lips with a note that turns into a hum.
“I’ve shed my skin to walk on land, now I’m trapped by his love of me,”
Sealene hears it, her rescue plea. Never has she been one to be ensnared by the will of another. That was how she ended up stuck on land in the first place. Desperately trying to break free of her eldest sister’s demands and her twin sister’s placid contentment with their life in the ocean.
And the baby so small, growing inside her, flutters. How could she force a child to live a split life? The child would watch it’s mother always looking at the horizon and wonder why they weren’t good enough.
“I will labor this baby into the world, and then I will return to the sea. Leave the fur with me.”
The silver hair of the oldest selkie catches gleams of moonbeams as she shakes her head, “no.”
But the youngest sister, still humming with the wind, presses the fur deeper into Sealene’s arms.
“Curly haired girl, forever with me.”
And as if the storm knows the matter has been settled, a thunderous boom shakes the ground. All of the selkies, all but one, slip into their skins and slink back into the frothing water. Seals only nurse their young for a short time, Sealene thinks. She will pour story after lullaby after cherished memory into her sweet child’s ears until the day comes when she will settle her baby in for a wonderful nap and depart for the sea.