From the story shelf
The Seal Wife of the Outer Skerry
There was a man who fished alone off the outermost island, where the land gives up and there is nothing beyond but the skerry and the weather. He was not a bad man. He was a lonely one, which can come to the same thing.
On the shortest night of the year, when the sun only dips its face and comes up again, he rowed out to the skerry for no reason he could have told you. And there on the flat rock he saw the seal folk dancing. They had put off their skins and were long and pale and laughing, and their skins lay about the rock like gray cloaks dropped at a door.
He did not think. He put out his hand and took the nearest skin and pushed it inside his coat, and it was warm.
When the sun cleared the water the seal folk ran for their skins and went into the sea, one after another, like spoons into broth. All but one. She went from rock to rock, looking. Then she saw him, and saw the shape under his coat, and stood still.
"That is mine," she said.
"Come home with me," said the man. "I have a house and a fire. I will be good to you."
"That is mine," she said again. "I cannot go home without it."
"Then come to mine," he said, and he would not give it back. And because she could not go into the sea without her skin, and could not stay on a bare rock, she got into his boat.
He was good to her, as he had said. He was gentle, and he worked hard, and in the evenings he told her the names of things. She learned to bake and to mend nets and to speak as the islanders spoke. In time there were three children, two girls and a boy, with dark round eyes and a way of holding their breath in the bath that frightened the neighbors.
She loved the children. Nobody who saw her with them ever doubted it. She sang to them in a language that had no words the man knew, and they slept better for it than for any song of the island.
But every evening, when the tide was at the full, she went down to the shore and stood. She did not weep. She only stood with her face to the water. And out past the skerry a big gray seal would lift his head and look at her, and she at him, until the light went.
The man had hidden the skin in the thatch, above the beam, where the smoke would keep it supple. Some nights he lay awake under it. He told himself that she was happy, that she had a hearth and children, that the sea was a cold place. He told himself these things for seven years, and he never once took the skin down and put it in her hands.
In the seventh summer the roof wanted mending, and the man went across to the big island for straw. The youngest child, the boy, climbed the ladder he had left standing, because it was there. He put his hand in under the old thatch and felt something soft.
"Mother," he called, "there is a thing up here like a dog asleep."
She was kneading bread. She stopped. She wiped her hands very slowly on her apron.
"Bring it down to me," she said.
He brought it down. She took it in her arms and put her face into it and stood so for a long time. Then she called the three of them and kissed each one on the forehead and on both eyes.
"Listen to me," she said. "I have loved you every day. I will love you every day. When you want fish, go down to the flat stone at low water and there will be fish. When you want me, sing what I taught you, and I will hear it. But I cannot stay in this house. I was never able to stay. I was only kept."
She went down the path to the shore, not running. At the edge of the water she put the skin about her shoulders, and it closed on her like a hand closing. And then there was no woman on the shore. There was a seal going out through the weed, and another seal coming in fast from the skerry to meet her.
The man came home at dusk with his straw and found the bread unbaked and the children sitting in a row on the doorstep, looking at the sea. He understood before they spoke. He sat down among them. He did not go out to the skerry again.
People say he grew gentler afterward, and that he was never heard to speak a word against her. They say that for as long as the children lived on that island there was fish on the flat stone at every low tide, and that on still evenings two seals would lie in the shallows, as near the shore as seals will come, while a girl on the rocks sang something that was not in any language of the land.
And they say this, too, out there: that if you should ever find a thing that is not yours lying warm on a rock, the right time to give it back is at once. It does not get easier with keeping.
Pieces in the stacks are written under pen names. Personal pieces are composite accounts that gather experiences commonly described by therians and otherkin, and are offered as illustration, not as testimony about any one person. See the editorial principles.