What The Ocean Eats – Part Two
Back in the cave you groan as your skin finally stops moving and settles into place. You groan once more as your body finally finishes shifting, the bones breaking themselves and rearranging, the cartilage ripping and shifting, reforming. Then you can breath again. You can see, though it is different from your human vision. You fall forward; there is no support from your legs that no longer exist.
You land on the cave floor in a plop, but it doesn’t hurt since the layer of fat on your body protects you. You yawn, running your tongue over the elongated teeth, adjusting to the feel of them as you wait for the rest of your Pod mates to change.
They are used to it. Some have been embracing the change for over a hundred years, some for only a few. None of them remember their previous lives. Nothing that came before their drowning. Occasionally, you can see a few of them poking at their body. Poking at their scars, some large, some small and repetitive, as they wonder how they got them. The unanswered questions swirl in their brain as they explore a body that is at once so familiar and so alien.
Some scars are thin and small, regulated to hands and look like kitchen accidents. The cousin that found you earlier has a long, slightly puffy scar over the back of his right hand, and a collection of small white scars across his fingers. Your mother has a very deliberate looking line of burn marks that run along her inner arms. She often wears long sleeves to hide them. There are fifteen scars on your body; you’ve counted them. A particularly large one that curves around your right knee often gives you trouble in especially cold weather. Often, while you sit with a warm, wet towel draped over it, you make up stories about how you received such a scar. They range from increasingly risky scenarios involving pirates or a life of crime, to something as simple as a nasty fall.
On days when it aches to the point of sharp pain, you imagine you can remember the moment that you received it. Remember the red drops falling from the crescent mark and dripping onto the ground. Where exactly, you aren’t sure. Maybe a forest, it could also be a road at night; you just feel that it was somewhere dark.
The youngest of you is your brother. In human years he seems thirty-four, in selkie years he is three. When you go into town on the mainland people assume you are parent and child. At home though, you are his elder sibling.
He drowned with cement wrapped around his legs, but he does not remember why. There are marks on his back and ribs, some are thin, others are messily stretched and puckered. One is round and concaved. You often wonder what he did to deserve them. You believe he wonders the same every time a storm rolls in and he must rest his shoulder, rubbing the large mark there absentmindedly. He is sweet with the pups though; therefore he is not bad, not to the Pod. And Pod stays together.
Speaking of the pups, they are crying. Silent tears mat their fur of their faces leaving dark trails that their parent licks away. The change will be more painful for them. They were half human, half Selkie; the change will always be more painful for them. You bark, and they come to gather against you for comfort. Their tiny, fuzzy bodies snuggle into yours, wiggling as you nuzzle both of them. One sighs and begins to experiment with their flippers, raising first one, then the other to observe how they work. The other buries his head in your blubber, refusing to learn his new body.
Your mother, she is the lead female, the head of the Pod, the oldest. She barks from the edge of the pool; it is time to swim. You nudge the two pups towards her, almost shoving them in the water. They must learn to swim now. Their parents follow, grunting out encouragement, the sounds not quite seal, but not quite human.
Sinking into the water feels like falling into a chilly hug. The bubbles fly around your head as you get used to the feeling of the ocean’s cold, smothering kiss. It wakes you up. The feeling of the cold water against your warm flesh awakens a longing inside of you to swim and dive. You slowly make your way out of the underwater tunnel that feeds into the cave, being careful of the rock walls as you maneuver your body around the corners and edges, following your mother.
The water gets brighter, threaded through with moonlight and softly ascending bubbles that reflect it back. You send out a bubble of air just so you can burst it. It tickles your whiskers as it breaks apart. A few more minutes of lazily flapping your tail and you are out in the open water.
The ocean makes soft whumping noises above your head as the waves move and crash on the distant shore. The water fractures the moonlight and sends it spearing down, making patterns on your mother’s back as you wait for the rest of the Pod to appear.
This swim night is peaceful. Nothing approaches the Pod as you swim. Nothing beyond a few stray fish, one of which you snap up in your jaws and swallow whole. Changing burns a lot of calories, you’ve found. Even if you ate moments before, you will be hungry immediately after. You are not bothered by the feeling of spiny bones and almost plastic fins. The fish goes down and you continue around the forests of seaweed and underwater boulders.
Your little niece and nephew are flapping their flippers. Their swimming is disjointed and awkward. You watch their parent nudge them up and poke them in the right direction with a soft muzzle to the fluffy underbellies. They tire soon, and the Pod returns to the cave. Back to the soft ocean winds and the waiting human mother and father. You return to your house that is half patchwork and half sea smoothed wood. You return to home, to the warm nests that you make out of blankets and pillows. A few of you sleep together in the living room. Heads rest on bellies and legs get tangled in arms. Your older sister uses your blanket covered feet as a pillow, her arms twined around your ankles, holding you in place. It is warm.
It is three days later that you feel it, a soft call that begins at the bottom of your spine and travels out to the edges of your fingers and hair. You drop the trowel and the soil covered gloves that you were wearing while you planted an infant pumpkin vine in the Pod’s garden. It is your turn to take care of it today. The warm dirt was welcoming and peaceful as you began to delve into it, into the darker earth damp with water, the faint tang of metal rising to meet you.
When the call grows in intensity, firmly buzzing beneath your skin, you can’t sit still. You can tell the rest of the Pod thinks so too. They begin to move to the cave. All twenty of you begin moving slowly, then, when you near the ocean, you begin to run. Your feet pound the sand, sending up sparkling explosions behind you, and your breathing picks up because you must find the source of the soundless noise. Sand hits your shirt but you pay it no mind; you just keep running. You run until black stone encases you and wet air floods into your lungs just as they begin to burn.
This is not a swim; this is a tracking party. Your target dangles in front of you, a small form leashed to the ocean floor by a rope and a heavy rock. They struggle, bubbles escaping their mouth as they try to breath and only take in water. A child. The small frame guarantees it. You hear them try to scream, the sound echoes through the water but is drowned out by the sound of a boat motor retreating. This is a familiar scenario to you now. The ones retreating having dropped their burden into the sea.
The boy seems so small against the backdrop of the water that stretches for miles. Small, helpless, but still alive. He is skinny, too skinny almost, fragile ribs showing each time the water flutters around his shirt as he falls. It’s not a natural thinness, you think. He still tries to breath. You desperately wish that he could.
The child finally stops struggling and floats limply. The Pod floats some ways away, hidden by the murky water. You don’t react; you don’t interfere. You have seen this before; a total of five times since you were reborn. The first time, you tried to interfere, but the ocean swept you back, throwing you to the rocky floor as if you were caught in a riptide. You learned the unspoken rule that day; what falls in the ocean is it’s to claim.
You have to fight the urge though. The limp form bobbing in the underwater current bothers you. It’s almost like, in that moment, you poses two forms at the same time. One, your seal body, floats in a forced state of calm. The other, this one wholly human, curls its non-existent fingers and tries to fling itself forward, an ache rising in its throat like a silent scream. Almost a memory. Almost human and not Selkie. But it stays just that. Almost. Because, you are the Ocean’s now.
The child in the rope lets out one last gasp, only clinging to the faintest strand of life, thinner than the web of a spider. You almost wish that what happens next wouldn’t come.
A presence moves through the Pod, cold and soft. It can turn into a furious typhoon at a moments notice, but now it is quietly slinking forward towards its new prize. Its new toy. Its new child.
It swirls around the figure on the rope, cooing gently.
“Oh, Little One,” it cajoles. The words, the same ones you heard when you drowned, slither through you. “Do you want to live?” You want to cringe, maybe snort at the offer. The Ocean always fails to list its price for living. The ocean erases all. Memories are just one of the things it takes. Everything down to your name. It takes and takes until you know nothing but it. The Ocean loves your dependence on its mercy. Who you were is gone; there is nothing left but Ocean and Pod
The boy gives the faintest of nods. He hears the offer. He wants to live. The Ocean chuckles roughly and begins the process. You can’t watch the transformation. It is unlike your own, much harsher, much more bloody. That first rearranging of flesh.
You hear the pops and grinds though. The water brings the sound to your sensitive ears as if you were standing right next to it, as if the Ocean wants you to hear it. You find comfort in the fact that the boy won’t remember the pain, just the change. You will remember, though. You remember each one. All but your own.
The Ocean finishes its gruesome work and retreats, an adolescent seal pup left behind. He is smaller than you but much larger than the pups, who are being held against their parents’ stomachs so they won’t see. The boy will grow until he reaches maturity in his seal form, then he will stop, just as you did. His body will freeze in time and his eyes will become older than his form suggests and a sea will swirl within him.
Your mother floats forward and nudges the young seal with her nose. It is her task to welcome the new members since she is the oldest. The boy, the seal, gives her the briefest questioning nudge in return. Then the Pod floats forward. You brush flippers over the pup’s back and his head. The only comfort you can offer. He leans into the touches. When you return to the shore, he will meet everyone. In a week someone will adopt him. It may be your mother or one of your uncles or siblings. He will join the family and learn how to be human and seal. But, for now, you touch and float, and the rope and stone lay at the ocean floor, amongst trash and rocks and seaweed.
Forgotten.