Selkie Shoreline

This image inspired my story as part of a visual writing prompt project. You can find the original prompt here.

Elsie searched every day for selkies, the creatures caught between land and sea. That she had never seen a selkie didn’t deter her; Elsie knew they were real. Her grandmother had told her as much. When Elsie’s faith wavered, she asked if it was all just a story.

“Do I look like the the sort of woman who tells fairy stories?” her grandmother would snap.

Elsie would say no and mean it. The old woman was stout and stern, always barking orders at one person or another. The only time she softened was in the kitchen, stirring in stories along with salt. She would regale anyone listening with tales of the faraway places she’d been. It seemed likely to Elsie that a woman who saw tigers in India would have also seen a selkie on their home shore.

That assuredness drove Elsie out with her lantern each morning, eyes raking over the pebbled beach for the seals who shed their skin to walk as people before the sun fully rose. She never saw more than bathing women who walked home to the forest instead of the water.

Then one morning, a flash of onyx caught on the edge of Elsie’s vision. Sleek and powerful, a seal swam to shore. Its rotund body moved gracefully across the rocks before stopping in the safety of driftwood tree branches.

The seal curled in on itself. Though it was hard to see through the mist, Elsie could make out the slow change in color along the outside edge of the animal. The inky black lightened to gray before turning into creamy white. Within the span of a few minutes, where there was once a seal, there was now a woman, hugging a ball of shining black skin to her bare stomach.

Elsie did not wait. What the selkie did next mattered less than being close. With the crash of a discarded lantern and the splash of a fully clothed dive, Elsie was gone. She swam to the opposite shore where a selkie awaited, eyes coolly surveying the strange creature coming toward it.

The selkie, Muirgen, had never seen a human before, though she’d heard the tales. Up until she saw the strange, small-eyed thing leap awkwardly into the water, she assumed they were just ways to scare young selkies into not going ashore.

It was covered in odd, partial skins Muirgen remembered being called clothes. Her grandmother had told her that’s why humans were so desperate to catch selkies; they envied their skins. Seeing how much these clothes slowed the human as it splashed more than swam in the calm waters made Murigen understand why.

Though she didn’t believe the old selkie, Muirgen still listened when her grandmother told her to only take off her skin on rocks far from populated shores. It felt prudent, regardless of humans. Other selkies used this vulnerable time to drown enemies, pulling the clumsy core of their opposition down so low their long limbs couldn’t carry them back to air in time. Despite the danger, Murigen was always shedding her skin. It was part of her, yet she chafed against its confines.

That itch is what brought her to shore. She’d swum around for hours looking for a rock on which to take her liberation but couldn’t find one. Surely, she thought, this desolate beach would be safe from other selkies. A human encounter hadn’t even crossed her mind.

Now that she was confronted with a cautionary tale turned into reality, Murigen’s mind scrambled. She had only ever luxuriated in her exposed self. She’d never fought in this form before, but quickly steeled herself for the possibility. Her scrawny appendages lacked the force she wanted but would have to do since slipping into her skin would take too much time. Still, she was confident that she knew the water better than the flailing mess of a creature coming toward her. Tucking her skin under a piece of driftwood, she waded into the water, took a deep breath and pushed into the currents.

It was not hard to find the human. The partial skins trailed off it like seaweed. Murigen only had to glide below it and grab. The idiotic thing took a breath right as it was dragged under the water. Murigen smirked at how easy this was, drowning a myth. What was her grandmother so afraid of? She swam down to the bottom of the inlet. Shallow to her, deadly to the human. Its beady eyes were stretched as wide as they could go until it stilled, suspended in struggle.

Murigen watched it die, fascinated by the delicacy of something supposedly dangerous. Funny, she thought, how little truth is needed to make a legend.

Back on land a new mother named Aoife slowly picked her way across the rocky shore, mindful not to jostle her tender, swollen breasts on the uneven terrain. She’d told her husband she needed seaweed for the stew, which although true was not the reason she exited the whitewashed cabin in such a hurry.

The baby. Oh, the baby never stopped. It cried. She shushed. It screamed. She fed. It spit up. She cleaned. It cried. She cried. It cried. All one endless loop that played with such rapidity she lost count of the days since it drew life into its lungs by extinguishing hers.

Because she was really here for escape, rather than kelp, Aoife’s eyes were cast down to the rocks and not the waterline. That’s how they caught on a small parcel of shiny black tucked under a driftwood log. She bent down to extricate, then unfurl it.

It was a seal skin, perfectly intact and with a neatly cut opening down the back. It was dry of the blood and sinew she’d expect and yet pliable in a way that tanned leathers were not. It was an oddity, to be sure.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, a word whispered. Selkie. Aoife had heard stories just the same as everyone growing up, but dismissed them as cautionary tales about the dangers of swimming out too far. Now, she remembered the other part of the selkie stories. The one where you could own a selkie by stealing its skin.

Aoife had no interest in owning anything else. She didn’t even want what she had. A thought occurred, quick and dangerous, and Aoife began to strip her clothes off, right where she stood.

Stark naked on the shore, she stepped into the skin, slipping appendages into flippers before ducking her head into the hood of the whiskered face. For a heartbeat, nothing happened and Aoife felt silly. What was she thinking? No fairytale can take you away from life’s responsibilities, no matter how badly you want it.

Just as she was about to step out of her hopes and back into her clothes, she felt the seam at the back of the skin begin to close. It squeezed shut and suddenly Aoife felt the empty spaces between her body and the skin fill, perhaps with blubber or maybe the melting of her own skin and bones. Soon standing was impossible and she flopped onto her now robust belly.

Delighted in the silky movements of her new body and the quieting of her mind, Aoife moved toward the water. She slipped in, undetected by anyone on land or sea, and was never heard from again.

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The first half of this story was written as part of a visual writing prompt project I started on Instagram. I ended that story when Elsie dove into the water. But my friend was eager to find out what happened next, so I transformed that microfiction into a short story to satisfy my friend’s curiosity. That same friend also prefers to listen to her stories, rather than read them, which is why this one is narrated. This one’s for you, Laura.

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