Old Bones

I never learned restraint. It wasn’t in my nature and my mother never taught me. She taught me how to hunt instead, like a carnivorous flower.

“They will think you are the most beautiful thing they have ever seen.” She told me.

I am always hungry but maybe, this time, I can learn restraint. Maybe this time, I can keep him.

I don’t remember my father, though I suppose I must have had one, once. It’s only ever been my mother and me. My favourite place we ever lived was New Orleans. It was so loud and full of strangeness that no one ever noticed our own bizarre faces, and if they did, they thought we were an act. There is a river that runs through that part of the country. It’s meant to be a terrible place, a spot for murderers and bodies to wash ashore, but it never bothered me. I have never been frightened of the water. 

Mother has taken us back to the coast of Ireland, back to the place I was born. Where we were all born, I suppose. I want to feel a connection, to recognise my own crooked soul in the landscape, but it feels too much like a coffin lid, sea glass scenery pressing down on me. I feel as if I am falling back in time, through a trapdoor and all I want is to move forward, to warm places where my skin can taste sun and salt air. My mother says that normal, our Kind like the feel of sea air on our skin. She has beautiful skin, smooth and glowing. She seems fresh and young, even though I know she is very old. Her bones should creak and bow, but she moves with the grace of a young woman. I already know that I am more like her than my father. One day I will have old bones like hers. I asked her once if she missed my father, but she would only say it was a long time ago. 

One day, she will go back to her true home. One day she will find her skin, the one he hid, and she will return to the sea. I know this because she has told me often when the fire is burning low and her eyes are almost black. She will find her stolen skin and return to the water. 

“What will I do?” I ask. Half-breed, mongrel that I am, I have no true home.

“You will be old enough to choose.” My mother says, her voice a winter’s wind. “Stay with me or go your own way.” Her words frightened me. My Mother is the only home
I have ever known, her arms my only comfort and her voice my first teacher. 

She says it is a choice, but a choice is meant to be freeing. It isn’t meant to feel like a test. 

He smelt like the ocean. That was the first thing I noticed, like salt and clear skies. Being near him was like plunging your head into a cold lake, paralysing and liberating all at once. 

“He will be a good one to take,” my mother whispered, noticing me staring. 

“His heart is untouched,” she sniffed the air, “he’s green and fresh. He will make you strong.” She means his aura. Everyone has one, although only a few humans can see them. The colour lets you know if they will make you strong or make you sick. Yellow is most common, bright, but not too strong. Most people have that. Blue is rare but can make you tired. Red leaves you with bees in your head. Brown is unusual and can make you very sick indeed. I tasted one once, just to see what it was like, and the shaking didn’t stop for two days. Green is pretty unusual. Silver is the rarest of all. I’ve never seen one like that. My mother doesn’t have an aura. You can’t see your own, so I have to trust her when she tells me I don’t have one either. 

“He’s watching you,” she continues, tracking the boy with her eyes, “stay a little longer and he will give you his heart.” She tucks a strand of hair behind my ear with a slender hand. Her tenderness is studied, but I appreciate her trying. “You seem tired. You need this.” Her lips, bitten red where she’s been worrying the skin with her sharp, white teeth. “We will leave tonight, but I want to know that you are strong before we travel.We can’t afford to take any risks, not when we’re so close.” She kisses me lightly on the head. “I can feel it singing to me. You must be ready to choose.” 

There are no true words, only pretty ways of lying, that’s what Mother says. All speech is manipulation, and all communication is theft. Words are weapons and she uses them with the skill of a well-trained warrior. She could persuade a blind man he could see again and stop the forests growing with a word. That is why she does not trust words in others, because she knows how easy they are to bend and twist. She has taught me how to bend with them, too. I can persuade and manipulate anyone with the dance of my words. Almost anyone. She says speech is a bloody sword to swing and I’ve never been entirely sure if she would ever swing that blade at me. 

I use my voice like a flower uses its petals, and it’s not long till the boy is relaxed and talking with me. Part of me wants to scream at him to run, that my studied blushes shouldn’t make him feel safe. The other part of me howls with hunger every time his sweet breath ruffles my hair. The creature in me claws at its cage, snaps its teeth and yearns to start its midnight prowling. 

The human part of me notices how one tooth is slightly chipped. I find this tiny imperfection so endearing, a secret from his childhood he shares with each smile, that I almost forget how hungry I am.

My mother has taught me how to fill up a space, like god, so that I become the only thing the human can see. I will take him down to the water’s edge. The moon is high, so there will be plenty of light to see by. My night vision is not as good as my mother’s. 

People used to think we were mermaids because they saw us walking from the sea, but they’re wrong. We’re not vampires either, though we need the energy that humans give off and we’re certainly not werewolves. It would be so easy if our second skin were that close at hand. 

The boy comes with me easily, as they always do. I’m hungry, my bones gnawing on themselves and my skin stretched tight and tired, but I don’t want to hurt him. I slide him down to the sea edge because that is what I am meant to do, because that is what my mother has taught me to do. Once we’re there though, all we do is talk and when he kisses me lightly, like a sea breeze across my numb lips, I know I will not be leaving with my mother. 

She says my father hid her skin in order to spite her. She says he knew she would leave once I was born and because he thought he loved her, he couldn’t bear to lose her. 

“He knew where I kept it. I was foolish and trusted him. I let him see me fold it away when I became pregnant. When I went back to get it, after you were born, it was gone.” 

She has never openly said that I’m the reason she lost her freedom, but the accusation lies heavy between the unsaid words. “He claimed to know nothing about its disappearance, but I knew it had to be him.” 

My Mother spat the word, “him” like a curse. She doesn’t have to tell me what happened next. She has always talked about him as if he were dead. 

“Wouldn’t he tell you where it was? Your Selkie skin?” 

“Anything he told me would have been a lie, “ she said. “I’m the only one who could find it after that. I’m the only one it will sing to.” 

“What about me?” 

“We shall see.” Is all she will say when I ask about my skin. I’ve never seen it. Selkie Children have theirs on the inside, sleeping. Once my mother gets her skin back, she will sing with it again. My sleeping skin will hear her song and wake up and begin its own song. It’s this song that will lead us back to the sea and we can go home. I often wonder what that will feel like. 

What if it feels like this? Like standing on a midnight beach in moonlight with salt kisses and a warm hand on my back? What if it smells like green leaves and an ocean breeze and never having to run? My lips part at the scent of his skin, but surely now, when it really matters, I can show restraint? I can learn new lessons, teach myself things my mother never learned. 

“You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” The boy whispers in my ear. Was this what it was like for my mother? Free and wandering, until she met a boy that smelt like springtime and the sea. Did she forget how to hunt and marvel as her belly grew round with life and her Selkie skin lay hidden? Could I bury my old life so easily?Could I reject this part of myself and feed on something other than the energy of stolen human love? Maybe I could have a daughter too? Maybe I could teach her to be something more than a flower with a hungry mouth. 

The boy sighs and leans into me. I hold him close, his chest hot and firm against mine. It doesn’t hurt at all, letting go of my old life. We could live here, by the sea, come to the water’s edge at sunset and drink beer and kiss. We could make plans and pretend, and name children we do not have yet. He would tell me about his mother and I would tell him about mine. Or maybe I’d never mention her again. 

The waves creep closer, rushing over my bare toes and in the dark I feel his body slump forward unnaturally. I lurch under the sudden weight and his body drops onto the sand. A rushing wave flows over his back and pools around his head as if he were nothing but a rock in the water's way. My fingers tingle the way they always do when an aura releases. I can sense the light has gone from his body even before I see the dying light of green shoots and living leaves settle on my hands. They still feel warm from holding onto his back. 

“Sweet.” My mother’s voice bleeds from the shadows as she steps forward. She raises my hand to her mouth and licks a stray thread of light from one of my fingers.

“I couldn’t help myself.” I say this every time this happens.

“It gets easier.” My mother says this every time, too. We have developed a comforting script over the years.  

“Come along.” She holds her hand out, like she used to when I was small, a safe place for crossing roads and exploring high places. “We’re close now, I can hear it.

Everything will be better once we go home.” She notices my tears and tuts impatiently, “creatures like us can never be happy here,” she keeps her hand out, pale in the moonlight, an empty space to step into."Don’t you want to be free?" 

I look at her beautiful face, ageless and unreadable as the ocean. 

“You don’t need any of this,” she says. “You’ve been around humans too long. Soon, you’ll see, creatures like us don’t belong here. We belong to each other.” 

I look down at my feet, bare and cold on the midnight sand. 

The bones of her old life call to her, and I do not yet understand my own bones well enough to truly make a choice. Perhaps there are no choices for creatures like us.