The Beastly Bride

THE SELKIE SPEAKS Delia Sherman

My mother said: Don’t swim too far from home. My mother said: Don’t tell men what you are.

My mother said:

Men are not like seals. They hunt for pleasure and for gain.

Restless, impatient

Of my narrow bay, my narrow life,

My own ungainly desires,

I swam far and far from home,

Along the whale roads

Threading the jeweled reefs

To the islands where turtles breed.

And I watched.

I saw:

Nets like giants’ hands scoop fish from the sea

I saw:

Opalescent filth clog the waves.

I saw:

Men hunt seals for pleasure and for gain.

Enflamed, enraged,

I chose a beach littered with men

And surged from the waves,

Shedding my seal skin as I came.

I seized a knife, I ripped their nets,

I roared aloud my grief at what I’d seen,

The proof of all my mother’s warning words.

The men ran from the beach.

All but one.

He said:

You are far from home.

He said:

You are magnificent.

He said:

I fish to eat. Like you.

Our house is built on a rock above the sea.

My pelt warms the foot of our bed.

He teaches our children to build and sail.

I teach them how to swim and fish.

Together we teach them the ways of wave and wind,

To fight when they must and love when they can.

At night, they sleep warm under their own pelts.

We tell them:

Swim to the limits of your strength.

We tell them:

Rejoice in who you are.

We tell them:

Men and seals are hunters both. But not for pleasure and never for gain.

DELIA SHERMAN’S stories have appeared in the anthologies The Green Man, The Faery Reel, The Coyote Road, Poe, and Naked City. Her adult novels are Through a Brazen Mirror and The Porcelain Dove(winner of the Mythopoeic Award), and, with Ellen Kushner, The Fall of the Kings.

She has coedited anthologies with Ellen Kushner and Terri Windling, as well as Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing, (with Theodora Goss), and Interfictions 2, (with Christopher Barzak).

Changeling was her first novel for younger readers. Its sequel, The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen,was published in 2009.

Delia is a past member of the James Tiptree Jr. Awards Council, an active member of the Endicott Studio of Mythic Arts, and a founding member of the Interstitial Arts Executive Board. She lives in New York City, loves to travel, and writes wherever she happens to find herself. Her Web site is www.deliasherman.com.

All the folklore about seal maidens tends to focus on the forced marriages, the romantic betrayals, the unhappy relationships ending with the seal wife finding the skin her (at best) clueless husband has hidden under the thatch and swimming away, with or without her selkie children. I began by thinking about one of those traditional seal mothers, embittered and traumatized by her sojourn in the world of men. But I ended up writing about her daughter’s journey. My thanks to Claudia Carlson and Ellen Kushner, who both gave me very helpful advice in working out the pattern of my seal maiden’s story.