“Beware the shore, mo ghràdh. If a man steals your skin, you cannot return to the sea without it.”

Isla was warned – by her mother, her mother’s mother, and every mother before that. She was a maighdeann-mhara – a selkie. To shed her seal skin and walk on land as a maiden was her magic. To risk losing herself by half every time she did was her curse.

“Every man in the isles knows a selkie makes the best bride, and will want one for himself,” the mothers cautioned. Despair makes an excellent housewife. But Isla refused to lose her sea-life to men, or her land-life to fear. She loved the liberty of the ocean, the way she could be fully herself there, with the mothers, but she also loved the sunshine.

Slipping bare-footed from her spotted pelt, she was always careful. She saw the red-haired man from a safe distance and darted to her skin, clutching it protectively as she eyed him.

He held up his hands, broad and work-worn. “I’m not going to take it, I just want to talk.”

He was a fisherman, and his name was Thomas. He’d seen her from his boat.

“I ken the stories my kind tell of yours, and am sure those yours tell of mine are less flattering,” he said apologetically. “I don’t want to be like that. I would know you, if you’d let me, but I’d never take your freedom.”

He seemed earnest, and kind, and despite herself, Isla liked him.

In the beginning, she always kept a toe in the water, eating bread and oysters with one hand and clutching her sealskin with the other, ready to slip into the sea and bolt home at the first sign he’d cage her.

He never mentioned it. Never pushed her. They shared dinners and kisses first on the sand, and then the rocks, the only touch of the sea the occasional ambitious spray as the tide licked the cragged shore. She drowned the call of the surf in the murmur of his voice.

When the last scraps of autumn bundled into winter, she asked to see his village.

It was simple and charming – not home, but not frightening. Wreaths hung from doors, and people bustled cheerfully through the streets. Thomas took her to a tavern.

After, he returned her to the shore, removing his boots to wade into the frigid water. That night and every night after, he walked as far as he could without the tide soaking his kilt. They kissed in the surf and he stood as she pulled her skin back over herself, not leaving until her body cut through the waves and she was gone.

Still, the mothers worried. They’d known many men, and warned they were all the same in the end. Thomas was waiting for weakness, that was all. But Isla knew him, and the mothers didn’t. She knew what sort of man he was, and he wasn’t the sort to corner injured prey.

One night, while Isla and Thomas were in the pub, deafened by drink and music, a gale blew in. A creature of the surf, Isla was unbothered, but Thomas shivered badly, and the sea was a mass of roiling black waves with frothing tops.

Isla couldn’t stomach the idea of Thomas being pulled under, but she knew he wouldn’t let her leap into this hostile ocean alone. So she suggested they go to his house, and when the storm lasted three days, it didn’t make sense to leave in the middle of it.

She kept her skin close, but she needn’t have worried. Thomas cooked her battered fish and steamed clams, and stoked a fire to warm her, and cleared a table beside his bed for her to set her skin within reach as she slept. She dreamed of the ocean, of the way rain hammered on the water and her mothers sang in the sea caves, but she woke to him.

When the storm cleared, Isla returned to the sea to say goodbye to the mothers. It was like ripping away a part of herself; gutted by a fish-knife. But she was in love with this gentle man, and she disowned her fear.

For two years, the spotted pelt lay lovingly folded on the bedside table. Isla would reach out and touch it when the sea sang her name. She imagined she could always slip away, return home. But then she’d roll over and Thomas would pull her close in his sleep and she would tell herself that perhaps she would go tomorrow.

When they married, Isla moved the skin to the linen closet. It felt disrespectful to their commitment to have it out in the open. That night, she dreamed of the deep black of stormy water.

She bore a daughter, slipping from the womb naked and pink, without a pelt of her own. More followed. Isla moved the skin to the highest shelf so they wouldn’t find it and ask questions. It still smelled like home.

The skin has remained there for years now, shoved between an extra blanket and Thomas’s great kilt. It’s mostly hidden, untouched and remembered only in dreams of sliding through the waves.

Still, every so often there is a winter guest, or a ceilidh, and when Isla goes for one of the woolens her fingers brush the lush familiarity of the pelt, her nose catching a whiff of fish and saltwater. In those moments she pauses; listening to her girls laughing in the kitchen, and remembering the mothers in the ocean; the way they swam together, sleek bodies sliding past each other, and barked laughter on the rocks at night. Mothers her daughters would never know.

Her body and soul ache to step into the skin and become that which she has left behind; this aging human skin a prison of comfort and regret.

“Maybe I’ll go tomorrow,” she whispers. She tucks the pelt further into the closet and shuts the door.

* * *

Ⓒ Madeline White