OBJECTS: A Modern Selkie Love Story Read online

OBJECTS: A Modern Selkie Love Story

  Meghan Edge

  Copyright 2015 Meghan Cox

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited.

  Disclaimer: The persons, places, things, and otherwise animate or inanimate objects mentioned in this novel are figments of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to anything or anyone living (or dead) is unintentional. The author apologizes however this is a work of fiction.

  Amelia and the Selkies

  The key isn't the problem. The problem is me.

  I stare into the mirror at the sullen-eyed girl there. I'm broken, damaged. I'm cursed. I'm trapped in a fairy tale story and I don't even have the looks to be a proper heroine. Pathetic. I wonder sometimes if my parents knew what they were doing when they left me with the key necklace. It's my object, glittering and silver, resting between too-large breasts just over where my heart beat-beat against my ribs. I'm not good enough to watch out for the little ones. They shouldn't ask it of me. I can't guide them when they need me to. I would lock them all up in our house by the ocean, our hearts safely locked away by the objects we wear.

  They would never know the hurt of rejection. They would never be a slave to their emotions. They would never feel passion, but they'd also never know how much it killed to have someone think you weren't good enough. They would be blissfully ignorant of all their faults, unlike me.

  But that's a perfect world.

  I sigh, and finger the key. The chain is too delicate. I'm large and lumpy, motherly. This necklace is meant for a fae child who has magical adventures to go on. It shouldn't have come to a selkie that more resembled a manatee than a seal. Seals were sleek, beautiful and graceful. I'm plodding and slow. I'm dull.

  I turn away from the mirror. If I don't look at myself, it's not so bad. In my mind I can pretend to be romantically gorgeous. I can pretend I have charm and wit. I can pretend to have style. When I don't look at the truth of it, I can pretend to be someone else.

  How was anyone ever going to love me when I was so... ordinary.

  My siblings were lucky. They were creative. They had taken their objects, the material possessions that replaced the skins of our ancestors, and made them into works of art. Waverly's plain denim jacket was studded and patched until it was covered in her favorite bands and flowers. Whatever buttons and band pins she didn't use, Marcus had taken and fixed to his bowler hat. He tied a scarf around it, giving the plain black felt a pop of color. Gabriella drew delicate drawings of mermaids and stars and sea shells and fairies all over the thin grey scarf that wound itself around her throat. Eileen wrote poetry on her leather bracelet, and when those words wore off, she wrote more. My beautiful artist babies, cursed to hold tight to these things until the right person came along, the right mate, and lifted the spell.

  Then there is me. The eldest. The plain girl with no talent, no pretty poetic words, no artist's creativity. Just a simple girl with a simple key on a chain. I can't save them from the curse, and I can't protect them from emotions forever.

  I wish my parents had found someone else. I wish they hadn't gone away. But wishing this doesn't change anything.

  The Selkie and the Mermaid

  or

  Waverly's Story

  Besotted. That is how I could describe the feeling. Not in love, never in love, especially with the jacket to protect me, but I am drunk on her, obsessed with her. When I see her, with her long blond hair and vibrant blue eyes, my heart skips faster in my chest. I feel like it could burst from my ribs in a rainbow pink explosion of my insides. I position myself so I can see her during the day. My moments of viewing her are few and fleeting. I pass her in the hall and she doesn't even look at me. I stare at her at lunch and she laughs with her friends. She doesn't notice and I shrug further into the jacket, keeping the whole world at bay. Protecting my heart.

  And then...

  And then...

  And then she does notice. It fills me with a feeling I don't even have a name for, but I'm pretty sure it's close to happy. I've never felt happy before, so I can't be sure. My kind, we don't feel much of anything, but this seems important. She returns my stare, knowing that I've been watching her, a smile on her lips.

  We're paired together on an English assignment. It's a retelling of a fairy tale. She likes that she's partnered with me. She loves stories, but she doesn't have the detail for language that I do. She says she'll teach me to color my hair if I can teach her to write. I tell her that I don't need to know how to color my hair and it makes her laugh.

  “With a punk rock jacket like that, I would think you'd have blue or purple or some kind of color,” she giggles. I bristle at her mention of my object. The jacket feels a thousand times heavier when she looks at me with her mischievous grin. I know it's impossible but for a moment I wonder if I'll be crushed under the weight of worn denim, band buttons and rose patches.

  “Blue would be nice,” I allow. Blue like her eyes.

  “Like the ocean,” she suggests. Pressing my lips together, I nod, but I know that water was the furthest thing from my mind.

  “Like the ocean,” I echo. We settle on the Little Mermaid. It fits the theme of our conversation, but it makes her uncomfortable. She doesn't say anything, but tension lingers in her eyes and the set of her mouth.

  We don't date like usual people. We don't go to movies, we don't walk down the boardwalk in town together holding hands (although we do go to the boardwalk once, but she refuses to set foot on the sand). She doesn't question my jacket and I don't explain it to her. How could I? I don't want to love her. I don't want to be more obsessed with her than I already am. Than her smile lighting up my life. Than her brilliant eyes seeing into my soul. I don't need to give her more, and so I keep my jacket on my shoulders, protecting myself. We don't date like normal people, but the passion is there. It simmers just under our actual flesh, waiting for one of us to break as we walk side-by-side in the hall or drive in my car, listening to music. We look like friends, but we are always together.

  When I do convince her to sit by the sea, the day is overcast but it is not supposed to rain. We are on the beach near my house. I do not invite her in. I don't want to make the others suspicious. She refuses to go near the water. I smell the rain before it comes. Forecast or not, apparently it's coming.

  “I love that smell,” I tell her, both of our eyes cast up at the low gray clouds, heavy with moisture. She's pale and washed out in the weak light, and she's just as beautiful if a little more fragile looking. Maybe fragile is the wrong word. She looks worried. “I love that smell before the rain comes.”

  “I-I,” she stammers but nothing else comes out. She pulls me close, our first kiss on her lips, mine pressed closed in surprise. She leaps away as if she's been scalded. As the first drops of rain start plummeting from the sky, she runs down the sand, toes touching the water. I blink and I do not see her.

  She's gone.

  I button my jacket. I've never kept it buttoned, always leaving it open to reveal my tee shirt. People don't look at me strangely when it's open. I almost look normal that way, but the weekend after she ran from me, I button my jacket all the way closed. The collar is tight against my neck like my sister's scarf and I pop it up, points nearly touching my ears as I shrug inside of it. My eldest sister, the mother of us all, she is the only person to notice.

  “It's your skin,” she says. I scowl at her.

  “I know the legend. If you give them your skin, they capture you until you can find it again,” I say obediently. The curse of our family had been well-drilled into my
mind since childhood. I was never going to forget it. “The jacket and other clothing replaces the skin of mythology. If the wrong person gets my jacket, they get my heart.”

  “But the right person won't need your jacket to have your heart,” Amelia reminds me. “The right person will already have it. You'll know.”

  I think of the electric kiss. The shock and surprise. Her running away. “The right person must not have come yet.”

  Amelia sighs. “They will. You just have to be ready for them. Don't worry, you'll know.”

  She sounded like I already did.

  It rains on Monday as well, and my friend is not in school. I do not see her Tuesday morning, but as I walk to lunch down our familiar route and I pass the ladies restroom, I am pulled in and attacked by lips and teeth and arms. I laugh. It's a bubbling feeling in