It ends like it begins: with the tide. There is always the ocean, always the waves clawing hungrily at the shore. That’s the problem with these gaps, these spaces, these pieces of emptiness on the edge of things. They want.
Our father left her sealskin under a floorboard in the attic. It wasn’t a mistake; he had heard the old tales. It should be locked in a box, buried six feet underground, the key thrown from the highest cliff. He thought he would be different. He thought she could love him. Maybe she did, but that isn’t the point. This is how the story goes.
The sea wanted our mother back, so she went. My brother wanted her back, so he followed.
What is a skin, when you truly dig down to the bones of it? The bark of a tree, rough and armoured and home to a thousand tiny living things. The scales of a fish, mail glittering silver in the flashes of sunlight that creep down from the surface. The crust of the earth, fractured by a thousand invisible lines. Different names, perhaps, but names are unimportant. Skin keeps the pieces of us inside.
The night before he leaves, he gives me his.
“I can’t,” I say. It sits heavy in my hands, velvet-soft and stinking of brine. “It’s yours. I can’t use it, I don’t know how.”
He cocks his head to one side. “It isn’t about owning,” he says, “or knowing. It’s about… wanting.”
“Wanting?”
He nods. To himself, not to me. A silent reassurance. “You have to want it.” His eyes lock with mine. It could almost be an apology, but I know him better than that. He will not apologise. He will not regret this.
“But the skin,” I try. I have to try. He knows this, too. “You need your skin to become a seal.”
He tosses his head back and laughs. A chorus of gulls echoes in my ears. “Who told you that?”
I want to say ‘the stories’ but it sounds foolish even in my head, a child complaining that picture books had led her to believe in the existence of pink elephants. Stories. Always stories.
“Mother took hers,” I say instead, because it’s true. “She always told us the old tales.”
His smile is faintly amused, as if he’s hearing the punchline to a private joke. “Exactly,” he says. “She believed them.”
He grasps my wrist and the sealskin falls to the ground. It doesn’t land heavily, or with any particular weight. It hits the concrete with a splat and sits there like a pile of wet animal fur.
“It isn’t like the stories,” my brother tells me. “I don’t need any skin but my own.”
That was the last time I saw him.
The wet sand sucks at my boots. The water spreads out dark and glittering before me, an oil slick in the night. Something breaks the surface. It sends ripples out in all directions. A small, dark head. Huge black eyes. I pull my father’s raincoat tighter around my shoulders. What is a skin, anyway? There is a loose floorboard in the attic. There is a heap of grey fur on the floor of the garage.
I step forward. My boots stay where I left them, swallowed up by the saltings. The water is pleasantly cool. The seal does not move its gaze from mine.
The sea always gets what it wants.
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Athena Oliver was born in Edinburgh and currently studies in Aberdeen. She grew up with a deep love of mythology and her writing often draws on the rich folklore of Scotland.