The Seal Wife's Return to the Sea

She is dancing on the rocks when he finds her skin.

He has come down to the strand at Malin Head in the small hours — not to hunt, just unable to sleep, the way fishermen sometimes can’t when the weather is about to change. The moon is full and the tide is out and on the flat black rocks at the water’s edge there are women dancing. Seal-women, rónta, their grey-brown skins left in a pile on the highest rock while they take their human forms for the night under the full moon.

He takes one skin. He doesn’t think it through. He does it the way a man does something he will spend the rest of his life rationalizing after: quickly, with his body before his mind catches up.

He hides the skin under the thatch of his cottage, in the dark space between the roof and the rafters where he stores things he wants forgotten.

When the seal-women return to the rock, all but one find their skins and slide back into the water. The one whose skin is gone searches the rocks with increasing desperation, and by the time the tide begins to come in she is weeping on the cold stone and the man is standing at the shore.

He brings her to his cottage. He is kind. This matters and also doesn’t change what he has done.

She becomes his wife. They have three children — two boys and a girl — and she is a good mother in the way of someone who loves genuinely and is also permanently aware of the distance between herself and everything she is doing. She knows where the skin is. She can feel it in the thatch above her head when she sleeps. She does not go for it, because of the children, because of the man, because the skin is too far and the morning is always beginning.

The children are seven, five, and three when the youngest girl climbs into the thatch-space looking for something else entirely and finds it: a soft grey-brown thing, folded, smelling of the sea, impossibly soft to the touch.

She brings it down to her mother.

The woman holds the skin.

The children watch their mother’s face change. Not into something frightening — into something that was there before, something underneath the familiar face, the way a landscape looks when the snow melts and you see the shape of the ground you’d forgotten was there.

She kneels and holds each child. She says — and this is what the folk versions preserve, the exact words varying by teller — that she loves them and will love them and will watch for them from the water, and that they should look for the seal who comes closest to the shore, who follows the boat, who waits at the strand.

Then she walks into the sea.

The fisherman comes home to three children and no wife and a changed quality to the air over the water beyond his cottage. He does not remarry for years. When he takes his boat out, a large grey seal follows him at a distance. He never tries to take its skin.

The children grow up knowing what their mother is. The youngest girl, who found the skin, becomes famous in the townland for her ability to read the weather by watching the seals. She knows which one watches the boat come in. She does not need to be told.

The skin was always hers. Every skin is always the creature’s. The love in the cottage was real, but it was built on top of a theft, and theft cannot be the foundation of anything that holds.