OBJECTS: A Modern Selkie Love Story
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smiles, gathering up his books. He leaves the plate on the table.
“I dunno, Amelia. Sometimes I wonder if it's worth it, these objects. I don't want anymore cookies. You should have the rest, it's only three of them,” Marcus tells me before stomping up to his room. I know his shoes are loud because he's letting his sister know he's coming up. I smile. Marcus is one of the sweeter of the children.
I eat the cookies, and I don't feel too bad about breaking my diet to do so.
The Selkie and The Ghost
Or
Gabriella's Story
The first time I see him, I'm convinced I imagined him. His flickering perfection in the dim light of the coffee house, with his shaggy dark hair ad blue eyes, like something out of a dream or a painting. Maybe even like something out of my dream. I will later wonder if he chose to look that way because of something he saw in me. Some kind of desperate daydream I'd buried long ago about what princes and love were meant to look like. He appears too good to be true, and the fact that he's transparent convinces me he's a figment of my imagination or, at the very least, not real.
I'm getting coffee before work, holding the steaming hot cardboard cup in a mittened hand, trying to convince myself to finish my commute when I notice him. My trusty scarf is wound around my neck and suddenly it feels too heavy, scratchy. Like the soft gauze has turned to sandpaper on my skin. I smile at him, the illusion sitting at the table in the corner. He smiles back, but then it dawns on him that I'm actually looking at him, seeing him, and his expression lights like the dawn over an ocean. Reflections of light in his features, glinting there like jewels.
That's all. I'm convinced, as I step back into the winter air, that I'll never see him again. I can't forget his face or how fast my heart is beating.
A week later and I'm back at the coffee shop, having almost forgotten the not-quite-there man. My coffee cup is sitting on the rustic wooden table, opened sketchbook on top, pretending to draw. Design work had taken all of the fun out of art and I'm hungry for change or inspiration. I'm waiting for a friend to come and I'm tapping my pencil impatiently on the page, waiting for an idea to come, but all of my ideas are murky and lost, all promised to other people who'll pay. One moment I'm alone, and in the next moment I feel his eyes on me. I look up from the empty page. I hadn't heard the chair angle out or shift under him, but there he is, sitting across from me.
“You can see me,” he says, and his voice is pleasant, like a breeze on a spring morning. Cool comforting refreshment. I scrawl on the blank page that yes, I could see him, and he smiles at me.
“You know other people can't, which ought to bother you but it isn't. Why isn't it bothering you? Have you got a secret, too?” he asks. I blush, and without thinking I adjust my scarf, but I shake my head no. A lie.
“I'm Edwin,” he tells me and I think for a moment, lips curving into a smile, before I write,
Gabriella.
“Do people ever call you Ella?” he asks me. I shake my head and he laughs. “Gabby?” I give a tiny nod, hoping that people aren't looking at me, seeing me shaking my head at nothing. My nickname makes him frown. “Gabby isn't very you, don't you agree? You don't look like a Gabby.”
It's true. While I've never given a thought to nicknames, I never liked Gabby. It's the one everyone uses and it makes me cringe. I point the pencil at the paper again.
Gabriella.
“You could be Ella, though,” he points out. His grin turns mischievous. “To me? I've been waiting for you, Ella.”
Before I can reply, the friend I'm waiting for is coming through the door, smiling at me.
“Gabby!” she cries. The man is suddenly not across from me anymore and yet I feel him smirking as I rise to embrace my friend. I wonder if I'll ever see him again.
I'm having a nightmare.
It's hard being away from my brother and sisters, the only people who are like me. Instead of finding relief in my move to the city, I'm finding sickness and depression. I miss my kin. If I felt love, or something close to it, it would be for my brother and sisters. I hurt when I can't be near them. When I came here, I felt like it would be good for me. Time away from them and the curse, time on my own, would harden me into a grown-up person. Someone with cosmopolitan dreams and control over her life. Someone with the power to break the curse on her own. That isn't what happens, though.
The stress of being alone causes me to have nightmares and I can't stop the screeching, screaming suffocation that takes over my mind as I'm overwhelmed by images I'd rather not see. One time I heard a banshee cry, and that's the sound I'm making. It comes out of my mouth, a siren's wail into the shadows of my apartment. My dream is always the same. I'm old, looking in a mirror, and I'm alone and sick and wrinkled. Solitary, and dying. I'm a dry shell of the girl I once was and I never broke the curse I was born with, never shed my skin, still possessed by the scarf that is my only real companion.
When I wake, panting in my apartment, he is there. Watching me.
“How are you here?” I ask him. I want to know how he found me. How he knew that I wanted to see his face, to feel like I wasn't alone anymore. He shakes his head.
“I don't know,” he replies, shifting to sit on the edge of the bed. “I just knew you needed me and so I came.”
“How could I need a ghost?” I wonder and he gives me a small smile, transparent hand brushing over mine.
“I think I understand your nightmare better than most,” he said, and it's probably true. He is the dead one, after all. I wonder if he's lonely, too. Can he see other ghosts? Does he have company in the afterlife? “I could help you.”
It's too much, too real, too fast. My scarf is like an iron chain, a shackle around my throat, and it's pulling me back under. Protect myself, that's what I need to do. Remind me of my true self and the curse that dictates my life.
“Get out you dream stalker dead man!” I'm screaming at him. His face is sad, he feels sad, and I can feel it, too, but he goes. In the blink of an eye I'm alone again, sobbing on my pillow. I could like him. I could care for him. And that scares me to death. At least being alone is something I'm used to.
I think about him often. I feel guilty for my harpy screaming and I don't see Edwin again for a long time after that, despite looking for him everywhere. I want to apologize. He was, after all, just trying to make me feel better, but he's disappeared. Finally, I begin to cry. I'm alone, in my home which has become nothing more than empty rooms. It is hollow, like my mind, and painful to exist in, like my skin. I pray, I wish, that at least maybe he found peace and crossed over. Had some mysterious person come along and helped him to the other side? Was he seeing his loved ones now, as I wished to see mine? My scarf is too warm around my throat as I fall asleep on my sofa.
Weeks later, a rash is forming on my collarbone from my constant scratching. The object that had found me was changing from a comforting shield, keeping my heart safe, to something that made me raw and bleeding. I've had it since I was a kid and this has never happened. I wash it with fabric softener, trying to stop the irritation, but nothing works. Finally, I tie the thin cloth around my head like a turban, but it still itches. It's almost like a warning, but I don't know against what. I haven't seen Edwin but I know he's there. Sometimes, anyway. I feel him in my room or in my dreams.
I can't take this city anymore. I can't stand the whispered promises of ghostly affection and the dull ache of a stagnant mind. I need my family, at least our home, so I leave. I'm driving away from the smoggy suffocation and my invisible almost-lover (who isn't).
(But somehow is.)
In my dream we are standing on the beach in my hometown where hours before I'd been running alone. His face is as familiar to me as my own.
“Where have you been?” I ask him.
“Right beside you,” he replies softly, and it's true. I know because I've felt him there. While he is with me, my object doesn't pull on me or cause me to scratch. Gently, he reaches out and lifts the
ragged cloth from my shoulders.
“What are you doing?” I ask him, but the relief is heady and I don't step forward to stop him. Edwin smiles at me and stands at the water's edge, dropping the fabric into the sea. I watch, his arms wrapped around my stomach, while my object floats away. There is a breaking inside of me, a changing, and it's frightening because I don't feel the relief my sister felt when she found her love. I feel a new chain forming, keeping me close attached to my spectral-man. He's kissing me, with his fingers tangling in my hair. We make love on the sand in my dreams in a mess of limbs twisting and whispers of flesh touching.
I wake up. I'm soaked with cold sweat and my scarf is no where to be found.
When I leave, my eldest sister holds me too long. I'm concerned. I frown at her, but she doesn't say anything about my missing scarf, if she notices at all. She just looks at me with big hurt eyes.
“Don't try and trick the curse, Gabby,” Amelia warns me. “It never works.” I grip her again, a weird sinking feeling in my stomach. Edwin watches me from the passenger side of the car, worrying his lip between his teeth. His non-presence is almost sinister in the weak daylight.
“I don't know what you're talking about,” I tell her gently and her face is hurt.
“Just know that I care about you. You are my sister,” Amelia says. I feel a prickling