Drops of water weep from my skin, far more than seven, though I am not looking for a selkie.Ī seagull cries out, lonely among the stars.Ī hurricane blew through when I was eleven.
Just a tiny scrap of ocean, filling the space where I had lain. There is no set of drying footprints leading from the beach, no grains of sand stuck in my bare feet. I dip my fingers in the water and taste, even though I don’t need to. Green kelp clings in ribbons to my calves. My bed is wet, the outline of my body in the mattress a small tide pool. Not the damp of sweat, I realize as I rub the sleep from my eyes, but the damp of seawater. My sheets, worn linen, cling damply to me. I wake with the taste of salt on my lips and the scent of the tide in my nose. When she told them, I would settle in, safe in my bed, and at the same time, carried away on the tide of her words.
THE SUN CRIES THE MOON WHISPERS A QUIET STORM FULL
They were my favorite stories, these tales of the ocean that was both the same as the one outside and yet also full of wonders, just beneath the surface. She would tell me stories of impossible things, of seal-skins slid on and off as if it were nothing, of ways people remade themselves and plunged into those salt waters as if they belonged there. And if you are very, very lucky, you will learn where the selkie keeps their skin.” “Well, you swim, don’t you? You and the selkie. “What happens then? After the selkie comes.” I kicked at the sheets, freeing my feet from their tangles. She told me I was her saltwater child, her ocean girl. Mara, she had named me, because it meant bitter. “Mara,” she would say, smoothing the hair from my forehead as she tucked the covers around me, “did you know that to summon a selkie, you must shed seven tears into the ocean? Salt for salt.” When I couldn’t sleep, when I was restless, when I burned with some childhood fever, she would sit by my side, and conjure something wonderful and strange, something half-magic, from the ocean for me. When I was a child, my mother would tell me stories of the sea.
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