Shape-Shifter

Once there was a fisherman who thought he loved a woman with eyes of coal and a smile more warning than welcome.
Once there was a Selkie who was more danger than woman who was trapped by a man who didn't know the difference between love and control.

One night the fisherman drifted further out to sea than usual. It was there he saw the woman of his dreams. She was sprawled across a rock that barely jutted out between the waves. She wore nothing, but a silvery-grey pelt draped around her and a smile. He couldn't let her leave, he had to have her so he grabbed his net and when his boat got close enough he tossed it over her. She thrashed around, but couldn't escape, the net was too strong.

She snarled at him, her teeth needles, but he bore her no mind and snatched up her pelt. He'd heard stories of women like her who'd fall in love with those who'd freed them of the pelts. She fell silent after he took it and had looked at him with eyes too big and too empty to be human. She knew something was missing, but couldn't remember what. Everything was slipping now, she knew it was important, but she couldn't remember how. All she knew was she was trapped.

***

Stories spread throughout the village about the fisherman and his bride who seemed to have appeared out of thin air. Stories about how her beauty caused strangers to fall in love with her , but one look into her eyes warned them to stay away. And how the first day she arrived off the fisherman's boat she stumbled as though she wasn't used to having legs. How her legs were scarred with the imprint of a net. How some nights when the tide was especially high and the moon especially bright she could be seen weeping by the sea like a woman who had lost everything.

***

The strange woman one day bore a child with the same empty eyes. The woman adored her from the moment she'd first laid eyes on her and the fisherman was happy his bride was finally happy. The woman sang lullabies to her child that would sound like waves  crashing against cliffs, lullabies sung with such homesickness and despair that anyone who heard them would burst into tears.

Everyday when the fisherman went off the work, the woman would take her child on walks along the beach. They would find seashells and rocks to take home and the woman would tell her child stories of the rainbow fish who swam nearby and the seaweed that tickled anyone who swam by and the way the water wrapped around you if you swam deep enough until it seemed like you were the only person alive. The woman didn't remember how she knew all of this all she knew was how important it was that her daughter knew it too.

One day when the fisherman was away at work the woman stumbled across a locked chest. She wasn't a very curious woman, but the contents of the chest seemed to call to her. So she picked up one of the rocks they'd collected from the beach and slammed it against the lock. The lock shattered and fell to the ground.

She opened the chest and there laid a silver-grey pelt. It looked painfully familiar, but she couldn't remember from where. She rested her hand against the soft pelt and remembered. She remembered how it felt to have to have a pelt instead of skin. How it felt to cut through the cold waves like a knife, to swim surrounded by her sisters. To care about nothing except the cold water and the way the stars looked shining down her. She remembered how it felt to be free.

She couldn't think of anything she had ever wanted as much as she wanted to go back home. Home with its icy currents and rainbow fish, away from the man who had stolen her. But she couldn't leave her daughter behind. She knew the fisherman wouldn't care for her, wouldn't love her, at least not the way she did. She rushed to her child's room, knowing the fisherman would return any minute. She picked up her child and cradling her in her arms left the house that had been her prison for so many years.

The woman with her pelt draped around her and her child walked into the waves and on the other side of the waves appeared a silver-grey seal and a smaller brown cub.

**

The village still tells stories of the fisherman who came home one day to find his wife and daughter gone. Who now spends his days and nights roaming the sea searching for them. 
But the Selkie learned her lesson and keeps herself and her daughter far away from him in their ocean paradise