The Girl With No Hands and Other Tales by Angela Slatter

Author:Angela Slatter
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Short Stories (Single Author), General, Fantasy, Fairy Tales, Fiction, Short Stories
ISBN: 9780980628876
Publisher: Ticonderoga Publications
Published: 2010-09-08T07:00:00+00:00

* * *

Skin

I was sixteen when he plucked me from the sea.

Caught in his fisherman’s net, I thought I would drown until he lifted me into the boat and began to hack at the rough fibres to release me. I should have known then how soft his heart was, to see him ruining a net so, but I was terrified. In his haste he cut me, split my tail a good eight inches and saw the fine-boned ankles lying within. He sat back, astonished, and I fought my way free of the pelt until I was naked and shivering in my human skin, huddled at the bottom of that little, little boat.

His family told him to throw me back, to return my other skin and send me home.

I learned his language and gave him children, two boys and three girls, all in the space of ten years. We were happy, for a long time, in our cottage on the tiny island inhabited by no more than fifteen families. They were all related, his cousins at one remove or other. And they were dark, some of them, so I knew they had selkie blood for all they thought themselves better than me. It made me laugh to see his mother come a-visiting, mouth all twisted like she’d sucked on something bitter, she with her eyes so black you couldn’t tell the pupil from the iris. She’d look at my children, her grandbabies, and something in her face would soften as she watched them frolic on the seashore like pups. Sometimes she’d look out to sea and wear a longing that her mind didn’t know, but her blood did.

We were happy until my man began to drink. I’d made him prosperous, for the shoals gather where selkie wives bide. His nets were never empty and the purse was always heavy from the sales at the mainland markets. The money it was, that led him astray. He would come home drunk, barely able to row across the short span of water separating us from the town, throw himself onto the bed and snore fit to bring the roof down.

When I begged him to stop he turned on me, called me fish and beat me for daring to question him. He was no longer the man who had saved me from a net.

I could have gone to the beach, knelt down and spoken to the waters, told the fish to go away. I could have pulled my old pelt down from the top of the cupboard where he’d hidden it all those years ago, as if I wouldn’t sniff out my own skin. I could have taken to the water once more and left them all behind, but my children held my heart. My pride yearned though, for revenge, and I called up a storm just as my mother and aunts had taught me long ago; called it up one eve as he rowed home, worse for liquor and new-found temper.

They say there had never been such a storm and there’s never been one since.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.