The Skin I’m In

Chapter 1: The Land Birth of a Selkie Girl

The Midwife marched through the fog. Her boots splashed in deep puddles of a street so rutted and holed from misuse it might have been the pock marked face of a bedridden sailor. Her expansive stomach complained of hunger.

“Bad luck. A baby born on a new moon.” She crossed herself and counted one, two, three doors down in a long row of tenement houses. It had been a shiny door once, but sea air and time had worn away its luster. “…and in the poorest district.” She knocked. “I hope the mother’s a healthy one.” She kicked the mud off her boots against the dark stone of the house while she waited, but heard no answer. She’d raised her fist to pound on the door again when a woman’s shrill cry came from inside. The midwife let herself in. Her work had begun.

The midwife found a small, tidy room where a good effort had been made for comfort. The bed in the corner was spread neatly with clean sheets. The fire burned large and welcoming inside a scrubbed hearth. A kettle of stew bubbled deliciously in front of the flames. Ah, good, decided the midwife, I’ll be paid with a decent dinner at least. In the center of this homely picture, a sailor who looked hardly more than a boy struggled with his pregnant wife. The girl ran for the door, but he caught her and held her tight.

“What are you doing to that poor girl?” The midwife swung at him with a satchel filled with the sharp tools of her trade. “Leave her be.”

“She won’t stay put.” He had the haggard face of someone who’d been crying. “She wants to have the baby in the waves.”

“The poor dear.” She’d been a midwife a long time. She knew women in labor often came up with strange fancies. Especially the young ones. Best to indulge them if possible for a safe birth, but to let her out in the storming waves? Unthinkable. She held the girl’s face in her hands and wiped the tangle of dark curls from her eyes. “We can’t take you to the sea, but what if we brought a bit of the sea to you?”

The girl’s body relaxed a little. From the doorway, she’d looked child-like in her tattered white nightgown, but up close, she was exquisitely beautiful with a thick mane of dark hair. Her skin was caramel and smooth, not one blemish from disease or hard work.

And strong too. This one could survive a hard labor. Thank God for that. The midwife crossed herself.

“Time to make yourself more useful.” The midwife gave the husband a gentle tap with her foot so she wouldn’t have to let go of the pregnant girl’s face. “Take a bucket by the cliffs and catch a bit of sea water in it.”

“She’ll flee if I let her go.” The boy held his wife tighter.

The midwife blew a strand of wiry gray hair from her face. “She’ll die if she tries to fight you and birth at the same time.” She forced the girl to look up. Her round, dark eyes carried a complexity and confidence unlike the midwife’s usual clientele. “If your husband lets you go and brings you a bit of the sea, do you promise not to run?”

The girl closed her eyes and leaned back against her husband. She nodded. He kissed her on the cheek and led her gently to the fire.

“I know what you want.” He wrapped a quilt around her shoulders. “I’m not ready to give it back to you. I can’t lose you. I can’t lose our daughter.” He put a hand on his wife’s belly.

The midwife found that strange. Most men expect a boy.

The girl looked up at her husband with her wide, brown eyes and the midwife saw the tears she held inside of them. “No. You don’t know what I want.” The girl took in the warm, simple room. “I want to be right here, but it frightens me. I have nothing familiar around me.” The girl nestled inside the faded comforter. “You do know you will lose me one day, but remember I love you as much and more as I love the sea.” Her accent was foreign and lyrical. The husband was clearly an Irishman, but the wife? He’d picked her up from some exotic place. That often happened in the sailor district. Still, the midwife had never seen a girl quite like this one.

The husband turned away. He pulled a thick wool sweater over his head and grabbed a bucket from a hook by the sink. “I believe you have one familiar thing. You have me.” He disappeared into the cold, damp night.

The midwife opened her satchel and placed her tools on the hearth to warm by the fire. At the bottom of her bag, she removed a knife and brought it over to the bed.

“My goodness,” said the girl. “What are you going to do with that?”

“Haven’t you seen any of your kin give birth before?” The midwife rubbed at her cold nose while she assessed her patient. A strange girl, she decided. Even for a foreigner.

“Of course I have, but not like this.” The girl extracted one of her hands out of the comforter and pointed at the knife.

“They have their own methods where you’re from, no doubt.”

“Yes. This all seems so…” She flared her nostrils in a way the midwife found offensive. “…barbaric.”

“I’ll have you know I’m the most modern you’ll find for miles and miles.” The midwife bent down and put the knife under the bed. She stood up and patted the girl’s shoulder.

“There. That’ll cut the pain for you.” Poor child’s so young, she doesn’t know a thing.

“How old are you, girl?” The midwife asked.

“I’ve just turned seventeen. My husband too. We’ve got the same birthday.”

“Well.” The midwife rubbed her nose. “I’ve attended to younger than you.” But none so alone in the world as these two.

The girl walked over to the window. “It’s dark. I don’t think there’s any moon tonight.” She caught her breath at the end of her sentence. The comforter dropped to the floor as she put her hands on her lower back.

The midwife noticed she didn’t cry out. A brave girl, or one used to physical hardship.

She guided the girl gently by the arm to the bed. “Nay, no hint of a moon tonight.” With long practiced hands, the midwife dug her knuckles into the girl’s back. “This might help ease your discomfort.”

“I wish my daughter had waited for even a sliver of a moon. It doesn’t bode well.” The girl sat down on the edge of the bed. The midwife saw her grimace, but the girl made no other sign of her labor.

“We can agree on that, but babies come when they come and you make the best of it.” The midwife plumped the pillows. “But you can’t be so sure you’ll get a daughter. Consult tea leaves or hang a ring over your belly all you want. You can’t know until a baby’s out.”

“I’m having a daughter.” The girl dropped her head back onto the pillows. “I know it.”

The midwife’s stomach growled. She shrugged. “You have half a chance of being right.”

The father returned soaking wet but with a pail full of seawater, and the birth progressed quickly after that.

“You have a beautiful daughter here,” the midwife said as she washed the baby. No use now, telling them it might have fallen the other way. New parents never listen. “Looks like the mother and just as pretty.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” said the mother.

The midwife made the sign of the cross over herself three times. “You’ve had a safe birth and a healthy baby. No right to complain about your blessings.” She kissed her fingers and held them up toward the ceiling. “This girl is young, God…and a foreigner. Don’t pay any mind to what she says.”

The mother and father exchanged a guarded look. The midwife pretended not to notice.

“There will be the afterbirth to attend next,” the midwife said. “It isn’t pretty to see.” She spoke under her breath to the father. “You might want to go register the child at the parish while it comes.”

“No. I want to stay with my family.”

“Hmpf. Young people these days.” The midwife wrapped the clean baby up tight and handed her to the mother in bed. “Best feed her now,” she said. “It’ll speed things along.” She tidied up while she waited for the afterbirth. Nothing came for a long time.

“Maybe she’s only a normal baby after all,” said the mother.

“Of course she’s normal. All fingers and toes accounted for and a lusty cry as well.” The midwife gave the mother a reassuring pat on the cheek and glanced at the ceiling as if she could hear the judgment of God himself. The mother lurched forward. The baby cried in her arms. The midwife lifted the quilt to clean the mess.

She found no mess. On the bed lay a silver skin soft and sleek and bright as moonlight. In her years of work, the midwife had seen some strange events, but nothing like that thing she gathered clean and dry from the bedding. Better to be done with the job and get out of that house as soon as she could.

“This is unnatural,” said the midwife. “It should be destroyed. No one will know. I’ll keep your secret. I’m good at keeping secrets.” With her face set in a sour, puckered expression, she carried the skin to the fire and threw it on the flames. The skin set off a thick, gray smoke that smelled of the sea. The hunger in the midwife’s stomach turned to nausea.

“It can’t be destroyed. Remove it from the fire,” said the mother. “Put it in the bucket and take it down the road to the ocean.”

“No,” said the father. “We don’t need to make a rash decision.”

“I already know my decision.” The young mother got out of bed. She handed the baby to her husband, who pressed his lips on the round, soft top of his new daughter’s head.

So much love in this room, thought the midwife. And the wee thing so pretty. Too bad the babe would grow up full of strange magic. No way to go through life.

The mother picked up the fire tongs. She removed the skin from the flames and drop it in the bucket of sea water. A sound came from the bucket that seemed eerily like the sigh of a tired child tucked into a comfortable bed. “Now I’ve made it through without any help from the ocean, I don’t ever want her to touch or see or know this part of herself. She’ll have a better life. She won’t have to make the same choices I’ve made.” She lifted the pail and handed it to the midwife. “Take it and do as I’ve told you.”

The midwife crossed her arms. “I won’t touch that thing. I won’t go near it. I know what you are. My grandmother taught me all the old stories. You’re a selkie girl, born a seal, but with the magic to make yourself a woman. You can seduce your husband all you like, but it won’t work on me. That’s your daughter’s seal skin there. It will make her a magic thing like you. It’s evil.”

“No,” said the father. “It isn’t evil, it’s only different. Why do we humans always get the two mixed up?”

“I’m not evil, and I haven’t seduced anyone,” said the mother. “My daughter isn’t evil. I can’t change what I am, but she can have a better life, a normal life. If you help us.”

The midwife puffed up her abundant chest and stoically stood her ground.

“If you won’t do this for me, there will be bad luck for all your family.” The mother tossed back her thick mane of dark curls and the midwife winced. “I know far more than you or your grandmother about the unseen world beyond the waves. My sea family could take the fish from the nets of your menfolk. They can empty cages. You don’t want to be responsible.”

“Come now.” The father reached out for his wife. “You wouldn’t.”

She pulled away from him. “I’ll do anything to give our daughter a good life. I intend to make the choice for my daughter I wish I’d been given. She’ll be human. That’s all there is to it.” She dropped the pail at the midwife’s feet. “If you think this skin makes our daughter evil, then take it from her, and she’ll never be able to use it.”

The baby slept in her father’s arms, a sweet picture of health and peace. Hard to think of her as anything other than an innocent, but…

“Let me have the child too then,” the midwife said. “I know all the stories, and I know the child of a selkie is bound to send her mother back to the sea in the end. You can’t leave her an orphan.”

“No.” The mother cupped her hand around her baby’s head. “I will raise my own daughter for as long as I can. She’ll have her father.”

Her husband put his arm around her. “Our family stays together.”

“God help the lot of you.” The midwife lifted the pail. It felt uncannily heavy. She wished she’d never come to that forsaken home. She made the sign of the cross again. Behind her back, she made the old sign against evil, the one her grandmother taught her. Who knew which served her best in such company? In spite of the dark and the cold rain, she ran down the road to the ocean, shuddering every time she heard that strange, silver skin slosh in the pail.

The rain came to a sudden halt. A woman appeared on the road ahead of the midwife.

Although dressed plainly, the midwife knew by the shift in the weather and the silent appearance that she’d come upon one of the doyenne, a wise woman.

“That’s an unfair burden you’ve been given to carry.” The woman started across the street. “Let me take it off your hands.”

“My burdens are my own business, thank you very much,” said the midwife.

“Oh, but I’m in the business of burdens such as yours.”

“I don’t need your help.” Although even as she said it, the midwife wanted nothing more than to be rid of the skin once and for all. And wouldn’t a woman such as this one be able to handle the task much better than she?

“Of course not. We could help each other.” The woman produced a leather purse and held it out to the midwife. “Open it. You can have all in exchange for the skin you carry.”

Curiosity got the best of the midwife. She put down the pail and peeked inside the purse. It was filled to the top with silver.

“I can’t accept this. I’ve already given my word,” said the midwife, but the woman was gone, as was the pail with the silver skin.

At first, the midwife was angry, but when she got safely home, she decided her bad luck had been swapped for good. After all, she’d been on the road to the ocean. Isn’t that all she’d been told to do? She’d done her part, the skin was off her hands now, and with coin in the bargain!

The midwife tossed the heavy purse on her nightstand and fell into her bed with exhaustion. When I wake up, she decided, the first thing I’ll buy is food. She kicked off her boots and drifted into a dreamless sleep. When she woke, she began to have doubts if she really deserved the good fortune. After all, the skin wasn’t hers to sell. Was that stealing? The midwife couldn’t decide. Her conscience tugged until she counted out what she’d need to keep herself fed. The rest she carried through the gray hour of morning to the house of the new mother and father. With a final sign against evil, she knocked and ran away, leaving the purse tucked in the corner of their sea-worn door.

When the weather cleared, the midwife went down to the wharf to shop at the market. She caught sight of the young parents and followed them through the crowd until they boarded a ship. The mother carried the baby in a pretty white blanket. She had on a new dress, and her thick hair hung neatly braided down her back. She put her hand out over the water and when she brought it back into the ship, the midwife could swear the girl held something bright and silver that hadn’t been there before.

As the ship sailed away, the midwife decided to pray for the baby girl, but in all the commotion she hadn’t learned the child’s name. She went down to the church and found the priest.

“What name can I pray for the new child come into this world?” Her voice echoed down the empty aisle.

“I don’t remember off the top of my head, but I could show you the parish register.” The priest led her into the vestry. He opened a heavy, dust covered book and turned the pages until he came to the last name listed. “Ah, there she is.”

The midwife leaned over the book. “I can’t read, Father.”

The priest unfolded a pair of spectacles from inside his habit and read the name to her in the deep, resonant voice he used for Sunday sermons...

“Come on, Mrs. O’Malley.” I grabbed her cool, wrinkled hand and squeezed. “Tell me her name. Give her any name you like.”

“That’s the point of the story.” Mrs. O’Malley patted the salt and pepper braids she kept neatly pinned around her head. “The child has to discover who she is.”

I groaned and fell back onto my pillows. “I don’t want a point. I want a name.”

Mrs. O’Malley sat on the edge of my bed. Behind her, the white curtains billowed around the open window on an ocean breeze. My blue wallpaper with the little white flowers looked faded in the bright morning light. The desk beneath the window was cluttered with books and papers.

Mrs. O’Malley pulled her hand free of mine. “You’re almost seventeen, Nuala. Aren’t you finally getting too old for this story?”

“Never.” I sat up and kissed her on her wrinkled cheek. It felt thin and delicate as tissue paper. “Lavender,” I closed my eyes. “And lemon balm.”

“Well done.” She patted my leg.

I stretched my arms over my head. “Aren’t you getting a little old?” I yawned. “To be waking up before dawn to grind a bunch of plants?”

“I most certainly am, but it gives me purpose.” She smiled. In spite of her age, her teeth were still straight and white.

“And here I believed Da and I were your purpose.”

“Absolutely.” She walked around my room, collecting dirty laundry from the floor. “Which reminds me you’ve got school work to catch up on.”

When I was seven, the state school board came out to the island and told Da I must either move to the mainland, or someone should be found to give me proper schooling. The U.S. Lighthouse Authority told Da he needed to hire someone as an assistant now that my mother wasn’t there to help. Da brought Mrs. O’Malley to the island to fill both those needs. That’s what came of my mother’s leaving.

I kicked off my covers and swung my legs over the side of the bed. “I wonder what my purpose is.”

Mrs. O’Malley blew an exasperated puff of air. “School work and chores sound like a good purpose to me.”

“I’ve finished my geography and my report on whales. They’re on the kitchen table.” I said. No doubt they’d been smudged with dust from Mrs. O’Malley’s herbs.

“Good.” She dropped my dirty clothes into a laundry basket and hoisted it onto her hip.

“Now you can write an essay on personal choice. You can reference a few folk tales that explore the issue, since you seem to like them so much.”

“Fine.” I yanked a pair of wrinkled overalls out from under my bed and put them on over the old work shirt I’d slept in. “But first I’m going to go help Da.”

Mrs. O’Malley clicked her tongue. “You’ve got more appropriate clothes than that.”

“Pfft. For cleaning a lighthouse?” I bent down to roll up my pants. “I’ll change later.”

“You mean you’ll put on something more presentable when Sam and Nathanial are here.”

“I’ll put on a dress before they arrive, but I don’t care what they think about my looks.”

Even so, I kept my face hidden behind my hair, just in case I’d turned red. “And who do you think gave me the overalls in the first place? Sam says there isn’t any reason a girl can’t wear pants the same as a boy.”

“Then he should support the opposite too. If Samuel Murphy plans to show up here in a dress, just warn me first,” she said as she walked out my door. “And wear your shoes.”

“But it’s a beautiful day!”

“Shoes.”

“It’s not like we have anyone to impress.” I pulled on old black rain boots. “Nothing ever happens here.” I reached into the dark recesses under the bed until my hand touched the cool metal of my mother’s silver comb. I tucked it in my hair above the tangle of yesterday’s braid.

“Don’t forget to feed the goats,” Mrs. O’Malley said when I ran by her.

I waved, let the front door slam shut behind me and kicked off my boots to run barefoot across the yard. I didn’t need shoes. My feet were as used to the rocky, uneven ground as the goats themselves.

Dotting the island, tenacious bits of grass grew in sporadic yellow clusters between the cracks in the rock. Downy moss glowed mint green in the sunlight. Not much else grew unattended on the island, but long ago, Nathanial Murphy had brought my mother six boatloads of soil so she could have a flower garden in front of the house. The garden wilted when she wasn’t there to tend it. When Mrs. O’Malley came, she planted the soil with herbs. Some of my mother’s flowers still grew wild along the wooden stairs that lead down to a small, white sand beach. Their colors danced on the wind, orange tiger lilies, white daisies, purple tulips. Mrs. O’Malley cut them and arranged them prettily in a mason jar on the table once, but Da said not to do it again. They were better untamed and wild.

The lighthouse hovered at the edge of a rocky cliff above the ocean. It could be reached by a flagstone path that wound through the rocks, but it was much more fun to run across the white sand of the little beach below the house and climb the jagged cliff. It also meant I was less likely to be seen by Da which aided in the delay of my chores. Right hand, left foot. Right foot, left hand. The familiar pattern of my climb. The ocean sang below me, slow and steady, crashing with each exhale against the rocks below. The sea spray hit my ankles and the salt water burned my skin as it always had, like too much sun. It wouldn’t last, and I’d come to some acceptance of it the way I almost accepted my mother’s empty place at the kitchen table, or the world beyond the horizon that always seemed just a bit too far out of my reach.

I stepped up over the edge of the cliff into the shadow of the lighthouse and leaned against the cool, white brick of the tower.

Maybe Mrs. O’Malley was right. Maybe I was too old for the story of the selkie girl. I still couldn’t help but wish the name in the story was mine. If it were, that would mean there was still a part of me waiting to be discovered. A reason to start my own journey.

A wave crested against the rocks. The sun was hot, but the breeze was crisp. It smelled of the ocean and the fresh promises of spring. The water frightened me, and it burned when it touched me, but all my dreams lived beneath the surface. I didn’t understand how I could fear it and desire it at the same time, but I did.

I opened my arms and called across the waves.

“Fionnuala Quinn.”