The Selkies

Corbin says to the priest, “The girl can’t remember her name.”

But she remembers the sea swell and the taste of salt. She remembers the flexing of her own sleek body against the currents, and the sunlight splintering like green glass on the water. She will remember these things even when she is an old woman, sitting in a comfortable chair, her knees covered with a grey woollen rug. Even though they have never been put into words, she will remember.

The priest says, “Then she must be christened first. She will be Mary Marina, because Our Lady delivered her from the sea. The marriage can come after.”

She looks up into the eyes of this man, Corbin, and although he had tricked her and stolen her from her own people, she knows that she could care for him and be his wife. Corbin, for his part, had been enchanted by the selkies as they shed their seal skins and danced in the moonlight. He knew that he would never be satisfied with an ordinary woman, so he had taken her skin and hidden it. Everyone knew that this was the way to trap a selkie and prevent her from returning to the sea, but the villagers keep up the polite fiction that she was the sole survivor of a shipwreck. After all, every one of them has lived by the sea long enough to witness miracles, and it is whispered that several are themselves descended from the sea people.

Corbin and Mary Marina are married in the tiny stone church on the wild west coast. It is a stormy day and the howling winds and lashing waves nearly drown the old priest’s words, but it seems right that the sea is present. Selkies make docile and loving partners, unlike some of the more treacherous inhabitants of the deep, but they are always torn, always they long for the water with half of their heart. In time Mary Marina bears two children, a boy named Dairmid and girl, Sian. Both have sleek brown hair and their fingers and toes are slightly webbed. They go down to the sea each day with their mother and fish or gather cockles. When the weather is wild, all three of them sit at the window of the cottage and watch the ocean raging, and when the storm is over they go to gather up the driftwood, wounded seabirds and any treasures the waters have given up.

One evening Dairmid is roused by a strange dream, but waking, he still hears the music. On the beach below he sees the women dancing and singing in the light of the full moon. As he creeps toward them, a shell cracks beneath his foot and the startled selkies rush for their seal skins and disappear beneath the waves like grey shadows. In the morning, Dairmid wonders if he dreamed it all. He is a young man, only fifteen, but from that night on, Dairmid is changed. He wakes each night to gaze hopefully at the strand, and he tells Corbin that he will be a sailor, as soon as he can get a place on a merchantman or in the navy.

Sian is quiet like her mother, and from earliest childhood she has helped around the home. One day she is sorting through some old boxes in the cellar when she finds a locked chest. For some reason she has to know what is inside, and, in a strange, driven mood she prises it open with a kitchen knife. Inside is a piece of parchment-like skin, dry and leathery on one side, and on the other covered with a smooth dark coat of hair. She drapes the thing over her shoulders and walks slowly down to the water’s edge. Out in the bay, sleek dark heads are bobbing, lithe bodies are twisting in the waves. She leaves her little pile of clothing on the sand and wraps herself tight in the seal skin. As Sian plunges into the green water, her mother and father call desperately from the cottage doorway. But the girl cannot remember her name.