The Selkie

A story

The Mikladular Selkie, Faroe Islands

Looking out across the still waters, I thought, What more could I have done for her?

Not just now. Rather…ever.

I was standing on one of the beaches that border the footpath from the Marina Green to the Golden Gate bridge. The bay glistened. The sun was lowering so that the waters had taken on a dark blue insistence that seemed, for me, disturbing in itself. Yet failing light did reflect from the passing tide and the breeze-swept surfaces of its coming retreat. I’m a native San Franciscan, a book guy in publishing, a disgruntled-with-myself novelist, and now a widower of sorts. My long relationship with Beth had had the usual issues back and forth, but it was a marriage of hearts (if not an actual marriage) enlivened by years of desirous, considerate, and sometimes difficult love for each other, and significant adventure.

But Beth was gone now, and when I saw the selkie, I knew…finally, inevitably…that she indeed had left me, although the choice had not been hers. Nor mine.

Her ashes formed a cloud just beneath the surface of the bay. The tide was so paused at this time in the afternoon, just as it was turning, that the motionless ash seemed only dreamed of…hesitation itself. It just did not want to go. The tide would begin moving soon, though, carrying the immense waters and Beth’s remains out to sea, beneath the fog-beset bridge.

The buildings far to my right, the high-rises of San Francisco, seemed like slim prisons in the failing afternoon light. I wished to turn from them, worried that, if not, I would be remanded to my cell of mourning, there to stay, never to see a hint of Beth’s kindness again.  

Beth’s daughter Eva and her husband, her son Kevin and his wife, and five grandchildren were standing on the sand with me. The kids were in college…New York, San Francisco, Berkeley, Boulder, and Poughkeepsie…helped there financially by Beth herself, and had gathered in San Francisco to attend this ceremony. It was one that Beth had spelled out for me, asking me to write down the details a few years before she was to die. At the time, Beth had had no such plans. Death was for her and me a far-off inanity. A certainty, yes, somewhere down the line, but for sure not just now.

“Just now” happened a few weeks ago when, holding her left hand with my right, I felt falling away what little strength there remained in her fingers. She had whispered to Eva the night before to “please…let me go.” The computer and machinery of the intensive care unit everywhere injected who-knew-what into her failing body. Computer beeping, heartbeat, blood pressure, liquids going in, liquids coming out, the far-off end nearer and nearer, life slowly leaving.

Eva and Kevin confided in me about what to do. I had no real authority in the decision since Beth and I had been just lovers, although for many years. But they confided in me anyway before they made the decision to free their mother from all this. I agreed that they should let her go. It was what Beth wanted. So, they authorized the doctors to unhook her from the machinery.

She doesn’t deserve this, I had told myself many times during the previous month. The failed operation was one thing. An outrage, though not punishable, we already knew. But in that month afterwards there had been one day with the possibility for conversation with Beth. From her, it was simple monosyllables, so unlike the bright intensities of her intelligence that had colored her talk for as long as I had known her. Everyone believed those few words had been the beginning of her recovery. Everyone. A fine conversationalist, a writer finally coming into her own, a very known quantity when it came to talk about what she was reading, about what she wished for in her family, about the humor to be found in varied conversation and colorful anecdotes…all that would come back. Except that the next day, she fell away once more, there to stay for the following ten days before all strength left the fingers that I, in that moment, held with such delicacy.

A selkie rose up from the bay waters, to look. A sea lion, one of those so common along the Pacific coast. But the ten of us standing on that beach immediately knew that really, from the excesses of the sea itself, from the black deep, this was a selkie-woman come to escort Beth. As so she did, or seemed to, when the tide did turn and Beth herself escaped the shore toward the bridge and whatever awaited her out there in the enormous Pacific.

—

I treat the books I publish, each one, as an emotional triumph achievable by only two people. The writer, of course. But the publisher, too, who has to understand in his heart what the writer is attempting to do and can provide the vehicles for bringing that person’s work to light. “In his heart” is the phrase, and as such makes fiction my preferred art.

The problem is that, as almost any publisher will tell you, fiction doesn’t sell.  At least, usually. But also, I’ve been watching the lowering of editorial standards in the publishing of fiction, a general receding tide of taste in the last many years. Reading a fine novel from a major publisher these days comes as a surprise to me. Fiction now swarms with phony adventure, frightful monsters, uninteresting crime, overwrought fantasy, pointless brutality, and dud writing, all announced with loud reviews and zippy advertising. Edith Wharton? The House of Mirth? As she would no doubt say, being a New Yorker, “Forget about it!”

Such reminiscences of authors like Wharton and what they have done for the human heart cause me now and then to rage at what is happening these days. My own experience in the industry has revealed to me the industry’s indifference. I love a good novel and have found and published several at my own Ronan Flood Books. They are, though, as I sometimes observe with wandering sadness, a drop in the bucket. Besides, great economic success for the writers of the books I publish is far in the distance…only perhaps possible. My novelists themselves all pursue other professions and write when they can…as do I.

But now, as I wander from room to room in my North Beach apartment, missing Beth, I’m working on her novel, saddened that it is I who have to finish it rather than Beth herself. A lovely evocation of Paris and the north of France, written for girls somewhere in their teens, it has a combination of romantic adventure (there is a heart-throb sixteen year-old movie actor in it), a vicious and comically described corporate-America villain, and a heroine, herself fifteen. Her life-threatening adventures in the novel provide the emotional growth, from that of a frustrated, teenage self-doubter into a young woman who saves the world. The girl also loves the northern sea…all seas…a major element in the story. The sea, especially during a storm, makes unusual things happen above and below, and Beth understands how that is so. So…the novel is terrific. The fifteen-year-old’s heart drives the soul of the book. The danger in it is real for me. The book is also funny, especially in the worrisome thoughts about herself that its heroine has throughout. Beth’s comedy, while rueful, is also thoughtful.

It's her only novel. A career snuffed by what her family and I see as a failed surgery. Nothing to be done about it. The investigative panel ruled that the mistake was “within bounds,” as their report declared. Other than that, Beth would be writing still. Besides wishing her alive, I also wish someone in that process had explained the possibility that even “within bounds” could result in death.  

My solitude serves now to surround me, to render me a kind of wanderer. I miss Beth. My heart wants her and, realizing full well that her absence was imposed upon her and was final, I still seek her hand in every thought I have of her.

Sitting to breakfast each morning, I miss the six-by-nine-inch notebook in which she so frequently wrote. I am alone and silent, sipping my coffee. Reading an article just this morning about the west of Ireland, I recalled our long trek up a rock-strewn Burren trail, beset by thousands of Spring flowers, to the site of Saint Colman mac Duagh’s ruined seventh-century stone hut. There were many such monks, driven to isolation to contemplate the Atlantic sea to the west. Their huts, they believed, held to the very end of the world.

I’m worried I’m becoming a hermit myself. I lose things, something that never happened before Beth left. I fret over my bereavement. I weep now and then. My apartment is slowly growing into a usual mess. I don’t cook nearly as well as I cooked when Beth was with me. I read less now while, in competition with Beth’s reading habits, I would sprint though book after book in the same way she did.

But I’m not all-fretful about what I miss. I’ve sought out particular passages from some of the many, many books we read, and have found a few that seem to make sense to me…well, now and then. John Donne, instructing the nervous phantasm standing before him: “Death, be not proud….” Tennessee Williams: "Death commences too early.” Anne Frank’s “I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death." Cormac Macarthy, who wrote that “the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it." Now, though, in the end, even these passages sound to me like the words of encouragement one can find on Facebook. Except John Donne, who never reminds me of Facebook. But the others are like pedestrian rubrics. Brief asides intended as wisdom…that occasionally are wise despite their brevity. But, always too brief for the enormity of what they are intended to explain.

What I know about death is wound up in what I witnessed in Beth’s leave-taking. She had been so isolated, despite my close presence in the intensive care unit and especially the caring despair of her children Eva and Kevin. But Death had come into the room, pushed us aside, and kidnapped her. Where was the consideration in that? What did Beth mean, really, to Death? Why Beth, whose spirit had been obliterated by the slip of a surgical knife? Why had foolish Death taken her, when Beth had had the talent as a writer to describe what Death really is, what it could mean, and where it can ultimately take us? Death had therefore snuffed her, fearful, I believe, of being found out as a simple, feckless murderer. As if it were afraid of its being revealed by Beth as a muttering coward. A faceless fool wielding its scepter over every single life and taking it without an explanation. Death’s facelessness was for me almost its clearest feature. It was the enforcer of its victims’ inevitable disappearance, victims who would never be seen again, with no explanation.

But I think sometimes that I’m giving Death too much of a place. Death is not a person. It is not a personality. It is simply a fact. Death has no emotions. There is no explanation for it, and it requires none. It is a number, nothing else. It exists simply so that no one else can.

But I do speculate about Death’s indifference to sorrow. Sorrow, so genuine and heart-felt a sentiment, is in part also an expression of each witness’s fears for his or her own passing. But Death could care less. It had come into the intensive care unit and had left with Beth in its arms. Death probably had no idea who she was. Clueless death. Thinking about this now, I remember one other writer’s remark…Wil Shakespeare, leaning over his desk, sorrow-ridden for whatever reason, yet taking up his pen: "Everyone can master a grief but he that has it."

Death showed itself to be a surly coward, taking Beth the way it did, when there was no way, unhooked from the machinery, that she could defend herself.

—

Beth and I had seen a selkie before. Just a year ago, we were standing on the Kilronan pier on Inis Mór in the Aran Islands when a selkie skirted about beneath one of the docked fishing boats, came up for a breath of air, and headed out to sea. There were two fellows on the boat, both in their forties, both in yellow rubber, bloodied fishing gear, dressed for the cold. Each had rough weather etched into the very way he stood on the boat’s deck. They had seen the selkie too, and were pointing her out to each other, laughing and talking about her in the Irish language. Or so it seemed. Neither of us understood anything they were saying, but we both recognized the humorous ups and downs of expression that still so exist in the English that is spoken by the Irish. It was obvious, though. These men seemed to be seeing something they didn’t often see. They hailed Beth and me who, watching from the pier, joined in on the celebration.

“You saw her?” one of the men shouted in English.

“We did,” I said. “Wouldn’t have missed it!”

“Americans, are ya? You’ll never see a selkie over there, so.”

“In San Francisco? We will!”

The men nodded to each other, one shrugging his shoulders. “Ah, that grand bay. Sure we believe ya.” Both laughed, one giving us the thumbs up.

Beth, who had written about selkies, told me the following morning that this was not the first one she had ever actually engaged with. We were seated at a breakfast table in the Pier House Inn, looking down on the Kilronan harbor.

“I dreamt of one once, and it was a vision, Ronan. Some kind of…miracle, maybe.”

Almost every morning, she wrote in a six-by-nine-inch spiral notebook with a fountain pen in green ink. Our breakfasts were therefore often silent, and I had no objection to the quiet. Beth had told me early in our romance that she had been writing every morning of her adult life, and would I please forgive her for it and understand why it was so important to her.

“I’ve got to get those dreams down,” she had explained.

On this morning, the rain was surging inland from the Atlantic. Everything near and far struggled in the strong winds that caused a chaos of regretful tears to crash against the Pier House Inn’s windows. It was possible to see a distinction between sea and storm, even as Galway Bay roiled with the same drear opinion of itself as did the tremendous winds and rain.  

Surely this wasn’t like the weather around Beth’s house on Taylor Street on Russian Hill. The house holds to the middle of a steep incline, half of her large garden (the regimented French half) on the incline below her house, the other half (the far more riotous English) continuing up the hill behind the house. She loved both halves, spending at least an hour a day, six days a week, in one or the other. She also had a regular gardener, a solid, muscle-bound Latina with a sweet speaking voice, named María Violeta, who was even more of a gardening expert than was Beth. I don’t know in any sophisticated way the difference between a pansy and a redwood, so I’ve listened to many of their conversations over the years. I’ve often been confused by the forest of gardeners’ names (Frederick Law Olmstead, Gertrude Jekyll, Capability Brown, et.al.), the complications of the latinate terminology, the mountains of vocabulary, and the occasional humorous arguments the two women would have over which plants to put where. They cared for each other, no matter the conflicts, each realizing that the other really knew what she was talking about. They were pals.

The weather on Russian Hill, though, is no match for that on Inis Mór.

“The selkie came into my dream all of a sudden,” Beth told me. Her notepad lay opened on the inn breakfast table. The storm continued banging against the windows. Beth replaced the cap on the pen, closing it tightly. “I don’t remember what the first part of the dream was. Just…suddenly! the selkie appeared. It was in the middle of a…Ronan, a riotous sea.” She pointed out the window. “Like that one out there. I worried right away that I was drowning. I was overtaken. The sea so black. The sky barely readable, a blank gray chaos everywhere above. And the selkie came swimming to me and saved me. She embraced me actually and took me to shore.”

“That’s where the dream ended?” I said.

“No! She wanted to exchange her skin for mine.”

I knew the story, how it is that an Irish selkie can come ashore and shed her sealskin, transforming herself into a beautiful woman. That she can hide the skin for a time, bury it, in case she wishes to return to sea. But if she falls in love with a man while ashore, she won’t be allowed back into the waters. She’ll be abandoned on land, in a lovely woman’s body forever.

“She wanted the trade-off with me so that she could get her own skin back,” Beth said. “If…if—”

“Love wasn’t good enough with someone like me.”

“Well…” Beth took my hand. “There isn’t a selkie anywhere who wouldn’t want you.”

“Beth—”

“But….” She surveyed my eyes. “It was as if that baffling sea were the very…font of love itself, and that only selkies could realize it for what it is. She didn’t want to lose it.”

I lifted the mug of coffee toward my lips, holding it just before me. “That’s so, about my love being good enough?”

Beth sat back, the seeming astonishment on her face enhancing the large smile she now gave me. She fingered the pen, and then placed it on the open notebook. “Oh, we have our dustups, Ronan. But I know you’re mine.”

“You’d give up your skin?”

“If it meant keeping you…. Sure wouldn’t I?” She lowered her eyes. I enjoyed the Irishism in her American accent. Her fingers fell once more to the pen, which she caressed. She had to write.

—

Just on our second date, we had gone for a walk. Beth asked me to come up for a glass of wine afterwards and, as she sat down next to me at the large round corner table in her living room, she motioned toward me with an index finger, and I leaned close. Her voice, which I had already noted as clarion, not at all shrill…just the sound of her voice offered a moment of humor. “Do you see all these books here?” She gestured about the room.

The living room had two walls of bookshelves, filled with volumes as well as occasional family photos and a few small, sculpted trinkets. From the table, we could also see out two large windows. The lights down the hill, of downtown San Francisco, moved slightly back and forth, a tapestry of shimmers. The table held a half-dozen large hardcover books, distinguishable as art history volumes by the front-cover illustrations on each one: a mournful Velázquez self-portrait, one of Sargent’s blurred, fast-moving Spanish dancers, two of Degas’ own dancers in quiet, elegant rest, in tender light, adjusting their ballet shoes….

I looked the shelves over. “I do see them, yes.”

Beth nodded, gesturing at the books once more. “I’ve read them all.”

I took in a breath.

“You know, I’ve had boyfriends. All of them cute.  All of them smart.  But few have understood why books are so important to me.” Beth sighed. “Or seemed to care. Or, if they were readers too… Yes, a few of them did read, as far as I could tell, but beyond the niceties and their fine looks, none of them seemed to want conversation, other than what kind of sailboat they liked…” She looked to the side. “All those fellows as sweet as they could be.” She glanced back at me. “But did any of them ever ask me a question that amounted to anything?” Her eyes remained on mine. I realized the serious discomfort that even this brief exchange was causing her. “That amounted to anything at all, Ronan?”

  “Am I interested in something you might have to say?” I nodded. “Beth, if that is the question….” I didn’t wait. “I’m very interested.”

Struck with surprise, Beth fell into silence. She studied me, to such a degree that I had to struggle to remain silent. I felt the void needed to be filled. But I guessed that that embarrassed hurry to say something was one of the elements that had sunk any chances for those other guys. Beth’s silences…her contemplation, the wait…made them rush to talk, which was just what Beth had not wanted. There was no question from them, no wish to get her opinion. There was simply more well-intended bragging, more pointless information.

The bookshelves remained silent. It seemed to me they were listening. A flight of pelicans surged through the moonlight beyond Coit Tower, like moving stitch-work fluttering above the bay.

“Beth, do you write?”

Beth’s mood changed in so short a time, that the moment appeared to brighten with regretful glee. “I know I haven’t told you this. I know you’re a publisher.”

“But—”

“I didn’t want you to think that was the only reason I wanted to talk with you.”

I recalled my own nervousness when thinking about how to sell one of my own novels to someone. I’m okay with other publishers because I am one of them. Agents are another matter if you are a writer, as they usually keep you waiting for a year before saying no, without an explanation. I disdain them, which of course I can afford to do since I’m a publisher myself and know all kinds of other publishers, big and small. No agents I have ever met are themselves writers, most of them, I’ve assumed, having long ago given up. Simply not up to the task, I guess. Some publishers are writers, of fiction and non-fiction, with the occasional poet thrown in. Nonetheless, these reservations of mine about agents are beside the point, knowing as I do that sales are considered by most in the business to be the only value really to be worried about in the purveying of any writing, whether it be great, imbecilic, or somewhere in between. With no sales now, there are no books in the future.

“What are you writing?” I said.

Beth’s attention was interrupted by the question, as though she had not expected it to be asked.

“The Selkie, it’s called.”

“When did you start it?”

“A few years ago.”

“What is it?”

She lowered her eyes. She had joined her hands together, and they seemed calm, while her reticence revealed embarrassment.

“It’s a novel. About a young American girl who saves the world.”

I grinned. “Starting out small, are you?””

Beth’s mood seemed to falter. “In San Francisco and Paris.”

“But what—”

“The Atlantic Ocean, too. She thinks she may be a selkie, and that being one will give her the intelligence to….”

“But what happens?” I said.

“The selkies come to her and counsel her.” Beth sighed, looking away a moment. I waited. “I just…. Ronan….” She took up the glass of wine. “I don’t think I have the talent to do such a thing. This novel business is close to an impossibility!”

“Do you write steadily? Regularly?”

“When I’m writing, yes. But I put it down after a few months and pick it up again several months after that.”

“How many times have you picked it up?”

“Seven or eight. A dozen.”

“Well…to me, Beth, that suggests that you do believe you can do it.”

”You think so?”

“If you really believed you didn’t have the talent, you’d let it sit in that desk drawer.”

Beth smiled. “Well…on my laptop.”

“Same fate.” I took up the glass of wine before me and noticed the evening fog flowing in from the Golden Gate, wrapping itself above and around Alcatraz.

Beth too looked out the window. “Do you think there’s a difference between that fog and the sea below it?”

I sighed. A change of talk, an effort to divert the moment. “I suppose. One is air imbued with moisture, the other moisture with no—”

“No, I mean in terms of your emotions, Ronan. My emotions.” Beth’s lips tightened, as did her fingers, now clinging to each other on her lap. “The worry and disapprobation.”

“Disapprobation!”

“Yes! Asking myself, ‘Beth, why are you even attempting to do this? Selkies! Who will believe it? How can I even think I could write such a thing?”

I do understand that question. I’ve asked it of myself dozens of times over the last several years. “You’ve kept it going, though, yes?”

She grumbled. “I have.”

“Well, I’ll wager that every novel you’ve read….” I gestured toward one of the bookshelves. “Every one of those up there got picked up yet one more time, many, many times, by the poor tout spilling it onto the paper.” I pointed to Beth’s computer. “Or onto the laptop, I guess.”

Beth nodded. “Same idea.” Smiling, glancing into my eyes, she sipped again from her wine.

—

One of our dustups was over my occasional lapses of attention. She had told me how I was sometimes indifferent to her, although usually I argued that that just wasn’t so. I actually believed that that just wasn’t so, which seemed to Beth a response worthy of chagrin. On this particular occasion, I moved to protest.

”If that is so…if I’m that indifferent, what would you prefer I do?”

Smiling, Beth pondered an answer. She was not a large woman, nor tall. Indeed, given her devotion to walking and gardening, she could be said to be in real shape, although petite. Her smile stunned people. It was a fine disarming intensity. I had frequently witnessed the smile at some party or other, when Beth had to mute another guest’s…usually a corporate lawyer’s or a mind-bogglingly successful entrepreneur’s…attempt to mansplain her into silence. Such men feel the need to treat a sophisticated question as though it is poorly dressed stupidity. They respond with amused disdain. Witnessing that smile, I would see how confident Beth was that her following response, carried on her beautiful lips and with her ready humor, would make the entrepreneur sound like a bragging fool. The entrepreneur would continue with his blather, as they do. But I know when such a fellow is flummoxed by a clear mind standing before him and grilling him…smile and all. When she intended them to, Beth’s charming demeanor and command could interfere big-time.

But…the dustup. She accused me of not paying enough attention.

“I do, too!”

“When?” Beth said.

“Every day.”

“Every day! When was the last time?”

“This morning,” I said. “Now.”

I usually arose a half hour before Beth and would go downstairs from her bedroom to dress and make breakfast. On this particular day, I had boiled four eggs…two for Beth and two for myself…and heated a croissant for each of us, with jam, and a small bowl of mixed fresh fruit. Coffee, too, to be sure…. I think that was it that morning. There were so many mornings…. And yet, living now, with my memories of her being disturbed by how she died, I wonder if I was even there that morning. But, of course, yes, I was there. She might have made a note of it in her 6 x 9 inch notebook. But that could make it seem like one of her dreams. A dream about the two of us having a dustup? Does a memory remain the same when it comes around a second time? A third?

Where is she, so I can ask?

“I walked into the kitchen, and you acted as though I wasn’t there.”

“I did not.”

“Not a word.” She put the pen down and closed the notepad, something Beth very rarely did during breakfast.

“Listen, what do you want?” I said.

The smile…generous in terms of how long it lasted…remained as long as it took Beth to enjoy her first sip of coffee.

“When I come down those stairs, Ronan…. I may be wearing my jammies. I may have my robe on.” The smile grew. “Maybe, like a selkie, I won’t have anything on at all.” She took up the pen, surveyed it, and looked into my eyes. I saw her hurt. “But no matter what, when I come down those stairs, I want you to tell me how nice I look.”

—

The selkie herself came to my dream the night after we set Beth’s ashes free. Of course, my dream-selkie could not speak. But I understood her intentions. Her demand that I….

Come with me.

It was just a dream. But I knew, as Beth had so often explained, that I too had to get the dream down, if only in my thoughts. So, as I walked alone on the path to the beach the following morning, I recalled how I would often escort Beth here with one or two of her grandchildren. She was becoming something of a star on the children’s literature circuit, and her grandkids enjoyed the snippets of stories that she would perform for them, new stories not yet with endings. She always spoke them out before writing them down. She needed to get the inflections right, the humor, the danger, the sorrows, laughter, and worries…. She wished to express those with as much subtlety as she could when, finally, she wrote the passages down. She could tell from the reactions she got from her grandchildren whether the subtleties worked or could be made better.

I recalled once more the conversation at The Pier House Inn. “The very font of love itself,” she had said. Such a word! Such an object! I thought of my Roman Catholic childhood and how much I had enjoyed my altar boy involvement with the things of the Mass, with holy processions and all the mystery of the Latin. The altar boys never fully understood the words, which made those words magical. The holy water font had been my particular favorite because every time I dipped my two fingers into it and crossed myself, I felt the sweetness of my belief sweeping through me. Eleven years old and overtaken by everything around me.

The holy water font was the key to the love being offered. Only years later did I learn of the child molestations that finally drove me from The Church. Such hypocrisy. Such damage. No priest had ever suggested any such thing to me as a boy, for which I have come to decide that I have been beyond lucky.

Her parents had raised Beth as an Episcopalian, at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. I accompanied her there for concerts in the solemn light that the cathedral contains. But she told me that she had always…always…been impatient with the priestly mutterings that, even as a child, she had felt were simply dished up spoons of featureless pablum offered by extremely dull men. (A few years ago, the cathedral had at last named a British woman to be its dean. This woman had fire in her, and so was closely befriended by Beth.) “At least you Catholics had flames and brimstone to deal with, Ronan. Death itself! Like those artists…you know, Durer and Van Eyck. Bosch!...would show you. Even if you dismissed their Catholicism, what they painted was still at least horrifying…horrifying fun to look at.” Glee appeared in Beth’s eyes. “In the Episcopal church, even Hell doesn’t measure up.”

Beth had suggested at the Pier House Inn that, notwithstanding the iron-clad dictations of the Catholic fathers or the bland English foppishness of the Episcopals, the selkie found real love in the compelling swirl of deep waters. For Beth, the sea embraced the soul and was embraced by it, the entire swirl and dance down below. The more often she could visit the sea…no matter on whatever country’s shore…the better her heart would feel. “Weren’t those rough, grubby fishermen just right with their laughter?” she had said to me as we had walked from the Kilronan pier. “They know what they’ve got.”

—

I stood on the beach and awaited the selkie.

Unlike the previous day—the day of Beth’s ashes—this morning was bright with high clouds and full sun. The bay was of saddened blue. It was a windless morning, unusual for San Francisco. I waited and beseeched the selkie not to forsake me.

I knew that I would never not love Beth. I wanted more of the descents of her stairway, angrily searching a compliment…more afternoons of my not understanding her gardens and their wishes, in order to have them explained to me by Beth…more mornings with her waiting in the rain on Inis Mór for the chance re-appearance of….

I wanted more of her worry, of her fun, her heart. There were too many such wishes for me to forsake the selkie on this particular morning, and I waited for the wishes the selkie would be carrying from Beth.

The selkie did not come.

Nonetheless I did think that Beth was somewhere near, as she so often had been on other mornings on other approaches we had made to whatever sea. If the selkie were not to appear, I knew Beth would, because Beth had existed, as selkies…well, maybe, I thought…do not. So, even if it were just a recollection of Beth, it would be her. And the selkie, whether or not she were in Beth’s company, would be with her. Two selkies surging together beneath the approaching waters.

No, not two, I thought with sudden, revealing certainty. Just one. The selkie Beth herself.

Copyright ©2023 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.

Note: No Plagiarism Software, also known as Artificial Intelligence, was used in the composition of this story.

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