The Mercy of Sea Foam
Time does not exist for the island that the conquerors missed.
If you walk the wrong way around the island quickly enough, time will turn backwards.
But I could never make it. At a brisk pace, the frail bones of my shins would pinch; my body was not meant to move that way. Whenever I made it past the needle rock, the one at the top of the island’s strange hill, I would collapse. My ruined body crumpled in the ancient grass, the damp, salty air stinging my cheeks and lips, tasting of forgotten sea shanties sung by dead sailors whose bodies sink, still, somewhere, not too far from here.
Today, I meandered across the rocks and craggy cliffs, passing the home of the prehistoric petrel, whose beak is hooked like the pterodactyl’s; the albatross, wider than waves; the mischievous skua, claiming the carcasses of her siblings from the sand. When summer returns, the king penguins will roar back, covering the beach like burnt breadcrumbs under melted butter.
Today, like every day, I found myself drawn to the sand. I sat. I waited. I watched the waves and listened to the language of the sea.
What else was there to do when my tasks were complete?
Beneath that chorus was the dull ringing of windchimes, mildly muffled by the bellow of waves assaulting the sand. I noticed how long it had been since I’d noticed that eldritch melody.
The routine fractured.
I saw something far out in the water.
My heart leapt. A glacier? I squinted, strained my body up onto my knees. There was a shadow on its embankment. The glacier cradled a seal.
The creature looked bloated, languid, starving. Too weak to return to the water. Was he shivering? I squinted. He was tiny and trembling. I realised, as I watched him, that he was dying.
I tore down across the sand. But I was too panicked. I slipped.
My feet and hands landed in sea foam. My flesh met the water—it turned to shards of jagged glass.
And sliced clean through my bare skin.
I howled and dragged myself back.
I kept on howling until my throat turned as rough and as dry as the sand.
Across the waves, the seal lifted his head weakly from his doomed vessel. He could not save me, either; he had seen my prison, now. It was too late for the both of us.
*
The sea witch’s name was Raven. She sat by the hearth, winding twine into poppets while I hid in the corner, tiny and trembling; I didn’t know where I was. She said she was named after the birds of her homeland, and opened a mouldering book to show me a photograph. She was patient. Gentle. Finally betrayed by curiosity, I peeked out from my hiding place.
‘Took this from a fine young man,’ she said. Her ancient eyes twinkled just like the bird’s in the picture, wide and wild and cunning. ‘A seafarer. A beautiful one.’
She gave me pringlea in cold broth and said that the sailor had had a broad nose, and strong hands, and mumbled in his sleep. She loved him. But he loved the ocean more than her, and so she took his compass, blankets and books. She had taken the chairs, pots and tables of the shack from the duchess, with lovely lips and hair so soft it felt like down. The fine woman had been lost at sea.
The windchimes—they had been made by the selkies.
Raven brought me blankets. They smelled like her: of sweat, earth, and decay. She told me stories of her heartaches. I played with the pretty birds in their cages. My fear dwindled with the weeks as I began to feel sad for her.
‘Pain is like the seasons,’ she would say, when I was comfortable enough to cuddle onto her knee. ‘It’s inherited from one person to another, going around and around. People who are hurt, hurt others in their turn.’
*
There once was a witch put out to sea,
Left by a mother who searched for feed,
The storms came in; the gulls came down,
Her mother was lost to the waves.
She waited ‘til she saw the sun,
And ‘til the ice had made her numb,
She waited forever for her to come.
Her mother was lost to the waves.
*
I did not feel the cold until the day I shed my skin.
From beneath the thin membrane of the water, I watched the heavy ebbing of the waves above. I let the current ferry me. Until I found a strange thing severing the ice. I darted to inspect it, though I did not have the words I have now. A shipwreck.
The vessel had collided with the sea shelf and become a metal glacier. All around floated its artefacts like organs spilling from a carcass. I swam through floating photographs, and strings of pearls, and pillowcases.
I came unto a spectral gown, the ghostly fabric swaying as if in a murmuring wind. I nuzzled my nose beneath the bodice. The fabric was soft against my blubber. My flippers forced through the sleeves. Only my head peeped from the dress’s chest. I did not fit. I held none of the grace of the women on the boats I had seen, but I slowly swam my own dithering dance, imagining my glorious life up there with them, beyond the skin of the water. I closed my eyes and ached for the world above, where people would meet me and love me and see me.
I knew I should check for the high-pitched calls of my kin—but they were hidden deep within the belly of the ocean, playing, chasing schools of krill through the dark, and would not catch me here.
In my childish longing, I could not see the danger rushing up to grab me.
A sharp hand curled around my tail and yanked upward.
I was dragged violently to the surface, ripped from the dress in a spray of bubbles. I flailed. I bit. But the hand was too strong, pulled too quickly. I saw the fantasy gown float further and further into the darkness as I was thrust out into the world.
The hand dropped me onto the sand.
I began to shiver.
I had never shivered before.
I sniffed the air and came away with so little; I perked my ears and heard only the dull edges of the waves, the cawing of gulls.
And windchimes.
My flippers were gone. Instead, I had fragile, sinewy limbs. My thin fingers fumbled, grotesque. My tail was lost. I could feel its absence.
I howled, for the first time with human lungs, and it hurt.
The witch tilted her head. In her hands, she held a dead thing. It was leathery and limp, sliced down the belly. I stared.
I felt the same eerie belonging to that carcass that I feel when I hear my own name.
She was holding my skin.
‘You’ll be happy,’ she said, ‘here with me.’
*
The witch bartered with the island’s god,
Who gave her spells and its own nod,
To sail the waves like a blue whale’s pod,
Her mother was lost to the waves.
She searched the sea and searched the land,
She thought her mother was naught but sand,
She found a ship sailing home as planned,
Her mother had left her
on purpose.
The witch took her pain and took her knife,
She stabbed and stabbed ‘til the wounds were rife,
She returned to the island for the rest of her life,
Her mother was lost to the waves.
*
Jars of frog spawn sat on the counter and I was perched between the fireplace and Raven, who prattled about the squid north of the island. I listened instead to the windchimes. They reminded me of the dying seal, the wind his ferryman, chartering him from this world to the next. Each dull ring was another soul, lost. Each long chime, a journey across the water to the underworld.
A violent smash smacked me from my reverie.
I looked up to see Raven staring at me.
The stone wall opposite dripped with frog spawn.
‘Was I boring you?’
‘No–’
‘You don’t care for my stories!’ she snapped.
‘Of course, I do.’
‘Liar.’ Her voice creaked like a haunted ship.
She smashed another jar, then another. They splintered against the floor, bursting into jagged shards like cracked eggs.
I watched, horrified.
She nodded towards the door and held out an empty jar.
It was beyond midnight. The sharp wind howled with bitterness and frozen rain. This was one of my tasks; she wanted me to wade through the ice to recollect the lost frog spawn.
I began to shiver. I looked sharply at her, but when her furious irises met mine, I shrank. I watched myself reduce in the reflection of her eyes.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said and took the jar with shaking hands.
‘I know,’ she said, softening. Remorse flickered. ‘Remember, the world away from this island isn’t as forgiving as me.’
I opened the door, and Raven went back to her bookcase. She stood, her back to me, facing the artefacts from the dead lover who mumbled in his sleep, poisoned with hemlock on the night she found his strong hands entangled in his first mate’s wife. She sat down in the armchair, stolen from the duchess who had sneered at Raven’s island and refused to dock her ship here. The woman was lost at sea because no one found the boat and all its crew slaughtered, strung up by their bedsheets and swaying with the cadence of the waves.
Her sodden gown sinking, spectral, receding into the murmuring darkness.
Just as Raven had said of them: I only had myself to blame for my fate.
I had strayed too close to the island of the sea witch. The island that all selkie pups knew to stay far away from.
She told me once that selkies can change back and forth from human to seal every seven years—she told me because she saw no harm in telling a bird locked in a cage that the front door to the house is open.
I cannot return to the ocean.
Not while she hides my skin.
*
I search the sand and search the grass,
I search every year while the ritual lasts,
I search every inch where my eye is cast,
My skin was thieved by the witch.
I’ve searched the caves, the crags, the brooks,
This is the final place to look.
I’ll dig ‘til I find what she took,
My skin was thieved by the witch.
*
Through the years, I collected clues like the Kerguelen shags collected twigs for their babies’ beds. Long necked, white bellied and vibrant orange between their eyes, waddling along the cliffs—one by one gathering their shrapnel like I gathered hints.
Finally, I had what I needed.
‘Mother,’ I said seven days after the jars were smashed. She smiled at me, lovingly. I sat in my bed beside the cages, in the room that stank of urine and bird shit, beside my fellow prisoners squawking.
‘Yes, pet?’
‘Do the animals know it’s the winter solstice tomorrow?’
‘Some of them do,’ she said, ‘which ones?’
‘The gentoo penguins.’
She gently shook her head.
I took a breath. I spoke again.
‘The seals?’
Raven froze. Her sweetness soured.
‘You know very well the seals recognise the solstice day.’
I flinched. ‘Why should I know that?’
And this is where my performance peaked. I did not have to pretend to fear her and that was why she believed me.
‘Sorry,’ she said, reducing: an ancient child scorned by her own misstep. She cawed a deep, gurgling laugh to mask her embarrassment. ‘Of course, you wouldn’t know that.’
Now she would leave the doors unlocked during the ritual.
Because she loved me and trusted me.
I had confirmed for another year my ignorance of my own species.
She leaned forward and kissed my forehead.
And I felt the tepid warmth from her mouth, and then a pang of terrible sadness within my belly.
She smiled, and I could see that she believed so intently that the potion of sea grass, and lemon myrtle, and frog spawn, and seal blood had worked; she thought me cured of my memory.
How I was fooling her.
How badly I, too, would betray her.
She fed me that potion the day she caught me, scooped me up off the sand, forced it into my mouth and shook me until I swallowed. Every year, the pain of that memory dulled. Every year, I forgave a little more. But now I looked at the hard edges of her mouth, where she’d smiled the devil’s smile as I changed. I loved her. I hated her. I steeled myself with that echo of fury, lost on the air over time like the ringing of chimes.
They rang now.
I heard the light, little ones I had made her on my fourteenth birthday, seven years to the day after I became her daughter.
*
At dawn, she rose and began the solstice ritual. She sat at the wooden table, her candles wafting tendrils. She drew her runes and closed her eyes, and when the guttural humming began in her chest, I stole out of bed. I pulled my furs around me with guilty hands, closed the door in silence and jogged to the hill with the rock like a needle. Only now I knew it wasn’t a hill.
It was a barrow.
And the needle rock, a tomb stone.
And I dug.
And I dug.
And I dug.
The pebbles and sharp roots bit at my fingers. A jagged rock pushed back the nail of my thumb, and I yelped.
But I kept on.
Until my hands hit wood.
And I pushed away the dirt, and wrenched back the door, and squeezed inside the handmade hill on the sea witch’s island, in the middle of the ocean, at the end of the world.
The space was so dark, I could hear it: ominous, humming.
And although my human nose was dulled to the scents of the earth and sea, it reeked.
The smell of dead flesh, earth, and decay.
I could see now
hundreds of stacked skins of seals.
The thin, dry edges of their severed flesh caught the light in violent blades. Whiskers draped over tails. Parched follicles had scattered shards of fur. They lay in neat piles of grey and brown blubber, heaped on each other, reaching the ceiling. So many empty black eyes stared at me.
For here were all of Raven’s selkie lovers, and all of her dead adopted children. The selkie pups who strayed too close to the island. The ones captured before me. The ones who drank the potion. The ones who threw themselves to the sea foam, and disintegrated.
I sensed my skin before I saw it—like hearing my own name muttered from another room. She was hidden, buried, forgotten.
A stack of dead skins collapsed as I pulled her free.
I fled the cave, running, my shins pinching, the frail bones splintering like cracking eggs, but I kept sprinting. I plummeted past the cliffs and the rocks, finally back to the sharp, granulated sand, and landed right before the water.
How long had it been since I wore my own skin?
The seafoam stung the tips of my toes. In the acrid bile of the waves that crashed on these shores, I thought, I might become a body severed, a soul lost to be chartered by the wind.
I turned back. The shack’s tin roof peaked over the dunes.
And, desperately, with every molecule of this creature I had become, I missed being warm.
I nuzzled my nose into the chest cavity. My arms forced themselves into the flippers. I felt the dry, lifeless skin clinging to me. My head pushed through the chest, and I climbed in.
The door to the shack opened.
The dead skin was limp against my flesh. I heard her coming down the dunes.
Terror and grief crashed at me like the waves: violent and sharp, gushing and ebbing, but, at length, revealing a softness beneath. There was hope there. There was longing.
It was too late for both of us.
The sea witch howled.
I felt ancient and infantile.
My warming skin welcomed me back.
I pulled my final leg through and I landed, again, on the sand.
My belly was heavy, and sore at its scars, but I kicked my mottled grey tail and flapped my flippers. The true scent of the ocean roared back.
I threw myself at the mercy of the sea foam.
*
I plummet to the jagged water,
Ending fourteen years I’d fought her,
I am not the Raven’s daughter,
I ‘claimed my skin from the witch.
The Mercy of Sea Foam was published in 2021, in Voiceworks #123 Pickle.
