Mona sits quietly, with her hands pressed to the cold window glass, watching the rain fall. There is a sort of sentience to the storm, that hissing wind, those tapping drops. The waves crashing down like angry fists upon the shore. Weeks ago, it would have been so easy to slip beneath those waves, sink into the sea, disappear into the mist. But now, she can only watch from the lookout as the sea creeps in along the shore, forever out of reach.

“Alright there, ma’am?” squeaks a passing housemaid, tense as a mouse in the dark. The storm is so vociferous, like an atonal opera, that Mona can barely perceive her question. They are so close, she thinks, those haunting depths where her people reside. Where her sisters, brothers, friends, all swim and sing free as fish, embracing the turbulent turning of the tide in a way a human never could.

She clenches her jaw. Such helplessness makes her blood boil, and the housemaid’s routine concern is only making it worse.

“Ma’am?” repeats the housemaid. This time, Mona pries her head away from the window, deep, brown eyes filled with the force of a raging rip current.

“What did he do with it?” It’s a simple question, though pointed, almost threatening, like a knife angled gently against the center of a throat. Her face is stone cold and just as unwavering. “I know you know.”

The housemaid hangs her head.

“He burned it,” she admits, and the silence that follows is as excruciatingly absolute a death sentence. In a way, it is one. Mona’s shallow, freckled shoulders sink into her chest as the storm rattles the windowpane like a prisoner would iron chains. In her mind, she sees the rocks where she used to rest, the beaches she used to sleep, the dolphins she used to befriend, all lost with one malicious lick of a flame. And for what reason but to feed a stubborn old whale-hunter‘s pride?

She lets her dark hair sweep over her face, like a widow’s veil.

To hide her sealskin is to confine her, but to burn it? Well, that is to shatter her hope. For, though the call of the sea may be stronger than ever, a selkie without their skin can never return home.