Selkie Skin

A short story about disenchantment, escape, shape-shifting and the sea

“And that concludes our business,” says the divorce lawyer. He shakes Ailsa’s hand and doesn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed about the poor deal he has brokered for her.

As she stands waiting for the lift, she tries to think of something she can salvage from her old life. Certainly not her home, and not her share of the business she helped to build. Not her friends either, judging by the slew of concerned texts and voice notes she has not received.

It is all unsalvageable, like the Titanic - a disaster no one, least of all Ailsa, ever thought would happen. The unsinkable Ailsa Muir - the engaging Scottish girl with the Big Smoke (and all its up-and-coming entrepreneurs) at her feet - has sunk without a trace. Still, despite the flotsam of glaring mistakes she has left in her wake, Ailsa isn’t stupid - she knows when she is beaten. No point flogging a dead horse; it’s time to cut her losses, turn tail and run.

The city has served its purpose; sated her need for something exciting, something edgy - and it had been that. It had buffeted her like a storm at sea - it was exhilarating because of the danger. You thought that it was all about surviving in the moment, risking it all; that there would be no consequences - except, it turned out, there were. Now, she needed a safe harbour, a land that would hold her: Lewis. Of course, she had no people there now. Migration and cancer had done for the Muirs in the Outer Hebrides. But there was always Airbnb and a rental from Stornoway Airport.

Photo credit: Leila Abboud on pexels.com

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Ailsa drives the borrowed blue Ford Fiesta through the winding, single-track lanes under a leaden sky. She parks outside the cottage, not even bothering to see if the key is inside the lockbox - she’ll do that later. For now, there is somewhere she has to be.

Rain spits in her face as she slips and slides down the slope to the shore. This is not a beach for sunbathing and swimming, not here on the western edge of Lewis where the coastline is constantly harassed by biting winds and driving rain.  

She perches on a boulder, looking out to sea, and that’s where she finds it - right under her hand, as if it was meant to be - in a rock pool of salty seawater. It is folded neatly, thick and leathery, glistening and smooth under the water. 

Of course, she knows immediately what it is. A decade, a lifetime in London couldn’t make her forget the stories - of kelpies and banshees, and of selkies: the sea creatures who look like seals, but can take off their skins to reveal the women underneath. Women so beautiful that they can bewitch human men, but never love them, for they harken only to the sea.

At some point in her city life, Ailsa supposes she had convinced herself that they were only folk tales, but back here in this wild, windswept land, she knows with perfect certainty the truth of the matter.

It is right there, under her hand.

She is almost afraid to touch the seal skin, to believe it is real. She looks around for the owner, but she is nowhere in sight. Ailsa doesn’t think about wearing the skin then, but she comes back the next day and the next to check the pool. The owner never claims it, and neither does the sea. After a week, Ailsa begins to think of it as hers.

It only takes another week of walking the lonely shores and barren hillsides and thinking of all the things she doesn’t have before she is ready. She stands on the shingle a little after sunset, pulls off her jeans and layers of jumpers, shakes off her bra and steps out of her knickers. She leaves them in a pile on the stony beach, along with her name and all her stories - she doesn’t need them anymore. She has something else to wear now.

The seal skin fits like a glove, like a second skin, which is exactly what it is. It grafts onto her own skin, becoming part of her. And, all at once, she understands the call of the sea. She has always felt it, but now she can hear it - the distinct words of the song that is calling her home.

When she steps into the surf, she doesn't feel the cold. The waves beckon her - come and play. She can see others in the distance, bobbing in the swell, and she dives, changing even as the water closes over her head.

She realises she has been living in the wrong body her whole life: the girl who grew up on land, who took a job in London and scaled the career ladder, who got married and screwed over and divorced - that wasn’t really her. It was a costume that she wore over her real self. 

She never belonged to the city, or even to Lewis. Once, she was fond of saying that she belonged to no one - she was free and only herself. But she knows now that wasn’t true. She was always enslaved to the sea, entwined and inseparable from it. However far she wandered, she would have found her way back here eventually. It is her lifeblood, her breath, her very soul - she is it, and it is her.

She surfaces and sees them, closer now, in the rolling waves of the wide-open North Atlantic: her sisters. She knows, without having to ask, that they are all women like her. Women who found, in the end, it was easier to slip their skins than to become what the world expected them to be.

They welcome the selkie who until recently wore the Ailsa-girl’s skin. She doesn’t look back towards the rugged coast, in the direction of her old life, as she dives with them into the depths, and begins to live again.