The Selkie
The little girl shivered naked on the snow-drenched shoreline with the cold, gray northern Atlantic lapping at her painful feet. When she first lumbered onto land, the full moon shining off the marbled rock uncovered veins of silver and she imagined it easier, this sloughing of the skin.
An hour ago, she swam in the deep with her puppy brown eyes poking above the surface to spy as her mother heaved her bulk out of the salt water and waddled on slippery fins to the shore drawn by the twinkling lights and the voices rising in a haunting melody in the coastal village. She studied her mother as she shed her skin, like a hermit crab crawling out of its shell and rose on two feet. Her brown hair cascaded in wet strands down the silky skin of her back and over her backside, round as a pink jellyfish. Her mother bent over and caressed the wet fur, folded it like a blanket. Unsure of her footing, she toddled to the edge of the coastal pines and scooped several layers of dead brown needles and crinkled beech leaves. She tucked the fur underneath and examined the tree. Leaning over, she grabbed a small, pointed rock to carve out a letter to mark the tree, a small b, for breeding perhaps, to remind her of why she heaved out of the sea. The little girl stared, her nose shuttering open then closed to keep out the salt spray, as her mother stretched one foot in front of the other and walked into the forest on this, the darkest night of the year.
When the silvery moon conceded to the faint purple of the morning horizon, he arrived wearing nothing but a mud brown blanket around his back and a pack slung over one shoulder. He inspected the trees that fronted the shoreline, his black hair much like hers, frosted in the air. She heard the crunch of quick footsteps on the icy snow. A gust of wind delivered the salty, fish-rich smell of her mother that lingered on his skin.
When he lifted his hands to trace the b on the pine tree, she rose from behind a rock exposed by the receding tide and tiptoed toward him hoping to grab her mother’s fur, worried that he would steal the fur to keep her mother from returning to the sea. But the girl’s feet cracked through the crusty scum of frozen sand. Startled, he swiveled around. He held her mother’s fur in his hands. He unslung the backpack and stuffed the skin inside as he ran toward her.
He called out but she yanked her own fur from the sand and raced into the water, paddled out as far as she could before the icy sea numbed her fingers. He called to her, “daughter,” again as he paced back and forth on the shoreline. She paddled further, though she could no longer feel her legs. Her fur soaked with water, and she tried to pull it over her, but it slipped from numb fingers and sank. Muscle memories of swimming fat and furred rode her as she pushed herself under the water. She heard the man yelling and splashing into the ocean now, but the sound receded as she traveled toward her fur as it slid into the depths of the cold unforgiving sea.