Ink of Ages Fiction Prize

Maidens, Men and Raging Seas

I was born in the foaming seas of Ireland, in a time you will not know well. A time of farmers, warriors, poets and men. A time when myths were true and truly known; when they were not strange stories whispered above crackling flames in the dead of night.

Yet perhaps, my story will feel eerily familiar to you. After all, there are human traits among some that stretch a little too far across millennia.

I am a selkie. By day, we are seals. By night, my folk shed our seal-skins in the darkness and become human. We dance in caves by the ink-swirled sea and take joy in what is beautiful. Our hearts swell with love: for each other, for beauty, for merriment in the light of the moon.

The night this was taken from me, the sea was restless. It was as if it knew my impending sorrow and mourned my future. Naïve as I was, I paid it no mind. I was vain and young and excited, anticipating the rush of a human body and the ebullience of night. I danced with my hair loose and wild, my dress spilling from my shoulders. I felt my hands entwined with my love’s as beautifully as I hoped they would be through the Trysting Stone.

***

It was nigh dawn when we encountered him. He was the image of a man who had never been refused. He scared me.

When we saw him, we reacted quickly. Each selkie scrambled for their seal-skins and leaped into the sea, frantic for safety. Well, except for me, that is. In my naïve excitement, I had left my seal-skin a little too far. I felt my love tug at me, but it was too late. The human grabbed it in his grubby fists and smiled like a shark that’d found its prey.

He slid the skin, my skin, inside the sack strung at his hips and walked toward me. With my love watching, helpless, he took me in his arms and claimed me; chained me to himself with a cruel look in his eye. He did not hear my refusals.

Afterwards, we wed. He announced his power over my life and death. Then, he hauled me to my new dwelling, declaring that we had fallen in love.

No, I did not fall in love with that farmer boy. No, I did not want his touch, my fate. Ask that farmer boy and his people, they will tell you that I lie; he will ask you, “What was she doing, with her hair loose and shoulders bare?”

The filidh believe them, painting me as a demon of seduction. A cautionary tale.

***

I lived decades in that boy’s house. He had swaddled my skin, proclaiming that it was my dowry. He grinned, telling me I would only have it returned once he was deep underground, and I sensed a promise that I would be underground well before him.

The people had such a different life beyond the shore. Like all magical creatures, selkies have long lives, so we keep our children close for many years. In the village, my boys swore their loyalty to elders and my girls married at fourteen. Some of my children were given to aristocracy when they were tiny babes; some children were given to me, stolen from conquered tribes. As much as I hated the father of my children, or the cruelty that gifted me my fostered children, I loved those little babes with all my heart. My heart broke every time a child left too early, but swelled every time a child arrived. It was hard to adjust, but my love was my comfort and my children, my home.

Home. My children could only be fragments of that word, that memory, that feeling, no matter how brilliant they were. Oftentimes, I would escape to the shoreline and watch the churning seas, feel its anger at the wounding absence of its daughter, hear its everlasting grief-stricken calls. I would walk the jagged edge where the saltwater met the sand, longing for depths dear to me. Why, I would think to myself, did I love being human on those distant nights?

***

 The last of my children were verging on adulthood when I made a gruesome choice. Selkies are a gentle folk. We are not violent. Nonetheless, a woman so far from home slowly loses the marks of her upbringing. The last time I toed the line of the shore, with my heart so weary and the memories of my youth slipping from my grasp, I was finally one with my conscience. I mourned that I had waited so long. I mourned the children, the reason I’d waited, too.

The filidh will tell you that I found where he had hidden my skin and stole away. That I left a letter to bid him goodbye, to tell him to raise our children well and that I was sorry. What nonsense! We were both illiterate!

And I killed him.

The village warrioress gave me a knife and taught me how to use it. She had taken a shine to my spirit and so did not question, to my relief, my eagerness. She gifted me the gleaming blade; bade me well in my endeavours. And so, weapon clutched in raging hands, I took his life coldly. I stared into his frightened eyes and relished how the roles had reversed: I savoured that our story had ended as it had started, with one taking from the other.

No one suspected me, the doting wife. They shoved my ‘dowry’ into my arms, grimacing as they declared my inheritance and their condolences. I embraced my crying children and whispered my love. I wept too, but not for him.

That evening, a seal dived into the Irish Sea. And that night, on distant shores, a selkie woman danced with her hair loose and wild, her dress spilling from her shoulders, a dagger strapped to her thigh.