Noreen

Clam

"Hello," the man says, his voice hoarse and touched with an accent I can't quite place. It's both familiar and unfamiliar, like an echo distorted by many speakers. He sits up, elbows on his knees, big brown eyes staring into mine. He's a beautiful, lithe creature bronzed from the summer sun. Long, black hair clings to his shoulders and chest. He brushes it to one side, and while I don't mean to, my eyes travel down to his hip, where a toothy impression drizzles blood onto the cast seal skin.

"You're—" I begin, almost forgetting to keep pressure on my own injury. "You're a—"

"Liam," he says, flashing a bright smile. His hand extends.

"No." 

"No?" Liam tilts his head quizzically, webbed fingers still outstretched. 

Shaking his hand, I try again. "I mean, you're a selkie." 

His fingers engulf my own, but where mine are stiff and cold, his are warm. He squeezes, unbothered by the blood on mine, and leans back with an understanding sigh. "Yes, a selkie. That is me." Those brown eyes are staring into mine again. "Who are you?"

But I can't wrap my head around this. The obvious answer to his question doesn't come out of my mouth. Instead, I look from seal skin to man incredulously, and the words stumble off my lips, "Aren't selkies supposed to be women?"

"No!" he barks, his chest quaking with laughter. At the same time he winces. "Legends they are always changing, but when they were made, many fishermen and sailors were at sea. Many more were looking for a woman than a man."

I smile a little, take a moment to catch my breath and my thoughts. My mind races, wanting to ask so many questions, wanting to learn so many things. I reach for the edge of his seal skin. He frowns, tucks it back underneath his feet. "Sorry," I mumble, but Liam only shrugs.

"Who are you?" he asks again. He touches his waist, where the wound seems little more than a scratch. "I have seen you before."

"I'm Noreen. You remember me?" I say slowly, confused. At this point I can feel my heartbeat behind my eyes.

"I remember this, Noreen," he says and gestures to the drooping daisy. "Very stupid, I thinks to myself, to be planting in sand where the tide runs." He takes the flower, gives it a sniff, and settles for twirling it idly. "Not even any roots." 

"It's a memorial," I say, snatching it back. With the daisy restored to its rightful place, I look back at Liam. Dusk dims his skin. His dark hair, drying slightly, blows back against his shoulders in the salt wind. I wipe my sandy fingers on my thigh. "About ten years ago, an extratropical storm blew through the air. Lots of damage, up and around the entire coast from Portsmouth to Bar Harbor.  A trawler crashed on the rocks around the cove. Do you remember that?"

Liam eases off the seal skin pelt, folding it in his arms. "Not many crashes around here," he says. He takes a breath, and points to the dark rocks where the sun has fully disappeared. "This one crashed on the other side of the rocks?" 

I nod. Even that tiny action sends my stomach churning. When I look at my calf, it's like the blood is rushing out faster, a constant stream that pools around my leg for a just a moment before the sand absorbs it.  

"Did you see bodies?" I ask. 

To this day, Chris was the only person on that trawler whom the coast guard hadn't found so much as a fingernail from. The rest of the crew had been found, some bloated, some just a collection of parts. For a long time I didn't want to think of my brother like that, like some pale bluish mass floating along in the sea, but when we buried his empty casket, I wished I could have had even a piece of him to put under the ground. We needed that peace, we needed that closure. 

Liam nods. 

"Survivors?"

He thought a long time. "Yes. One." 

My heart skipped a beat. There hadn't, not even as they pulled the bodies, been a sign of life from that trawler. 'No survivors' the police had told the media. 

"What happened to him?"

Red and blue lights flood the horizon. A siren wails through the early night. Liam rises. 

Panic makes my heart flutter. "It's okay!" I gasp, lunging for his arm. I miss with a mouthful of sand, and he backs up several feet. "What was the survivor's name?"

His big brown eyes are guilty now. He turns away. "Christopher," he says, and then he's on his feet running through the shallows, scrambling over rock and sharp barnacles. He ducks down near the spray of the surf, and when the next wave crashes over the rocks there's only a massive grey harbor seal. A firetruck rumbles into the desert lot and a cruiser pulls beside my car. Not far behind is an ambulance. 

"Must be a slow night," I say as the cop reaches me first. He asks me what happened, but when I start to tell him, all I see are Liam's footprints, deep pockets of sand that the incoming tide bubbles and rolls through.