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Aoife Dunne has always felt a connection to the ocean. From a young age she would sneak out of the house just to jump into the waves. Her father had been against it at first, citing that it was dangerous, especially without supervision. Still, she ran off to swim for hours in the early morning, greeting the sunrise covered in saltwater and sand.
Father quickly gave up since whatever he did, he failed to rear Aoife in.
No one taught her how to swim. It was like from the moment her body touched the water she knew what to do. It baffled Aoife years later when her half-brother nearly drowned as he fell overboard during a boating trip. His mother screamed as their father jumped in after him. It was only then that Aoife learned that humans aren’t born knowing how to swim and have to be taught it. Her affinity was strange- but it was hardly the strangest thing about her. Aoife wasn’t gentle, charismatic, or personable, but she didn’t need to care what others thought of her. If they gossiped, she could just go to the shoreline and ignore them all as she swam and swam and swam.
The Dunne family has many generational ties to the other prominent families in town, which means lots of sons who could gain a fortune by marrying the eldest daughter of the patriarch. Aoife knows one day she’ll have to settle down with one of those boys, give birth to plenty of sons, and keep herself busy with mindless hobbies like flower arranging or embroidery. While she’s still young, however, she wants to be wild.
Even if she’s a young lady now, close to adulthood, she chooses to avoid her responsibilities to go out to the ocean, kicking off her clothes and prancing around in her swimwear, exposing her long limbs. Of her many oddities, she has never understood why she had to be self-conscious about her own body, or care about other people’s bodies. As kids, whenever Aoife and her brother, Rónán, were getting changed for a fancy event she didn’t care about finding separate changing rooms. It was Róisín, Rónán’s mother, who worked to separate them and their improper behavior.
Aoife Dunne has seen the bodies of men and they don’t impress her. Ah, but it’s incorrect to say she’s entirely uncaring. If there’s one person who can fluster her, it’s-
“The sun isn’t even up yet and you’re already here?” a cheerful voice echoes across the rocky shore.
Aoife scrambles out of the water, “Niamh! I thought you were visiting your aunt today?”
Aoife’s best friend makes her unsteady way down the hill, joining her by the water. Niamh Kelly shrugs as she explains, “I was! But Aunt and the baby are apparently under the weather, so no visitors allowed.”
They join hands, Aoife’s still wet with seawater, but Niamh holds on tight to not lose her. It’s as if she’s afraid a giant wave will take Aoife under and never return her.
If there’s anyone in this town who understands her, it’s her best friend. Niamh is strange, not in the same ways Aoife is, but she’s always been obsessed with seals, losing hours lost in books reading about them; Niamh has sketchbooks filled to the brim with drawings of the habour seals and grey seals that are common to see around their town. They’re both happy to waste days by the sea while others spread unkind rumors about them.
Aoife likes her family well enough, but there’s no one she loves in this city as much as she loves Niamh Kelly. It’s a feeling she keeps quiet, happy enough to spend their days calmly. Speaking them aloud might ruin everything.
Niamh settles on a boulder as she takes out her sketchbook and pencils, getting started on a drawing of the ocean. Aoife returns to the water, jumping around and stealing her friend’s attention every so often. Niamh watches her, indulging her antics. Like this, she feels like the center of the universe.
Aoife couldn’t be happier. She can feel her face warming up, so she lets the next waves wash over her, following its pull to shore. Aoife loves it when she’s under the waves; she can stare up through the rippling surface to Niamh’s blurry figure, staring without shame.
She stays under as long as she can until her lungs complain for air, so Aoife begrudgingly surfaces.
“It’s crazy how long you can hold your breath!” Niamh laughs. “Any longer and I would have to check if you had drowned.”
It’s another one of those things she’s never understood. Aoife has noticed how others can only spend mere moments underwater before they return up for air, gasping desperately. She lingers longer under when she’s alone, but Aoife knows it can be worrying to witness her ability to hold her breath.
“I’ll never drown, the sea loves me too much for that,” Aoife says. It’s pure nonsense that makes Niamh roll her eyes, but she still looks so fond. It makes Aoife’s heart tremble.
She slinks back into the waves, covering her face and screaming silently.
Aoife can’t convince Niamh to join her, but they still joyfully waste away the hours. For all her love of aquatic sealife, Niamh has never learned to swim and Aoife’s natural talent makes it hard to explain the technicalities of it all.
Niamh still makes an adorable sight, crouched over her book with hands stained with pencil dust, her large sunhat flopping over her and hiding her focused expression.
“Ah, look at the sun, I should be heading back now. I need to be home for lunchtime. Can you tell Rónán to cover for me again?” Niamh lifts the edge of her hat, staring up at the clouds.
Aoife frowns, but says, “Sure thing.”
Niamh’s parents don’t like Aoife; they’re traditional folk who prefer that their daughter not spend time with a child born out of wedlock. Aoife and Niamh have long since worked out their cover story that Niamh spends her time with Róisín Dunne and her son. Rónán lies for them corroborating their story, and the Kellys get to think their daughter is getting close to a wealthy heir. Everyone gets to be happy.
Aoife watches silently as Niamh dashes away from her, leaving her behind. She likes her solitude but her mood feels too ruined to enjoy swimming any more for today.
She fusses as she dries her hair with a towel and pulls back on her dress. If only she had different parents, maybe she’d have fewer troubles. Aoife thinks it’s illogical to blame the child for the parents’ mistakes! Why dislike her when she didn’t commit the crime?
The tale of Aoife Dunne’s birth is a troubled one best not spoken of in polite company. She was born to some woman who came into their town and left it just as quickly, ephemeral as the setting sun. No one dares to slander Éamonn Dunne, the leading patriarch of the Dunne family, but the townsfolk are more than happy to call Aoife’s birth mother all sorts of horrible names.
Aoife walks home through the woods, avoiding the main roads. Róisín will nag her once she sees her dirtied clothing but at least no judging eyes will land on her.
The thing is, Father was never meant to have Aoife. People knew he was fascinated by the out-of-town woman, but then the two disappeared. Éamonn Dunne had run off to some coastal vacation villa the Dunne family owned, and took the woman with him. Then a mere two years later he came back to town with a baby in his arms, and simply said, “She’s gone.”
Aoife’s mother had disappeared. No one knows where, and no one was eager to find her. No explanation was given, or desired.
He was, according to stories Aoife has overheard, distraught for quite some time after. But before he had an affair with a wild woman, he had been engaged to the eldest daughter of the Sharpe family. Father’s parents were eager to put the whole scandal behind them and the Sharpe family was willing to overlook things to gain access to the Dunne family’s wealth.
So, Father married Róisín Sharpe, and they had Aoife’s younger brother, Rónán. Everyone was happy about it, even Father moved on from his troubles. The two families were relieved to have a son to pass their fortune onto, and Aoife Dunne was the shadow of worse times.
Father kept many secrets from his youth, and never spoke a peep about Aoife’s mother, except for the holidays when he drank more than he could handle. When her father is drunk, his lips loosen and he tells tales from long ago. He liked to get funny about it, embellishing facts or adding supernatural elements to his stories- like the one Christmas he went around bragging that he ‘definitely wrestled a kelpie that tried to drown him.’
People like to whisper that something is wrong with her father, and that Aoife caught it as well. They’re both introverted, awkward, and stilted people. Recently, during Easter, Aoife got to learn more about her mother. As the rest of the family was wrangling the younger children, Aoife sat with her father whose face was bright red. She always assumed she took after her father the most, because of their awful similarities.
Aoife ran late to the family gathering because she was swimming at sea, like always. He should have scolded her, but Father laughed, laughed too much and said, “It’s funny, you have no memory of her, but you’re so similar to Fiadh. When we first met, it was when I was sitting on the cliffs by the ocean. She loved to swim, too.”
Aoife’s stomach twisted at that. “Mom and I… how else are we alike?”
She took after her father in appearance as well, they both have straight, dark hair and dark eyes.
“You both… freckles,” he slurred.
Aoife spent so much time in the sun that freckles covered her entire face, shoulders, and limbs. She had no idea she got them from her mother, she’s got some uncles and grandmothers with freckles, even if not as plentiful as the ones she had. The story Father told about Aoife’s mother had temporarily ruined the ocean for her. She had no idea her mother liked to swim, too. How could she have known? No one ever says her name aloud, nonetheless talk about her openly.
Aoife Dunne’s own face is a betrayal, a map of freckles matching a woman she’s never met.
The stories about Fiadh are varied, none to be trusted because the gossips in this town are brutal. But while most call Fiadh a seductress, some imply it was Aoife’s father who was the unsavory one; they say Fiadh was uninterested in his romantic pursuits, until one day he locked her up in his cabin.
The truth is best to be left in the past. Aoife is here now whether her mother wanted to have her or not, and Fiadh is somewhere else beyond the horizon. Aoife doesn’t blame her mother if she had to leave this maddening town and a horrible man who wouldn’t let go of her- but why leave her daughter? Why did she leave Aoife here to suffer the same fate?
Ever since that revelation, she’s hated looking in the mirror. She’s all sharp edges like her father, inheriting no feminine softness or charm, but maybe her birthmother was a harsh woman as well?
Fiadh was a woman who was cruel enough to leave her child behind. Who could be that heartless? Now she’s cursed Aoife to live this horrible life, being mocked and stared at like a zoo animal in a family that doesn’t want her.
Róisín is a nice enough woman. She treats Aoife with respect, which is far more courtesy than others show her. Maybe if Aoife were a son, she would’ve posed more of a threat to succession. But as it is, Róisín Dunne is a lovely woman who ended up in a marriage she didn’t decide upon to a neurotic man who already had a kid.
Aoife will one day have to marry someone, whether she wants to or not. They’re in the same boat at the end of the day. Maybe it makes Róisín pity her, softening any hatred she could have.
Maybe it’s why Róisín is so quick to complain about her faults and try to mold her into a proper woman. As it is right now, if Aoife got married next year she’d have no idea how to be a good wife. She doesn’t care about being a good wife- but she is her father’s daughter. She must be.
Aoife Dunne returns home.
As expected, Róisín notices how she’s muddied up her new shoes.
Rónán and her chat, he agrees to cover for Niamh, but only if Aoife gives him her portion of dessert. She agrees easily.
The day passes just like the previous one, and the one before that, mind-numbing and suffocating.
When Aoife sleeps, she dreams of the sea. Not the sea she knows, but many thousands of miles beyond the shore, of dark, turbulent waves. She wakes up feeling a restlessness under her skin. She stares out her window at the full moon, and quickly grabs a cloak before running out the back door towards the ocean. Barefoot, she climbs up the rocky cliffs until she stands high above the water, watching the moon’s glow reflect in the obsidian waters.
Something feels… off. Her body feels hot and itchy, and it is as if her very soul is writhing inside of her.
“Oh. I wasn’t sure you’d come,” a soft voice startles her.
Aoife whips around and comes face to face with a stranger. She thinks she should be more alarmed, but something about the woman’s gray… shawl? Cloak? It’s familiar to her. Somehow.
“I’ve never seen you before,” Aoife says.
The woman stands a few meters away from her. Aoife doesn’t know how she crept up without making a noise, but she continues to move like a shadow. Even if Aoife sees her, there’s a dreamlike quality to her.
“Has your father told you about me?” As the stranger enters the moonlight, her face becomes visible. This woman has long, curly red hair, and a face covered in freckles.
“Mom? Are you crazy- why are you here?”
Aoife has dreamt of meeting her mother many times, in many different ways. With screaming, with joyous laughter, but this is much stranger than all of that. It’s a quiet night with no one around, and Aoife isn’t sure how to feel. Maybe she’s dreaming.
“I assume not,” Fiadh sighs, her expression never changing from aloof and apathetic. “Perhaps Éamonn has convinced himself it was a fantasy. But it’s all very, very real, my daughter. You can feel it now, can’t you? Your skin isn’t your own.”
Aoife scratches at her arm. Maybe Fiadh is crazy, maybe she’s mad.
The woman tugs her thick shawl tighter around herself, showing off the gray and speckled fur, “How foolish he is to ignore it, as if you’re not half my kin. You hear the water, don’t you?”
Aoife has always felt a connection to the ocean.
“My name is Aoife. Aoife Dunne. Do you even know that?” She asks instead, feeling incensed. Does Fiadh even remember her daughter’s name?
Fiadh doesn’t react to that, “I know what troubles you. You’re changing and you don’t even know it.”
During dinner, Aoife was ravenous. But she didn’t eat her salad, nor her potatoes, nor did she mourn the dessert she traded off to Rónán. All she wanted was to eat serving after serving of fish. She’s lost her appetite for anything but meat in recent months.
She doesn’t think Fiadh is talking about normal puberty. “What did you do to me?” she asks.
Fiadh takes Aoife’s hand, pressing it to the fur wrapped around her, and there’s something electric that flows through the connection. There are no words, but it brings her to tears. It’s like coming home, it’s like sitting in the ocean’s waters, it’s just right.
“I did nothing. You’re a selkie, just like me.”
The dreamlike tinge of the evening cracks. Of all the things she expected, Aoife is caught off guard.
And she laughs.
Oh, so Fiadh is crazy. Great.
“Selkies, alright. Makes sense, Father talks a lot about the, uh, group of fae folk he met when traveling to London.”
Fiadh takes her hand off Aoife’s, and calmly pulls her shawl over her head. Before her eyes, Aoife witnesses the woman’s form change from human… into a seal. Just as quickly, Fiadh pulls back her sealskin, looking at Aoife with pointed eyes.
“I need a moment,” Aoife says before stepping back. Her knees give out and she falls heavily onto the grass beneath her.
Maybe she’s the crazy one?
Fiadh gives her a few minutes, but starts talking again before Aoife feels ready to acknowledge reality.
“I’m sure you have plenty of questions for me. We don’t have much time right now, unfortunately. But I left you long ago because selkie children aren’t able to shift between seal and human form. I couldn’t bring you with me, but you’re old enough now to develop your second skin and delve into the waves. You don’t belong here, you have to leave. Otherwise the humans will grab your sealskin the first moment they can and chain you here forever.”
“What?” Aoife’s voice comes out weaker than she wishes it to. “What do you mean, leave?”
“You know your feet don’t belong on solid ground. You want to abandon this place, don’t you?”
Aoife’s head spins. She feels nauseous.
Fiadh turns to leave, “You can take some time to decide, but the clock is ticking. Do you value your freedom or would you enslave yourself to others’ whims?”
That was always going to be Aoife’s fate, literally or metaphorically. She’s doomed for a marriage she doesn’t want and a best friend who doesn’t love her back the same way. But she never had another way out before.
Aoife watches Fiadh walking away from her. “You’re going, just like that? You don’t have anything else to ask me? Don’t you want to get to know me?”
Fiadh doesn’t look back. “... I told you what you needed to know. I won’t wait for you here, not in this place where that disgusting man resides.”
She knows the myths. If a fisherman takes a selkie’s sealskin, he can trap her on land. Fiadh and Éamonn disappeared from society for two years before Fiadh ran away. There had never been any love between them. Aoife is the living proof of her father’s crimes against her mother.
Fiadh says one last thing, “If it’s comforting to know, selkie communities are tight-knit. If you choose to follow after me, you’ll find your people who’ll love you. We could get to know each other then. If you embrace your nature, you’ll know where to find us.”
Then Aoife’s birth mother walks down the cliff, walking up to the water’s edge. The woman pulls her skin taught to herself once more, changing into a seal and diving into the ocean. And then Fiadh is a gray dot disappearing into the water.
Aoife returns to her bedroom, but she doesn’t sleep the rest of the night. Before daybreak, she rushes back to the beach and waits. She doesn’t dare touch the water. Now that she knows the truth, she fears she’ll swim deeper and deeper, going as far as she can without turning back. There are urges without her that Aoife isn’t sure she can control.
And she wants to talk to Niamh before she decides on anything.
So she waits on the rocks, watching the waves crashing with a deep longing.
“What an odd sight to see you dry and on land,” Niamh’s voice calls out from behind her.
Aoife looks at her friend. Lovely, kind Niamh Kelly, who loves the ocean like her. She used to imagine they’d always be together, even once they got married. They’d stay in this stupid town and look after each other’s babies. It wasn’t such a bad future. Could it be? Even with a sealskin, who believes those myths anymore? Aoife could bury it out in the backyard and never have to think about it again.
In her gut, however, she knows it isn’t that simple.
“Niamh, I have something I need to tell you.”
“Me too, actually.”
Aoife shakes her head, “Oh, you go first then. Mine isn’t that important.”
She still doesn’t know how much she should reveal. Does she explain everything about selkies and her inbound change, or does she speak in vaguer truths?
Niamh settles down next to her, growing somber. The words seem to weigh heavily on her, and the silence rings on for many moments.
Finally, Niamh sighs and says, “My father told me he’s arranged a marriage between me and Mister Collins.”
Aoife’s gut sinks. “But you’re still so young?”
“Mister Collins doesn’t mind. Father doesn’t either.”
The problem is that Matthew Collins isn’t from their town. He lives many miles inland; he’s wealthier than the Dunne family, so it’s good prospects for the Kellys. It also means Aoife would never see her again.
She desperately takes her friend’s hands in hers, “Niamh, we could run away.”
Niamh’s eyes go wide, “What?”
“Our future husbands, they’ll suffocate us, drown us while we breathe air, sink us on dry land. You can’t possibly want to marry that old man.”
Her friend shakes her head, pulling her hands away, “My- my mom and dad want me to. I don’t have access to any of my inheritance, it’ll go to Mister Collins once we’re married. You too, we’d be penniless and destitute if we just ran away right now.”
“The fear of what could be will only hold us back from true happiness.”
Aoife wouldn’t mind living on land if it were with Niamh. She knows Niamh would let her swim for hours at a time, wasting the day away. Maybe Niamh would even tend to her sealskin and they could sleep under it together at night. Maybe all the old selkie stories tell one tale, and they could live another.
Her dreams are crushed right after she envisions them.
Niamh says, “I want to settle down. I think starting a family sounds nice. I don’t care if they’re sons or daughters, but I like the idea of raising a big family. I don’t want to go anywhere else, what are you talking about? A madness has infected you.”
That hurts. The world can scorn her, but Niamh can’t call her mad.
Aoife is strange, she has always been strange. She’s always known the strangest thing about her, the one thing no one would ever forgive… is that she doesn’t want to be a housewife, she doesn’t even want to touch a man. She’d rather run her fingertips over Niamh’s pale skin, loving her like a husband would.
She’s always imagined the perfect future being by Niamh’s side until they grew old. She even thought that maybe… Niamh was like her.
Aoife stands up abruptly, running away from the beach. She ignores Niamh’s cries for her to come back, and beyond that there is the loud pull of the ocean. She’s cursed, is that so? Are selkies doomed to never have the ones they love, only to be wanted by those they despise? This town will become a destitute place without Niamh there, and the ocean will be cold without any familiar faces.
Aoife tosses and turns in bed that night, ignoring the tugging that itches under her skin. She can hear a storm raging outside.
She wants to stay. She should stay. Who will make fun of Rónán when he trips during fencing lessons? Who will Róisín use as a model when she’s repairing old dresses? Who will Father tell his crazy stories of beasts of the old world to? Who will see Niamh Kelly off as she’s wedded to a stranger?
… But do any of them need Aoife? She’s the eldest daughter of a family she doesn’t fit into, in a town that doesn’t see any worth in her.
Niamh is getting married. She’s going to marry a man. It’s a fate not so different from a selkie’s stolen skin. Their fathers are the holders of their fate, to hand off at their own wills.
Would running away make her feel any better? Who's to say the seal folk are any better than the human folk? Róisín is warmer to Aoife than Fiadh appeared to be, and it’d be charitable to call Róisín and Aoife’s relationship “Mother and daughter;” they’re more akin to roommates who’ve learned to cohabitate.
Sometimes Aoife hates her whole family more than anything. Other times, she’s grateful to have them by her side.
Sleep won’t visit her tonight. She runs through the forest as the cold rain stabs into her. She runs through the trees as they get caught in her nightgown and cut her skin. She makes it through the tree line and climbs up the cliff again, staring out over the raging waters.
Should she stay, or should she go?
If she left right now, she doubts anyone would care for long. A burden of a daughter, a sister by only half her blood, and a friend for only as long as their fathers allow it. Aoife doesn’t know how she ever accepted the idea of marriage. It felt so far away but now she knows if she joins the other selkies, she doesn't have to live by the customs of man.
Can she abandon Niamh?
Her heart rattles against her ribcage. The thunder above mirrors her own stormy emotions.
She wants to leave. She wants to so badly. Her family and her best friend will forget about her, just as everyone chose to forget about Fiadh. She loves them but it’ll be easy enough to let them all go.
Right? Right?
If Father knew that she was a selkie like her birth mother, would he steal her skin and give it to some old, rich man? If she explained everything to Niamh, would she change her mind and run away with her?
If she exposed her true heart, would it be possible for Niamh Kelly to reciprocate?
To stay, or to go, stay, or go?
Aoife Dunne stares at the long fall beneath her.
…
The sun rises over an empty cliff face.