Heading Inland

The clouds are a vulnerable, wet grey that would come away if he touched them, like the sloughing skin of half-cured paint.  The man looks toward the shoreline, invisible behind the battlements of row houses, toward the sound of keening.  The sound draws him out of himself, through the window of the silent house, like a clown's string of knotted handkerchiefs.

On the shore, the selkie has lost her seal-coat.  She sits on her haunches, naked in a shawl of dark hair, bone-white against sea-black stone, eyes watery as oysters. 

She watches the ocean drawing back and drawing back and drawing back

and drawing back and drawing back...

On the far side of the world, the moon gathers the sea.

Under the clouds, the world hunches its shoulders.  The selkie tips back her head, eyes like wellsprings, and sings.  Her voice pries at the horizon: 

Let me out. 

Let me in. 

Where the crinkled tinfoil of ocean meets the soggy box-lid of cloud, there's a narrow space, a gleam.  She works her fingers into it, spreads them wide until the webs between them stretch to translucency, blush with sunrise, pull apart. 

The man stays at the window, watches the pinking edges of row house battlements, reaches for his cup on the dresser beside him, muses about doing the dishes, wonders where he put the charger for his cell phone and how he made it this one step past grief to where the coffee is, thinks that maybe today he'll go outside, smooth a hand across the sky. 

In the gentling, sidelong light, the selkie combs her fingers through her hair, blinks hard until her eyes are dry.  Then she picks her way carefully over the rocks, heading inland.