Elizabeth Wing
Sealskin
Shane meets her while working on an oil rig in the North Sea. For every day of his twenty-one-day hitch, he wakes at four to his phone alarm and straggles sleep-blind to the kitchen. He works until ten in the morning for the breakfast shift, goes on break for a delirious nap, then works again from five to ten for dinner and wash-up. He has washed dishes before, in the bar that he works at on shore, he has lied about cooking. But how hard can it be? Liquid eggs come in bags, five gallons apiece. His bunkmate is unhinged and shows him how to breathe fire by spitting out a mouthful of non-dairy creamer and holding a lighter to the puff of powder. During one shift his manager gives him foil-wrapped Cadbury eggs to drop in handfuls over the dining hall’s formica tables. This means it’s Easter, which means it must be Spring.
Under the surface, phytoplankton blooms up into the warming water. Schools of herring seek shelter in the craggy footprint of the oil rig to spawn. Their milt reels milk-white in the current, and their swarming attracts fish, gulls, seals. For three days, the sea under the platform roils with sex and hunger and death, and then the herring dissipate. The bigger fish and gulls go with them, but, for a while, the seals stay.
On break, Shane hangs his feet over the safety rail and smokes a cigarette. Seals haul out of the sea and cluster on the piling ledge below him. Some scatter when he arrives, but one is braver and more curious than the rest. He feeds her raw chicken. Her mouth is pink and her teeth are like a dog’s. He likes to watch her eat.
Sometimes, when he walks along the deck at night, he hears laughter. He can’t tell if it’s seal or a human.
His bunkmate is fired for dealing amphetamines to the spar platform crew and is taken back to shore on the resupply boat. Left alone, Shane lies in his bunk and tries to read Pitchfork on his phone, but the wifi is shit. He cooks then he washes then he washes then he cooks. He cuts his hand opening #10 cans of tomato sauce. He hoses down the anti-slip mats. He scrubs porridge splatters off the wall.
Then there’s the night he wakes up wanting something to eat. He lets himself into the kitchen for a slice of leftover cake. Walking back to this bunk, he passes above the piling where the seals haul out. That’s when he hears her voice.
“Throw me a rope,” she says.
He looks down. She is standing on the piling ledge, naked, clutching her sealskin in one hand. The moon isn’t out, but the lights from the drilling platform glow cool white on her skin.
Wet hair plasters against her face. She examines one hand and then the other, spreading her fingers in a fan.
“These are my favorite part,” she says. “I want to try and climb.”
“You’re a selkie,” he says. This is strange, he thinks, but everything is strange living on this giant metal platform in the middle of the sea.
She ignores the question, asks, “Can you please throw me a rope? I want to come up and explore.” She flexes her hands, and each finger on its own.
He thinks. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.” He goes to his bunkroom and finds a pair of coveralls his bunkmate left behind and a coil of rope in the emergency storeroom.
As she climbs, her shoulders ripple with muscle. She zips herself into the coveralls.
He shows her around the rig for hours that night, he shows her the draw-works, the mud pumps, the crown blocks. She is curious—she wants to know about every pulley and ladder and staircase and seems unafraid of being seen or caught, a little too unafraid. More than once he has her duck into a storeroom when he hears footsteps. He brings her a slice of cake from the kitchen, vanilla with raspberry buttercream, and when, near dawn, she ends up in his room, she is still hungry. She has never made love to a creature with arms before and she likes how they wrap around her, alive as kelp.
He’s not really a cook he tells her as they lay in the dark. He’s here because his friend Finley said offshore work pays well, and he needs the money for equipment: a turntable, some sampling software, and a better mic. Back on shore, he works as a barback, but he’s trying to be a DJ. It’s starting to pay off, he has a gig lined up for Friday the week he gets back to shore, and he wishes she could be there, he’s sure she would love it, not that he would be that good, per se, but she would love it: the wave of endorphins and sound, the people moving like water, the light that paints everyone the same color, the glow of body heat, the girls in line for the bathroom who hug you for no reason.
“Where?” she asks.
“Oh, far from here,” he explains. “Aberdeen. Thirty kilometers, at least.”
“By which estuary?” she asks. “The one that forks and curves or the one with all the boats?”
“I can’t tell you,” he says. “I’d have to look at a map”
“North or south?” she asks.
“Oh. South. I live a few blocks from the Waterloo jetty.”
“I’ve been all around there,” she says. “Good smelt. I was born near there, in the sea cave in Grayhope Bay.”
“There’s a sea cave in Grayhope Bay?” he asks. His hand is cupped against her ribcage, and her skin is warmer than any skin he’s felt.
“Yeah,” she laughs. “I’ll show you sometime.”
He finds himself laughing too. “I have so much to learn. I don’t know anything about where you’re from, but you seem to know so much about how my world works. I don’t understand. Have you always—have you been human before?”
She strokes her sealskin as it rests under her head. “I’ve always been myself,” she says.
He lies in the quiet for a moment. The rig sways below them. Then the ecstasy of it hits him. “You mean it?” he asks. “I’ll see you again?”
“Yes,” she says. “If you come to the far east-side end of the Waterloo jetty three nights from now, just after the sun goes down, I’ll be waiting for you.”
She is exactly where she says she will be. She is sitting on a kelp-slicked rock, cracking open a crab when he finds her. He brings her a pair of cargo pants and his favorite tank top, and all night she dances through the crowd like it’s water.
His friends think she’s great, and Finley asks where he met her. He says the oil rig and says nothing else about it. He takes her home, to his apartment a few blocks from the jetty. She stays. He cannot get used to her namelessness, so he calls her Celie. They share the mattress on the floor in the room filled with instruments he’s tried at some point: snare drums, keyboard, stand-up bass. He looks around, at the dishes unwashed in the sink. She is sprawled across the green couch his friends helped him haul up from the curb, flipping through an article in a sound tech trade magazine about sub-bass frequencies. She is wearing his clothes: his boxer shorts and big wool socks, his polar fleece sweatshirt. She doesn’t have any clothes of her own, which seems wrong to him, but doesn’t seem to bother her. She doesn’t need anything, really, which frightens him. The only thing in the apartment that’s hers is the sealskin, and she keeps it folded under a pillow. Once, while she is asleep, he tries it on, to see what will happen, but he can’t get it over his hips. It is thick and soft, a silvery, milky gray speckled with graphite-black. It smells familiar yet secret.
She’s outlined her life to him by now: she’s her mother’s tenth pup, conceived underwater, born on a rock. After a month her mother had given half her own body in milk and left. She taught herself to swim and now she swims, she taught herself to stand on two feet and now she stands on two feet. Her name doesn’t fit in a human mouth. She knows exactly who she is.
Sometimes he’ll come home sighing, I don’t think we have much for dinner, and she’ll say, look in the fridge, where a whole flounder or seabream will be bleeding softly from two identical punctures wounds.
One morning, before dawn, he wakes up to find her slipping out of the bed. She stands in the doorway, wearing just his boxers, the sealskin around her shoulders.
“Where are you going?” he asks.
She smiles. “Just for a swim. I might catch us some breakfast if there’s anything good.”
He untangles himself from the blankets. “Can I come?”
She hesitates, then nods. “Sure.”
The morning is gray and silent. They take the back route to the jetty, through the alley, which smells like tar and fry grease, wet newspapers, cigarettes. He doesn’t realize how cold it’s going to be until they’re standing at the edge of the jetty. She ducks behind a tall rock, drops the boxers, and stuffs them into a barnacle-lined crevice. She shakes out the sealskin and runs a hand over it, then steps inside and dives into the choppy water. He doesn’t see her change—rather, he sees her surface, a meter away, suddenly a seal. She doesn’t speak now. She motions to him with a toss of her head and he knows what to do—he shrugs off his clothes and dives in after her, the cold hitting his system with a bitter shudder, and he finds her, wraps his arms around her back and clings as she slices through the water.
The spring days melt to summer. They switch from swimming before dawn to after dark. In the shallow June nights, he follows her to the water and she plunges through it with him on her back, one creature with two heartbeats. She takes him to the estuary, she takes him to the lighthouse, to the sea cave where she was born. She takes him further from shore than he could swim, deeper than he could dive. Sometimes, she forgets that he can’t hold his breath like she can, and remembers only when he pummels her back with his fists.
But on land, she follows his lead. He gets her a job bar-backing with him, and she’s good at it—weaving fast between drunken masses with a tray of dirty cups held over her head—ducking, twisting, laughing. But she can’t grasp how a schedule works and would have been fired in her first month if Shane wasn’t there to remind her when she has to go to work. There are things she can’t remember, like wearing shoes in the grocery store and locking doors behind her.
Fortunately for him, she has no interest in money. It seems natural to her when they go to the bank together every two weeks and withdraw her entire paycheck, which they use for rent and coffee and milk and toilet paper and vodka. He saves his paychecks, and, at night, longingly surfs through websites selling subwoofers and amps and mixing programs endorsed by Fergie and Ikonika.
Shane brings Celie to every gig and at the end of every night says this one’s for you, babe, and hits play on the track that is everything he feels when she brushes against him: a throbbing beat, a distant rush of water, surf draining over cold black sand, an atmospheric current, an electric wave.
But it isn’t easy. Strobe lights confuse her, the same way the boat lights above water confused her as a pup. Liquor makes her nauseous. Soap dries her skin, and work gives her knots in her back that Shane has to rub out with his knuckles.
The summer passes.
It’s hard for her to keep track of time with the moon always blocked out by buildings, with the tides truncated by seawalls, with all this being told to get up and go to work when she’s still bleary, or lie down and be quiet when her blood is still alive.
She’s not sure why she stays. When she was younger she once followed a pod of Minke whales for a month, trying to understand their language. They were wary, but after she freed one of the calves from a ghost net with her teeth, they let her in. They told her legends about tricks played on marauding orcas. Their songs were too slow for her to sing.
She does like the boy, or man, or whatever he is. She likes his arms, with their veins like eelgrass, and the soft fabric skins he pulls over himself. She likes the way he tries to record her heartbeat for the back-track of his songs with a borrowed microphone. And she likes it when her coworkers mix the dregs of customers’ drinks and take bets about which will taste the worst, and she likes finding wild mustard flowers blooming yellow by the train tracks. She likes seeing how far she can walk in a given direction, and when she meets cats that let her scratch behind their ears. Sometimes it feels like she has been diving the whole time she has been on shore, her mind constricted, her vision narrow, her blood thin. But she can hold her breath for a long time.
One day Shane comes home from work at four in the morning. He undresses, drinks a glass of water, and uses the toilet. He does everything quietly so he doesn’t wake her up. But when he pushes open the door to their bedroom, he doesn’t see her shape under the covers. For a moment he thinks she’s being still and flat, as if she’s woken up and wants to surprise him, tackle him the way she sometimes tackles a seagull floating on the water’s surface.
But she’s not in bed. He feels around under the pillow—the sealskin is gone. She must be out on a swim. He falls asleep imagining her underwater, the shape of her, turning, turning.
She’s not back when he wakes, and still not back in the late afternoon, so when it’s time for her shift to start he covers it.
It’s six in the morning the next day when she finally comes home. He’s not proud of it, but he is sincere when he threatens to take her sealskin away.
She doesn’t argue. She says she’s sorry, does he want to swim with her? OK. She takes him into the mouth of the bay. The sky is curdled with clouds. Gulls keel above. She dives for longer than she knows he can hold his breath and only surfaces when she feels him slipping. He comes up gasping and shivering and he’s still shaking when they get home. His skin is pale. They wrap together in a blanket and watch Game of Thrones. The clouds fall apart into rain, soft against the apartment windows. In the alley, a cat carries her kittens out of the storm drain and into a thatch of knotweed.
By September, the vacationers have left and the bar’s rhythm slows. The gigs dry up, and Shane opts to work a few more stints offshore. For three weeks at a time, he yearns for her, listless, only half inside his body.
When he comes home the apartment is always a mess, dirty laundry strewn across his drum set. Bunches of flowers she’s picked rotting in beer bottles on the windowsill. Raw, half-eaten cod in the fridge. Things she’s collected on her walks: pretty stones and lost children’s shoes, sand toys, scraps of bright plastic, organized by color and shape on their living room floor in foot-stabbing mosaics.
When she’s at sea she sometimes finds her sisters and tells them about life on land. But she doesn’t tell them everything, not about the way Shane scrubs her with dish soap that makes her skin itch so she won’t smell like fish, not about the way she was “a friend from work” when his mother came over for dinner.
The last rig stint ends in November. He comes home to find a trash bag of oil-blackened clothes lying on the bedroom floor. Celie is in the bathtub. Her hands are filthy to the elbows. Between her legs, she has pinned a juvenile shearwater. The bird is shrieking, its mouth a desperate tunnel. Its flapping wings knock over the dish soap, which travels through the tile grout in a blue, antiseptic river.
She explains, over the bird’s screaming, that a barge coming into dock from one of the North Sea rigs had spilled, and she spent the past four days volunteering in the cleanup effort. She tells him this flatly, while she pins the shearwater’s wings to its body and wraps it in his towel. She holds the bird and Shane holds her, her face buried in the bird’s feathers, his face buried in her hair. She smells like sweat and brine and dish soap and something rich and rotten, the same smell that he had caught sometimes on an updraft from the piping platform on the rig.
“Good thing you were here,” he says, “On land.” Pressed against her, he can feel the deep sob racking her diaphragm. Shit. He starts to say he is sorry, but the shearwater tries to squirm free, and she pulls herself from his arms to subdue it.
The next morning, after they release the bird, he goes with her to the shore. A coordinator with a clipboard gives them a waiver to sign and two hazmat suits, and for fourteen hours they shovel oiled sand into flatbed trucks and mix them with chemical dispersants. They watch the boat crews corral the oil with skimmers and booms, watch them try to burn it off the surface. When it is too dark to work they crawl out of the hazmat suits. Underneath their clothes are soaked in sweat and reek of oil. They strip down to underwear and walk hand in hand to a fish and chips stand on the boardwalk. Tourists ramble through with children in strollers, buying bright polyester kites and ice cream cones. They can feel people looking at them, wondering at their exhaustion and undress, but Shane is calm. None of these people know what he has just done. As they wait at the fish and chips window, the glow of work fades from their muscles and the cold sets in; they press their bodies together for warmth, giggling. They take their fish and chips, wrapped in newspaper, and scurry back to the apartment, where they take a hot shower and pull on pajamas, sit cross-legged on the green couch, and eat.
Shane licks the fry grease off his fingers. “I’m not going to work on the platform anymore,” he says.
“I know,” she says.
He still likes to watch her eat. When she is hungry, she tilts her head up and back to chew, as if the fish were still alive and flopping. She reaches across the newspaper for the handful of fish bones he had sucked clean and pops them in her mouth. “Oh,” she swallows. “Did I tell you that I’m pregnant?”
At the start of her second trimester, she folds her sealskin away. It goes in a crinkly white bag (Thank You For Shopping With Us!) on the top shelf of the closet. It’s a windy spring. She goes on walks and comes back with things she thinks a baby might like: a jingle bell from a cat’s collar, a ring of keys. Her scrap mosaics sprawl across the coffee table, the kitchen counters, the bathtub rim. She wonders if her baby will have hands.
In the third trimester, she feels the baby turn inside her and thinks he will look more like Shane than like her. For the first time, she watches the news, she reads the newspapers that they use to wrap fish and chips at the bar. She asks Shane questions about money that make him nervous. In the aisles of the grocery store, she frowns at the diaper prices. She wonders how her baby will learn to catch food without sharp teeth. She goes on leave from the bar. Shane has to DJ less, pick up more shifts. Because she doesn’t have papers, he can’t take her to a hospital. She says she can give birth at home in the bathtub, but that will make him feel like a bad father.
Father. A word he tries on like a new shirt. They spend two paychecks on a doula-in-training and a kiddie-pool-water-birth in the back of a yoga studio overlooking the bay.
The doula-in-training plays whale sounds and tells her to visualize an umbilical cord looping back through generations, her grandmother’s grandmother laying hands on her pelvis. The baby rockets out of her, a wailing, blood-streaked torpedo. To Shane’s relief, he looks like a perfectly human little boy, the space between his fingers just barely webbed. They name him Kai. He is born in August, of the hottest year on record. Salmon, unable to spawn in the warm waters, die along the muddy banks of the estuary, their bellies still full of roe for the gulls to peck open. In the bars along Trinity Street, the fishermen complain: this year’s herring catch is the worst they’ve ever seen.
The doula-in-training is amazed by how Kai looks around without crying, how he finds the nipple and latches on the first try. It’s then that Celie knows he is like her, even if he looks very different than how she looked when she was born. She knows he knows himself, in a way beyond a name, and that he will figure things out on his own, just like she did. Maybe one day he will grow a seal’s skin, the way he will grow a set of teeth or a beard. Maybe one day he will find that he can be underwater in the same lurching trial-and-error that she found she could be on land.
A week later, she’s breastfeeding Kai when she says, “He’s not my first one.”
Shane looks over from his laptop. “What?” he asks.
“He’s my fifth if you count the one that was born too early.”
Shane gives her a puzzled look.
“My first one was born too early. It didn’t even have fur. My second one was so curious, her eyes were open when she was born and she was already looking around. My third was very fat, he hurt me on the way out. We were in a cave, there was a highway above us, everything was very loud. But I was glad he was fat. I had my fourth one in the sand above a cove. The water was warm and shallow, she was swimming in it by the next day.”
“Where are they now?” asks Shane.
“They’re out there,” she says.
“You don’t—you just abandoned them?”
“No,” she says. “I weaned them.”
When Kai is old enough to eat spoonfuls of mashed sweet potatoes, she moves the sealskin out of the closet and under her pillow. Shane finds it there and rolls it tight, puts it as far back in the sock drawer as he can. But the next day she takes it and puts it under the pillow again.
One day Shane comes home from work and she is gone. Kai is awake in a puddle of blankets in the living room. He has recently learned to push himself up to his elbows and, in the right mood, he can roll over. Shane hoists Kai onto his hip and carries him into the bedroom, roots around under the pillows. The sealskin is not there.
When she comes home, she stands over the sink and wrings the saltwater from her hair. She takes the herring she has caught and mashes it between the cutting board and the bottom of a coffee mug, feeds the glinting mess to Kai.
“My other babies were catching their own at this age,” she says. “But it’s OK.” She pats Kai’s stomach. “He’s weaning well.”
She turns to Shane, smiling, then notices that he is furious.
“What?” she asks.
“You can’t—you can’t leave him like that. For hours! You didn’t even tell me.”
“He’s fine,” she says. “Look at him.” Kai burbles, huge dark eyes flicking between the two of them.
“For hours! For fucking hours! And you didn’t—you didn’t tell me. Are you just going to do that now? Are you going to…” He can’t finish.
She rinses the coffee mug under the faucet. The smell of dish soap.
“Celie, listen to me Celie—” he takes her by the shoulder and pulls her to face him. The coffee mug falls to the floor and rolls in a semicircle.
“That’s not my name,” she says.
He has to tell someone, so he tells his friends at work about the fight, about how she thinks it’s alright to leave the baby alone for hours. And they get it, they say she’s crazy. And that it’ll fuck up the baby, too, attachment theory or something. It’s unacceptable, they say. If he doesn’t want the baby to be unredeemably fucked over, he’s got to find a way to make her stop.
He comes home with a few drinks sloshing inside his skull. The apartment smells stale, he opens a window. She’s out, on one of her collecting walks, and she’s taken Kai with her this time. He makes himself instant noodles, and when he opens the fridge for an egg, he finds a shortfin squid, not quite dead, in a casserole pan of salt water. Its eyes glint metallic, as if they’re backed with tin foil. He leaves the noodles on the stove and goes to the bedroom. A way to make her stop. Picks up the laundry on the floor and tosses it into the hamper. Pull aside the bedspread. Reaches under the pillow. His hand finds the sealskin, he says this to himself. His hand. Not quite him.
It is thick and buttery soft, dappled, dark on the back and pale on the belly. He has never envied anything so much.
He takes it to the dumpster behind his work and he tosses it in, with the takeout boxes and puke-smeared paper towels. The nighttime garbage run will pass in a few hours. He comes home and ransacks the apartment. He tears down curtains, he throws flatware on the floor, flings the contents of the closet across the bedroom. He takes a few valuables: his cherrywood electric guitar, some video game consoles, a helmet his grandfather picked up in the war—and brings them to the pawn shop right before it closes. Then he waits across the street until dusk when he spots her silhouette, lump-backed with Kai on her shoulders. He waits for her to find the chaos, find the sealskin gone, before he comes home.
He insists that someone must have broken in while they were away, but she doesn’t believe him.
He reminds her that she always leaves the door unlocked, that they’ve talked about this before, that this was bound to happen.
“No,” she says. “Not anymore. I always lock it now. I do everything you tell me.” She puts down Kai, who starts to cry. He points out to her the other things that they have found missing, how they were his things, his things and they were valuable. But nothing that he cared about, she says. The amps aren’t gone. Or the laptop. Nothing he uses to DJ.
Kai’s crying pitches into a wail. Outside, the sun is setting. The days are getting short again. It’s almost winter.
“If you don’t tell me where it is,” she says, “I’ll take him with me.”
“Come here,” he says. He takes her face between his hands. “I’ll tell you if you stay.”
She looks up at him. The same look she gave him when he used to feed her raw chicken off the side of the oil rig, when he threw her a coil of rope off the piling, when he first worked a hand between her thighs.
Hunger, he thinks, and he tells himself she’s pleading. He tells himself she means yes.
When they arrive at the dumpster, she hands him the baby. She hoists herself inside and disappears into the churn of trash. Grease-soaked rags, french fries, a dead mouse in a glue trap that had bled out while trying to chew off its leg, a hotel Bible hollowed into a bong, a torn-up kite the colors of the Scottish flag, a pair of jeans, a broken child’s sand-shovel, a mass of paper towels dripping with grenadine, juice bottles, gin bottles, syrup bottles, eggshells—
There. Her skin.
She holds it to her chest. It smells like everything that it has been crushed beneath, and it smells like her.
Together, they walk to the jetty. He tries to take her hand and for a minute she lets him, savoring her last feeling of fingers on fingers; these miraculous skeletal flippers that can touch and twist and hold. She presses her forehead to the baby’s and whispers something Shane can’t hear. The gulls are flocking to settle on the water. A warm wind picks up a plastic bag and ghosts it between the rocks.
He stands with Kai in his arms as he watches her swim away. The streetlights have not switched on just yet, and so, for the last time he sees her, she is lit only by the moon.