Maiden, Mother, Seal

Morna stares ahead, eyes glassy as the sea she’s looking beyond. The salted air is sharp as it whips at her skirt and hair and stings her eyes, although she knows that’s not why they water so. And it isn’t because she plans to jump either. That was why she had forced herself to hike up to the cliff top, not follow the call to the seashore. She couldn’t very well heed the call from that height, even if she had her sealskin.

But maybe that’s what Colin will tell them when she is gone. She has to go. That she’d jumped, or one way or another, she had killed herself. Hadn’t they seen how listless she had become? The long, lonely walks on the beach? That was what the other husbands said, and it couldn’t always be true.

Because sometimes it was by their own hands, too. Murder, not suicide, although they claimed it all the same. Better a dead wife than a seal wife. That’s what they said, too. Brazenly, in mixed company, as if it might scare the next. Death in any form was an easier sort of abandonment, somehow.

Morna, in her pacing, veers away from the cliffside. She has to go home, and she will, but she needs her sealskin first. Under the bed in the house that they’d built—she and Colin. It had been her home too for a while. A good, loving while, but it doesn’t pull stronger than the sea anymore. It had come to her in dreams at first and waking visions now, lapping at her ankles, swelling to sweep her away by the waist… Colin wouldn’t be wrong when he told them that she’d been unmoored for months now.

She walks with steady purpose now. Through the little garden that had once fascinated her so. Rooted. That’s how she had felt, once. Now, Morna sways once over the threshold of the house. Her bile rises as the walls close in around her. She had never once done well with the idea of being kept or contained, but it could always be steadied—anchored—by touch or even just a look shared with Colin.

Colin in the kitchen now, the heart of their home, his head lifting from his work to greet her. He knows. She can see it in his eyes. They swell like the sea.

He’s always known, from the day they had wed. It hadn’t felt right to keep it from him then, and besides that, it was customary to offer your sealskin to your husband after the wedding. He hadn’t balked or flinched about it then. He’d hardly wanted to keep it. Not locked away, the way most of the other husbands did. It shouldn’t have been so easy for her to get. The searching and scrounging and secrecy of it all was supposed to make her think twice.

They had talked about it then and after the bodiless wakes of her selkie sisters: that she might leave him someday. That she wouldn’t be able to help it. He’d said he’d understood. He even said, once or twice, that he’d let her go if he had to. If the alternative was an unsteady, frantic thing, then that wouldn’t be his wife either, would it?

Ilsa coos from her highchair and reaches for her mother. Morna approaches, but she doesn’t pick her up. She watches Colin watching them, his face darkening like a storm.

They had stopped speaking of it shortly after Ilsa had been born. Maybe she’d never get the urge now, Colin had mused, and Morna hadn’t the heart to argue with him. He might have known. He might have even understood—better than the other husbands, at least—but what he didn’t know was that was how all seal pups and selkies alike were reared. Just enough to get them going, then abandoned on the shore to fend for themselves. Sometimes, if one of the older, more experienced selfies felt it had come too soon, they would take on a foundling for a little longer, but it always ever ended the same exact way. With a lone pup on a beach. But that’s what villages were for.

“Please.” Colin breaks the silence with a lump in his throat. His voice is wet and choked, like drowning. “Please don’t.”

“I have to,” Morna says plainly. She always had, and she’d thought he’d always known.

“You don’t though. You’ve been happy, I’ve been good to you. And Ilsa…”

Ilsa had been good for her. Morna knew that. But Morna had never had a mother of her own, not past the age of four. She too had been raised by the village. She wouldn’t know what to do with a daughter, even if she had been afforded the opportunity to raise one of her own. She hopes, as she kneels down to eye level with Ilsa, that Colin won’t call it a suicide after all. Ilsa is barely two. She won’t remember this. Morna could at least remember her mother. She remembered the sea, too.

Maybe it was for the better that it happened now. That Ilsa does not remember after all.

“You’ll be good for your dada, won’t you? Of course you will.” Now Morna’s voice is wet and choked. The closest to drowning anything besides the urge to return has made her feel in months. It makes her wish Colin could be right, that something else could be stronger than the call of the sea, if only for that one moment while she’s kissing her daughter’s forehead goodbye.

“Morna… Don’t.” Colin says as she straightens up. His grip around the kitchen knife tightens. He’s thinking about it. She suspects they all do. But when Morna closes the gap the rest of the way to their shared bedroom, he doesn’t follow. She kneels down without fear as she pulls the sweater box out from under their bed, digs down past all of the winter things she’s made and mended for him, and pulls out her sealskin.