In the Night Garden

I tried not to listen to him whimper as I pulled them from the wood.

Ghassan handed over the rubbery skin with a grin on his sparsely whiskered face. “A pleasure, prettiest of girl-slips. Farewell—I don’t imagine we’ll meet again.” He pocketed the bark and strode back over the damp grass.

I pressed the skin to my heart and hid it beneath my bed when I came home for supper—I breathed its salty, watery scent dozens of times before I reached my own door. How proud I was! When I lay down to sleep I pulled it out again and held it to my chest, feeling its cold weight on my own skin.

It was such a small sound, when I think on it now. Knuckles on glass, a rapping at the window. I was startled as a sparrow to look up and see two huge, gray eyes looking through the pane at me. They belonged to a young man, no older than I, with dark hair and skin so pale it seemed bloodless.

“Please,” he said, “let me in.”

“Certainly not,” I whispered, so as not to wake a father already suspicious of every suitor’s knock. But I unlatched the window and opened it, just the smallest of cracks. The youth looked at the skin clutched in my arms.

“Miss, I’m afraid you have something that belongs to me.”

“And what’s that?”

“The skin. It’s mine.”

“I see plenty of skin on your bones as it is. This is my skin, I bought it, just as fair as a pair of golden scales.”

The youth shook his dark head sadly. “You bought it from a beast and a thief, who stole it from me when I was sunbathing on a craggy rock. I am a Selkie, and that is my skin.”

I tightened my grip on the little bundle. “But I cut into my grandfather for this. It will grow back, I know it will, but I oughtn’t to have done it and if I lose the skin then I will have done it for nothing. This is the only thing that is mine, and not my father’s or my mother’s or my sisters’ or my brothers.’”

“It is not your father’s or your mother’s or your sisters’ or your brothers’. It is mine. Please give it back, lovely Satyr, I want to go home, and I cannot until you give it over.”

I did not want to cry, but the tears pricked all the same—but I was a clever girl, and I knew all manner of tales. “Wait a moment—what is your name?”

“I am called Shroud.”

“And I am Eshkol. If you are a Selkie, and I have your skin, that means you must stay with me and be my lover until you can get the skin back, doesn’t it?”

Shroud’s shoulders slumped. “Yes, that is the way of it, but I was never like the other seals…”

I WAS ALWAYS SO CAREFUL WITH MY SKIN. THE others let them lie around just anywhere—it is who we are: Who might take it? Whose house might we enter, whose sardines and black bread might we eat, who might we love? It is the chief activity of Selkies to have their skins stolen.

But I was careful. I loved the sea, I loved the waves and the breakers and the curling white foam. I loved the changing character of the sea, how it could be choppy and gray or smooth as glass, like the brow of a wife. I loved the taste of the water, and I was afraid of what it would be like to be closed up into a house, without the slap of the wind and the cry of the gulls.

I did not mean to fall asleep. I was sunning my silver stomach on a desolate rock in the shallows, basking in the heat reflected off of the violet waves, breathing the kelp-spattered air. I had only closed my eyes for a moment when he slipped up, silent as a spear fisherman, and sliced through the skin of my back just as easily as tearing paper.

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Such a thing had never occurred—he stripped my skin from me, ripping and rending it, pulling my fingers out of my flippers, my feet out of my tail, my face from my muzzle—I cried out, but my sisters saw from afar only that someone was stealing my skin, and high time, too. They did not see the knife. They did not hear my screams. They cheered from a distant outcropping of stone.

When he was finished he paddled easily to shore and began packing the skin into a fat leather satchel. I followed, swimming clumsily in the man’s body I had never once lived in. When we clambered onto the sand, I lay gasping, air burning my unused lungs.

“Where are we going?” I gulped.

The man I came to know as Ghassan stopped and turned to regard me. He was, as he often is, dressed in a woman’s skin in those days, a crone with long tangled hair. “Whatever do you mean, young unfortunate?” the crone said.

“You have my skin.”

“Oh, yes, that I do.”

“I am yours, then. What house will you take me to? What fish and breads shall we eat? Who shall I love?”

“I don’t care who you eat or who you love, seal. I only want the skin, and I only want the skin for selling. You are incidental, a pit in a peach.”

I rose shakily to feet I had never known. “But this is what I am. My skin is stolen; I must belong to someone.”