by Solstice Lamarre

Content Warning: Blood

He watches the selkie strip her skin away. He didn’t think that it would be this long, this laborious. She only has her nails to dig through the bloody, thick skin, and it takes her almost half an hour to get her hands free enough to be able to tear at the skin faster. Once she’s done, she lays there, naked but for the blood. She looks like a new-born adult, wet and messy and exhausted.

An eternity later, she moves. His limbs have gone numb from staying painfully still, observing her, but he can’t afford being noticed. She sits up slowly, then stretches her long legs, as if waking up from a very long sleep in an uncomfortable position. When she stands, she’s shaky on her legs, but determined all the same. She lets out a small delighted noise when her toes dig into the wet sand. She stretches her arms above her head, her fingertips trying to catch the stars and keep them into the sky a little longer, fighting the coming dawn.

She takes her time to wash away the blood, crouching into the waves, humming to the sea, making sure her human voice is still working. When she walks back to the beach, she looks like the woman he’s never seen, but knows all the same. Her long black hair no longer sticks to her face, but falls in wet tendrils down her back. She stands straight, and her smile is sharp. When she looks towards his hideout behind the rocks, he can see her eyes, the blue-gray of an angry sea.

The same as his.

He ducks under the rocks, his breathing hard. He looks down at his hands, pale and tinged blue, the color of a drowned corpse, with webbing linking his fingers together. He despises his hands, just like he despises her. They both make him the selkie’s son, the monstrous good-for-nothing, the give-us-a-break-and-go-drown-yourself of the village. They make his father look at him like he’s a stranger. They make him furious.

Once his breathing has quieted down, he dares to glance at her again. She’s cleaning her seal skin now. Her soft humming has gotten louder. He listens to it, searching in the melody a memory, a feeling of fondness, the sensation of a mother found again. He finds nothing at all.

So, he watches. And when she walks the rocks barefoot, close enough to him he can hear her breathing, he listens carefully. He knows the shore by heart. It’s his true home, the place he comes to when his father’s home feels like a stranger’s house. She hides her skin, and he can guess where by the sound of it only. He smiles, and he can’t see it, but he knows it looks unnaturally sharp. Just like hers. When she walks away towards the village, he waits again, makes sure she won’t return.

She doesn’t. He stands up. Takes the time to stretch his numb limbs just like she did. He finds the skin easily, and it feels strangely familiar against his cold hands. It feels more like home than anything he’s ever known. He closes his eyes, brings the animal hide to his nose, breathes in the musky, bloody scent of it.

And prays, not to the gods, but to the sea, that it will work.

He brings back the skin to where his mother crawled out of it, lays it into the sand. He strips out of his clothes, and abandons them in a pile on the beach. He wants her to see. He hopes she will know he did it, even if he doubts she remembers him. It’s been sixteen years, after all.

Then he curls himself into the skin, with nothing but needle and thread, and he stitches himself back into it. His hands tremble. For all he knows, it might not work, the skin might only respond to his mother, half of her blood in his body not enough to sing the skin alive. He might stitch himself into the seal skin and asphyxiate alone on the beach. He’s not sure he would care, but it doesn’t sound like a comfortable way to die.

As he stitches the skin completely close, though, he feels it warm against his human skin, and then he feels himself change. It feels like acid melting his body, molding him into something else, something new, something that fits. It hurts, but he has never felt this alive before.

When the selkie boy slips into the cold, cold sea, the waves sing to him, chanting his newfound freedom. He sings back, and it’s a song of belonging and delighted revenge. He hopes that when his mother finds his clothes instead of her skin, she will weep.

Solstice Lamarre (they/them) is a French, non-binary aroace writer. They write queer, neurodivergent stories in various genres, but always come back to themes of monstrosity, found family, and all sorts of queer love. Their work has previously appeared in Unthinkable: A Queer Gothic Anthology. When they’re not writing, they work as an English teacher for French teens, read an unholy number of books, play video games they never finish, and cuddle with their cat.