Sunrise

Deborah Grabien

Light coming in through the window, falling on his face, painting a thin lovely streak down the wall above the bed. The first touch against his cheek, his chin, wakes him.

The bed is warm, piled high with blankets, shawls, two duvets. She’s joked with him about that, how his body never warms. There’s no way to tell her why; the words and the reason both exist, but they make no sense. Even if she understood them, she wouldn’t believe them. If there’s a way to say my true skin is hidden, buried deep for safekeeping under a stone at the water’s edge, and all my warmth as well, while I stay here to give you what you need of me, he’s never once found it.

A sigh, a murmur. Beside him, the girl Morag stirs, shifting, searching for something he can’t begin to identify. Black hair, two feet long, is tumbled across her cheek. He lifts a strand to his lips, lets it brush against him.

For the first days on land, even the fall of her hair against what passes for his flesh would send small splinters of electricity branching through his hands. He remembers the feel of it, hot lightning forcing itself between his fingers, keeping them whole and distinct, human flesh over human bone.

This is his measure of his time on dry land. That time is almost over; the electricity has faded from a hard bright crackle to a faint flash, barely more than an echo. He lifts a few strands of her hair, and waits. Nothing, nothing at all.

His eyes are open, unblinking. He holds his hand away from him, in the growing patch of pale sunlight, confirming what the change in his own blood has already told him. There’s a web of flesh between his fingers, translucent skin. That web wasn’t there yesterday.

She sighs again, something that might be his name. This time, the murmur has a fretful edge to it. He wonders if, down in the place where humans lay dreaming, she knows she’ll wake up alone. It’s a question he can’t ask, not now, not ever. So many women he’s taken to bed over the centuries: a week, a month, his skin buried safe, waiting against his need. There are others of his kind who come and go, water to land and back again, caring enough to wait the seven required days before they go back to that same woman. He’s never done that.

One woman, one movement of time passing, never again. It will be the same with Morag.

She twitches, and this time, she says a name. He recognizes it: it’s the name of her dead husband, the sailor who drowned at sea, the man whose death left her vulnerable in the first place.

She came to the water’s edge, the northern tide pushing against her feet. He remembers watching her, seeing her drop to her knees in the chilly water. He remembers hearing her think, an inchoate internal sob of her husband’s name. He remembers hearing her grieve, hearing her wonder if, bereft of her man and without even a child to bear her company, it might not be best to let herself be taken to join him. He remembers her face, swollen eyes and tremulous lax mouth distorted by the lap of the tide, crinkled with emptiness and grief.

He remembers, too, the moment when she summoned him: seven salt tears wept into the salt sea. They dripped from her face and became one with the water, a song of need, lyric and music calling him as he lay in the shallows: come to me come to me love me help me save me.

Terrified by Scott Grey

New moon to new moon—it’s always been that way, century after century. The cycle begins: a woman loses, she weeps into the water. He comes to her, whoever she is; he comes to her bed, holds her and takes her warmth from her, giving her whatever she can take from him. Sometimes, it’s enough for her, and more. This time, the parting to come will be a bad one. Morag hasn’t healed. But there’s nothing more he can do. The new moon is tonight, and the music is coming in off the sea.

He slips free of the bed, looking back at the curve of her body. In his mind, he sends a message, watching the soft rising and settling as she sleeps. What a time we had, darlin’, but it’s time I was gone.

He closes the cottage door behind him, walking toward freedom under a sailor’s delight: grey and pink and pearl. There’s a brisk wind blowing in off the channel, and out in the shallows, the seals have paused in their hunting, feeling him coming back to them, his own seal wife in the water, singing to him. His hand is showing more webbing between the fingers now, but he cups one to his ear, hearing her sing to him: return to me.

The rock at the water’s edge is there, undisturbed. He digs beneath it, down and down, until his hand meets a softness that has nothing to do with sand. Laughing, without a look back at the fisherman’s cottage, he pulls the sealskin free, sliding into it as he’s slid into the grieving widow this month past. For a moment, just a moment, his whiskered brown nostrils open wide enough to catch a vagrant scent of Morag. On his skin, on the morning breeze? It doesn’t matter.

Seven human tears to summon him. The siren call of the sea to bring him home.

Water, foam, chilly breakers close over him with a familiar icy shock. He knifes through it and deeper out, riding the current, finding the channel between the rocks, Orkney behind him and open water in front of him, as the sun rises.