The Seduction of Water Read Free

her mouth. She took the chimes from the windows and closed the flue in the chimney so she couldn’t hear the wind whistling through it. She scolded her daughter for chanting a rhyme while skipping rope. She’d never scolded her for anything before.
    The day after the equinox the farmer thought that things would go back to normal, but they didn’t. She went about her chores like a thing made of stone. She made the porridge, but she burned it. The animals shied away at her touch. When she looked at her children it was as if she were looking through clear water.
    Things went on like this through the summer. The farmer hoped at first that she would change, but when she didn’t he hardened his heart against her. It was the girl who followed her mother when she left the house at night. She’d find her mother curled in a ball between the cows in the barn or wedged between the rocks on the shore, trying to find a place where she could cheat the sleeplessness that seemed to be always upon her now. As the nights grew cooler she saw her mother shivering in her thin nightdress out in the open and she thought that if things went on like this her mother would freeze to death.
    It was a night in September—the night before the autumnal equinox—that the temperature, as if in anticipation of the planet’s tilt away from the sun, dropped so low that the girl could see her mother’s breath turn into ice on the rocks around her. The heavy mist from the sea was turning to crystals in her mother’s hair, so heavy that she could hear the strands chiming in the cold sea breeze. If she didn’t do something her mother would be frozen solid by the morning.
    She ran back to the house and opened the blanket chest but the farmer had already heaped the extra quilts on his sons’ beds. Her hands scraped against the bottom of the trunk, scrabbling over the rough wood until her fingers bled from the splinters. She dug her nails into the wood just to feel the pain and then, to her surprise, the bottom pried loose and her hands sunk into something warm and silky soft.
    She thought it was something alive.
    Even when she lifted the heavy fur up and saw that it was an animal skin she still couldn’t believe it was a dead thing. The skin pulsed with warmth and glowed like a burning coal. She held it to her cheek and smelled the ocean in it. She heard the ocean in it trapped in each bristling hair, the way a shell holds the sound of the ocean deep in its whorls.
    She wrapped the fur around her shoulders and ran to where her mother lay between the rocks above the beach. Instead of weighing her down, the shawl of fur seemed to float on the wind behind her back and buoy up her steps.
    When she found her mother she thought she was too late, that her mother had already frozen to death. A fog was rolling in from the sea and as it touched her mother’s skin it froze in a fine skein of ice so that her mother seemed to be caught in a net strung out of crystal beads. But then she noticed that her mother’s breath was crystallizing too and she knew her mother was still alive. She lay the fur over her mother and crawled in under it, wedging herself between her mother and the rocks. Instantly she felt her mother’s skin grow warm; the net of ice melted and soaked into the soft, heavy fur.
    The mother and daughter slept together on the beach beneath the cloak of fur, but even as they slept, the girl could feel her mother’s fingers in her hair, stroking away her fear.

    I sometimes fell asleep at this point too. There was a corner of my blanket that had unraveled and then matted back together like a piece of wool that’s been felted. After my mother had gone, I liked to tuck this under my cheek and pretend it was the selkie’s skin or the fur collar of my mother’s coat, the one she wore if she was going someplace special: a party the local college was throwing for her, dinner with her editor across the river in Rhinebeck, or a reading in the city. These