by Georgia Cook
(950 words)
They tricked her. Long ago, when the nights were colder and darker, when the wind howled across waves taller than houses, and the surface world contained little more than firelight and stone cottages, they stole away her skin and cursed her to eternity as a fisherman’s bride.
The fisherman loved her in his way, but he misunderstood the price such love demanded. He kept her confined to a hearth, a home, left to wander the beach beyond their cottage, her feet bare and bleeding, her hair clawed by the wind. Her sisters swam along the shoreline, their seal-skin coats flashing in the shallows, able only to sing out in comfort. They could not touch her, nor she touch them. The fisherman had bestowed upon her the cruellest of fates: to forever glimpse home, but never touch it.
In time, the seal-bride bore the fisherman three children. Two drowned before their tenth birthday. The third, a boy, ran away to sea at thirteen, pulled by the call of the waves, and was never seen again. The seal-bride bore him no ill-will, but she bore no others.
The fisherman died long ago, with grey in his beard and grief in his heart, but the seal-bride persisted. Even in death, he had not returned her seal-coat. Eternity is eternity, after all. Only those cursed with immortality know how long a bond can last.
Decades flew by, dipping deep into the valley of centuries, until there were none left who remembered the fisherman and his seal-bride, nor where they had buried her pelt. The seal-bride remained in her cottage by the sea. She, who remained young and beautiful as the old world fell away. She, who remained even as newcomers arrived over the hilltops, descending upon the tiny stone villages with paperwork and bright ambitions.
The fishing boats disappeared, replaced by yachts and paddle boards and vast commercial liners. Hotels sprung like wildflowers along the seafront, seeded with amusement arcades and roaring funfairs, spilling light and music across the windswept pavements. Promenades arced across the sand, bristling with iron ballasts, miniature golf courses and slot machines.
And now…time slows.
The seal-bride walks the foreshore path. No cobbles these days; only tarmac and concrete against her calloused feet. The world is a thing constructed of chip packets and overstuffed bins, leftover takeaway cartons and squabbling gulls. Pubs and clubs spill their occupants across the pavements, laughing and bright eyed, the lights behind them turning the sky orange-brown. Snatches of song pierce the air. Drunks stumble past, barely glancing at the grey-faced woman in her patchy grey dress.
The seal-bride descends to the beach alone, unseen and unknown. She digs in the sand below the pier, her fingers blue, her nails torn ragged, but unearths nothing but cigarette ends. She watches the ships pass in the harbour, filled with tourists and day trippers, and she wonders if any of them have seen her seal-coat. Centuries have passed since she last touched the ocean.
Sometimes she catches a flash of grey fin out in the harbour, a baleful black eye cresting above the waves, and she knows she is not alone. Her sisters still sing to her, although their voices sound muffled and strained these days. They sing in the cry of the gulls, in the chatter of hen parties and drunken one-night-stands, the wail of the lost and forgotten. They sing in the voice of the old fishermen, in the whirr and beep of cell phones and radio towers. They sing as the seal bride searches.
One day, she knows, she will find her beloved seal-skin. She will hold it in her arms, smell the salt-meat smell of it, and feel whole for the first time in centuries. She will walk to the end of the pier, past the amusement arcades and the twinkling lights, to where the sea rises and foams against the struts. There, she will dive into the ice-dark waves, reclaiming her place among the currents and tides. She will find her sisters waiting, and they will sing together at last, their voices rising against the roar of humanity.
Sometimes she dreams of this moment, curled beneath the groaning wooden beams of the pier. She dreams of rising oceans, of the tide ever-encroaching on an unseeing world. She dreams of the shoreline rising, rising, flowing up past the girders and struts, over the roads and walkways, snuffling the lights, muffling the wail and rattle of the amusement arcades. She pictures a vast underwater surge, shaking the hillsides, sending great chunks of land crashing into the ocean. She pictures a world consumed, ensconced in perfect flat ocean. And in the depths of it all, she pictures a rock flung loose, an ancient tree uprooted, revealing a hole concealed for centuries. A scrap of ancient cloth, bundled with fisherman’s twine, and the silken grey cloak concealed within it.
The image is so strong that for a moment the seal-bride can almost touch it, her fingertips brushing a softness as familiar as her own heartbeat.
Each time the dream is the same. Each time she awakens at exactly the same moment, grey dawn burning her eyes, the stink of asphalt and urine sharp in her nose, and a world unchanged.
But she can wait.
She knows the fragility of human constructs. She knows that the cliff tops will one day crumble, the hotels and clubs and amusement arcades consumed by the sea, the surface world pulled to lie among the sea folk and ruined cities on the ocean floor. She has watched the tide creep closer. She has seen the first steps of oblivion.
The seal-bride has waited for so long already.
She can wait a little longer.
END
Georgia Cook is an illustrator and writer from London. With writing in such publications as Baffling Magazine, Luna Station Quarterly, and Vastarien Lit, as well as the Doctor Who range with Big Finish. She also writes and narrates for horror podcasts ‘Creepy’, ‘The Other Stories’, and ‘The Night’s End’. She can be found on twitter at @georgiacooked and on her website at https://www.georgiacookwriter.com/