by _Anthology
"You don't look Irish," Malcolm said. Dublin smirked impishly, eyes lighting up, "I know. I get that from my granny's side of the family. She had the skin and eyes, and me and my mom both got it from her. Just one child in a generation. Everyone said it was 'cause she was a selkie."
"And what, pray tell, is that?" Malcolm asked, delighted by the boy's infectious enthusiasm, resting a chiseled cheek against the cupped palm of one hand, interested more from a desire for Dublin to continue speaking than out of any real concern for the subject matter. He was smitten.
"They're shapeshifters, creatures that look human but take the form of a seal. They have a magic seal-skin that they keep and put on when they go into the water and it allows them to change. Sometimes they come up to have celebrations and dance on the beaches, or to sun themselves, or whatever, and they take off their skin and become human. If a man can steal a selkie woman's skin while she's out of the water and hide it from her, she'll marry him. They're the most beautiful women in the world," Dublin added, proudly. "My grandfather must've hidden her skin real good, I guess, or maybe she just stuck around because there was no ocean to run off to in Kansas."
"That's certainly a nice story," Malcolm said, heart beating faster, mind buzzing frantically in his skull, his attention suddenly elsewhere, on the object he had found the night before. His gaze shifted behind Dublin, to the pelt that lay upon the sofa and he wondered if the boy had seen it lying there. Certainly not; if he had, wouldn't he have taken it already? Malcolm licked his dry lips, trying to control his shaking voice. "For a fairytale." The words fell down hard.
"It's not a fairytale," Dublin countered with a sly wink, a secretive Mona Lisa smile playing across his features. "There are families in Scotland today that still claim selkie descent. But I didn't expect you to believe it."
Malcolm's eyes darted between the boy and the seal-skin once more, he clenched his fists and, finally, he pondered aloud, "And what about selkie men?" Malcolm looked at Dublin in a new light, drinking in that intoxicating, enchanting, inhuman beauty; he wanted it for himself, now.
"What about them?" Dublin chirped, perfectly happy to answer any questions on the topic.
"What happens if someone steals the skin of a selkie man, Dublin?" Dublin paused, brows furrowing in exquisite concentration, chewing thoughtfully on one soft, red lip. "I don't know. There aren't any stories about that. The most you hear about the men is they sometimes come up on land and seduce unhappy women, bored housewives and the lot. Sometimes, they take their lovers away to live with them in the sea. I guess if a woman tricked one, she could get him to marry her, too." He regarded Malcolm, abruptly alert but without any malice or suspicion, merely a painfully innocent curiosity. "Why?"
Shaking, Malcolm stood, without regard for anything, tipping his chair, which landed with a crash upon the floor, jolting the table. Not saying a word, he went to the living room and took up the pelt, glancing back with a sudden inspiration in his eyes. He smiled. "You wouldn't happen to know about this, then?"
Dublin jumped up, reaching out both hands plaintively, still free of any distrust, innocently and eagerly proclaiming, "That's mine!" "Really?" Malcolm regarded him with a cool detachment, though inside him raged an uncontrollable hunger, a rush of adrenaline and purpose that filled him up and corroded him away. As a dawning desperation grew upon Dublin's face, the same feeling washed over Malcolm's mind, a paranoia that his brilliant plan might not come off successfully at all. He calculated, continuing, "You ought to be more careful. Just leaving it out where anyone could find it..."
"And you ought to mind your own business! Give it back!" Dublin pleaded quietly, looking as though he could cry. He did not step forward to take it by force, and, to Malcolm's shock, there was no amount of anger in the boy's tone at all, just a sad and mournful longing in his eyes.
"What if I don't?" Malcolm asked, voice strained, rising in pitch. It was not in his nature to be cruel or threatening, but an anxious emotion overwhelmed him, assaulting all his senses, his heart raging wildly, his mouth dry, something in the pit of his stomach smoldering. The selkie seemed to him, at that moment, complete fulfillment and perfection, everything he had ever denied himself and been denied, all the beauty in the world he had ever wanted and had been too afraid to hold on to. He knew that this boy was the only real thing he'd ever needed in his entire life, this moment, this second, stretching on for eternity. He would not let the selkie slip away. He gripped the skin and it was warm in his hand.
"Why wouldn't you? Why would you? Why?" Dublin sank to his knees, gazing up at Malcolm with aching sincerity.
"If I keep the skin," Malcolm stammered. "If I keep the skin, will you have to stay with me?" "You son of a bitch!" Dublin moaned. "You bastard!" He staggered to his feet and stumbled out of the house, numbly, tripping on the threshold but regaining his balance before he fell. He spat another filthy curse, slamming the screen door, which screamed at the hinges and closed with a monstrous, metallic crash. Dublin sat, barefoot on the porch, gazing out across the water to the sky, and Malcolm knew that he had won.
Malcolm folded the skin, carefully, concealing it away in an old paper sack among the boxes in the attic. He was shaking all the while, glancing around and behind himself just to be certain that Dublin wasn't there, watching and waiting to discover his hiding place. He crouched with the package like a frantic criminal in the night, burying a corpse out among the trees or beneath the floorboards, terrified that someone would stumble upon him and reveal his dirty secret to everyone who mattered. His hands and body moved independently of him, of their own accord, Malcolm's mind barreling off in other directions, careening around inside his skull.
The sack found itself beneath dusty, moth-eaten clothing, faded childhood relics and hundreds of miscellaneous objects not worth holding on to that had never been thrown out -- his family was a veritable dynasty of packrats. He stacked the boxes so that it rested at the bottom, under a mountain of cardboard and cobwebs. Malcolm was covered in sweat, coated in the grime of so many memories, making him sneeze. There were dark places on the wooden floor where it all rested before he came to stir the past around and reexamine it; brown splotches of color amidst the uniform gray of collected dust, ancient fossils that could be dated by the amount of dirt surrounding them when they had been laid down.
He finally emerged, two hours later, wiping his face on his white t-shirt, which came away gray and sticky. Dublin still sat on the porch, holding a cold and untouched cup of coffee in his white hands. Malcolm sat beside him, flushed from the effort of securing the skin, and Dublin glanced at him dubiously, appraising him again in the heat of the day. Surprisingly, he cracked a grin.
"I guess, if nothing else, trying to keep me here gave you a good workout, huh?" Dublin joked, smiling a little, a slight stiffness in his posture belying his friendly behavior. Malcolm licked his lips, wiped his chin with his hand, and carefully presented the words he had been rehearsing, over and over, like a holy mantra as he stacked the tower of boxes higher and higher, into the sky. "Look, I won't keep you here if you don't like it. If you're not happy. I don't want to be cruel, but I...I want to know you better. I think you're interesting. I'd like to get know you. Is that okay?"
"I guess so," Dublin replied quietly, clutching the mug tighter. "So if I ask to leave after a little while, you'll let me go?" "Sure," Malcolm sighed, shrugging, running a hand over his graying hair. "Sure, that's fine. How about this? I promise if, after a month, you really want to leave, I won't stop you. Deal?" He held out one tired, lined palm, skin dry and rough and warm.
"Deal," whispered the selkie, placing his elegant fingers in Malcolm's own, not retracting them when the handshake was through. "But I want that in writing."
"However you want it," Malcolm soothed, kissing the selkie on the lips. Dublin kissed back, gingerly leaning into the deft embrace. Gradually, night fell, the chill, inky darkness crawling up and along Dublin's spine, at which time he determined to retreat inside, when the
lightning began to flash and the rain started pouring down. Resigned, he lay on the sofa, head in his arms, staring up into the cryptic twists and swirls in the chipped white paint upon the ceiling. There was a purple blemish on his shoulder, an itchy insect bite, and he picked at it a little with his neat nails. He glanced into the kitchen occasionally, where Malcolm stood at the stove, and, finally, he asked, "Are you making dinner? I'm starving."
"Yeah," Malcolm said. "Spaghetti. Is that okay with you?" "Anything's fine." Dublin sighed, examining his shoulder a little longer. He yawned, tossing his head back, looking around, and he asked, undeniable curiosity welling up once more, "Since you know all about me now, can I ask about you?"
"Sure," Malcolm said. "That seems fair."
"Where's your wife?" Dublin inquired, not accusing, merely inquisitive. "What?" Malcolm turned to face him, obviously puzzled. "What do you mean? I'm not married." "You have a ring," Dublin pressed, pointing solemnly. "On your hand." "Oh, this." Malcolm laughed, turning back to the food. "Yes, I have a ring. We're divorced now."
Dublin sat up, scrutinizing. "Then why do you still wear it?"
"So that other women don't try to flirt with me."
"Oh." Dublin sighed. "I was worried you'd have to try to explain me to someone. I don't want to start any fights."
Malcolm shook his head, chuckling. "Virginia and I didn't need any help finding things to fight over. No, I live alone now. It'll be fine."
"So that's why you broke up," Dublin pronounced.
"Well, we didn't get along well, but what really ended things was when I came out."
"Oh. So you're gay." Turning off the heat and taking the pasta from the stove, Malcolm laughed. "Well, obviously!" He drained the water from the noodles and set the pot down. "I haven't tried to hide it; you should have been able to tell from the way I've been acting around you all day. I like you, Dublin."
"I know," Dublin mumbled, smiling shyly. "But plenty of people like me. I've had straight guys like me, all the time. It's terrible for me, since they always want to hide it from everyone when we're together."
"So you are, too?" Malcolm asked. "Is that why you ran away from home?"
Dublin's eyes widened in surprise, dark lashes splayed across his cheeks. "That's part of it. Why? How could you tell?" "I know the type," Malcolm said. "And who but a runaway kid has just one set of clothing to his name?" He grimaced. "My best friend in high school -- my boyfriend, actually -- was very much like you. He ran away to Chicago, or somewhere, and tried to get me to go with him. Sometimes I wonder if I should have gone along with him," Malcolm confessed. "And if my whole life would have been completely different, maybe better." Obviously leery of the subject matter, he turned away, and hastily added, "But about you. You said that's only part of the reason. What was the rest?"
Dublin sighed wistfully, expression losing focus, gaze fixed somewhere beyond the horizon. His voice ached with an inexpressible sorrow. "I've never been to the ocean." To that it seemed Malcolm had nothing to say. Malcolm strode over to him, kneeling beside him, taking his face in warm hands and kissing it reverently, in absolute adoration, as if Malcolm could take in Dublin's pain and make it his own, instead. Dublin deepened the kiss, placing his hands on Malcolm's shoulders with a tender but firm insistence, drawing the man closer. The rain came down around them, pounding on the shingled roof.
Malcolm slept deeply that night, as he had not in years and years, arms coiled round the soft skin of the selkie who was splayed across the squeaky, decrepit mattress in a jumble of limbs. When he woke, Dublin was no longer there. Fighting a rising wave of panic, he stood, intending to search the house until he saw the boy, half-dressed, seated by the window in the kitchen. Dublin smirked, drinking his coffee.
"Good morning, indeed. I see this house is clothes-optional." Malcolm smiled, relieved, and shook his head. "I was worried. You were gone."
Dublin scowled a little, looking back outside. "I always get up early. To see the sunrise. Sorry if I scared you. Don't worry; I'm not going anywhere." He sighed with an exquisitely bittersweet sound. "I'm staying right here, as long as you need me."
Reassured, Malcolm sighed and returned to his room to dress, grinning like a lunatic at the knowledge that this had not been just a dream; this was an enduring reality. He felt happier than he ever had in his life, and if not out of all his life in total, then he was certainly more contented than he had been in a long time. Stooping over his desk to retrieve his glasses, he paused. The papers which had been lying there had been disturbed and, on the uppermost leaf an elegant hand had scrawled, "This is lovely. Would you write me poetry?" He picked it up, staring, unsure if he should be flattered or feel a sense of violation; he was a very private person and no one had ever been inclined to rifle through his manuscripts before. They were his solitary hobby. Virginia had always detested verse and found fiction dull and, though she used to smile when he attempted to share his writing with her, she eventually exclaimed, "Malcolm, you know I think it's boring. I'm sorry and I support your interests, but please find someone who understands and appreciates the stuff to share it with, instead of me. I can't help you with it."
"Would you write me poetry?"
No one had ever asked such a thing of him before. Delighted and inspired, Malcolm Hall sat at his desk, retrieved a fresh sheet of paper and he wrote. A week passed without incident, as if the two of them had been living together for years. Dublin was quiet and undemanding, surprisingly affectionate at the strangest of times; the selkie was perceptive and helpful. With little else to do, he decided that Malcolm's house needed to be thoroughly cleaned, beginning with the bedroom, proclaiming he refused to live in such dusty squalor. Malcolm, for his part, was too entranced by every movement the selkie made to care. Suddenly, everything he saw was so overwhelmingly inspiring; he struggled, not to capture it, but to write it all down before another thought emerged in its place to banish it forever, forgotten in the frenzy.
It did not occur to him until two weeks into their cohabitation what, exactly, the selkie was doing. Meticulously, Dublin scoured every room, dusting every object, polishing, washing, organizing, rearranging, poking and prodding. Nothing was left untouched. He searched through Malcolm's desk first, arranging all the papers, taking out the drawers entirely to search behind and beneath, to find if there were any empty, hidden spaces there to see. He poured over the house's many bookshelves, taking each book down and flipping through the pages, touching them gingerly and with unrelenting motivation, as though just the right one might yield a clue or provide an entrance to some secret passage beneath the floor, leading elsewhere. He scrubbed the floorboards, carefully, looking for edges he could wrench loose. He disassembled the sofa and put it back together again. He cleaned out Malcolm's car.
It became evident that the selkie was searching for his skin. Malcolm knew that by the end of three weeks' time, Dublin would delve into the attic. Nervously, Malcolm conjured up the key from among the collection Dublin had assembled in his quest, locked the attic door tight shut, and threw the slender piece of metal into the lake, where it sank twenty feet down in the clear, cold water. By the end of the month, the rest of the house was clean and the selkie satisfied that his skin was nowhere he had been. Surely, he had tried the attic door and found it locked, knowing that was the one place, now, that his seal-skin could be. But Dublin made no indication either way.
The month allotted came and went. The selkie said nothing. Malcolm did nothing, realizing that he had never intended to let Dublin go to begin with. He felt a hot and strangely satisfying shame after that every time he saw that lovely face or held it in his hands, coaxing a lazy kiss from that beautiful mouth. He was being dishonest with both the selkie and himself, but refused to acknowledge he was doing something terrible in attempting to deceive them both. Malcolm could not conceive of a world without Dublin in it anymore. He never wanted their affair to end, but, as time went on, Dublin began to grow more distant, sitting by the lake's edge and sighing f
or hours, spending all his waking moments in the water, or nearby it. Finally, unable to bear the silence when he spoke, the polite responses on occasion, their subdued and uninterested sex life, a motionless body in his arms at night before they went to sleep, three months after the selkie's arrival, Malcolm asked, "Dublin, do you like me?"
"What do you mean?" Dublin mumbled sleepily, parting dark, delicate lashes, turning up a squinting eye from where his face lay buried in the pillow. "Course I do. Of course I like you. Why would I stay with you and sleep with you, and whatever else, if I didn't like you? Stupid." Yawning, he stretched, blankets falling down around his waist to expose an expanse of creamy skin.
Malcolm sighed, propping himself up on one elbow, running his fingers lightly over Dublin's side, afraid if he pressed too hard, the selkie would break. "I mean, do you find me attractive?"
Dublin let out a lazy laugh. "Attractive? I think you're hot."
Pausing, taking Dublin's hand in his own, kissing it, holding it close, Malcolm asked, "What I mean to say is, do you love me?" His penetrating gaze bored into the selkie, who withdrew his hand and turned away.
"I guess," Dublin said. "I dunno. You love me?" The lukewarm response broke Malcolm's heart, something deep inside him snapping, coming to a halt with a sudden and jarring lurch. It made him angry. "Of course I do. Of course. Yes, I love you more than anything."
Dublin sighed. "That can't be true. I'm sorry, it just can't be. You're a liar. But I do love you, Malcolm. I do." He did not accuse Malcolm of anything specific, his words curt and resigned.
