Salt. Blood. Foam. 

These were the sacred fluids that invigorated my being. The pang of hunger. The rolling thunder of the deep.

For years beyond counting, I have roamed these waters. I don’t recall a time before. There has always been the ice and the foam, the blood and the salt. Days and nights intermingle, my journeys long and my destinations merely suggestions in my mind. It’s all the same. The squid taste the same, with their long arms that desperately wrap around my snout in feeble attempts to beg for mercy. The cod grows bland against my tongue. Even the blood of penguin tastes of iron and dust. 

I have grown bored. 

In the distance, human ships sparkle like stars against the night sky. They used to be a rarity, however like with most sicknesses, they become progressively more noticeable over time. Like a creeping vine or an open, angry wound. Spreading when not watched. Infesting when not tended to. 

Sitting amongst the rocks that adorn the shore, many larger and heavier than I, my eyes follow the vessel. I ponder a most heretical of thoughts. My flipper twists and grows long and bony, the suggestions of fingers forming and the biting cold of the wind feasting upon the naked and vulnerable skin that the transformation has revealed. I look to the mangled hand, webbing curtained between the digits, and then back out to their ships. I can only think of the taste of dust and the chore of the hunt.  Certainly another one of my kind would call upon every insult known to both our kind and theirs to chastise me for considering it.

But it has been many seasons since I saw another one of my own kind. Since I felt the touch of another. Since I listened to the melody of an instrument.

Too long.

The bony hand receded back into a leathery flipper, the bite of the frigid antarctic air becoming too much to bare. Foam-laden waters lapped at the shore, beckoning their rebellious child to come back home, as if knowing my thoughts. As if scrying my heart and intentions. And much like that rebellious child that the sea deemed me to be, I hardened my heart and ignored her pleas. My bestial form intact, I feel the embrace of the waters once more, the shore giving way as my form carried me swiftly towards the strange vessel. I would follow it into a new dawn, a new chapter. Like a stowaway sneaking in through the tollgates, I would find passage to my cure. 

X.x.x.x.x.X

Regret.

It was not a strong enough word to describe Lagan’s disposition. There was no word strong enough for the intensity of his anguish. He had been seduced by his own imagination, lured into the trap that so many apex creatures fall to when they commit the sin of vanity. 

Oh naive selkie of the antarctic isles, did you believe that there would be a better life for you than the one given by mother sea? Did your arrogance provide you safe passage, not to the paradise that your own mind conjured, but instead to a plane of suffering beyond comprehension? 

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The foam, the salt, the steady heartbeat of mother when gliding into the deepest troughs of her bosom. 

Those are all gone now. The blood remains, however it is cold and bitter. Fish on a chopping block. The crunch of a bone as a knife severs through it. The wet plop of guts and entrails into a bucket. Another desecrated body dumped into a bucket full of it’s own kin, tails standing out like a grotesque bouquet.  

In the wet prep room at Happy Fins Marine Park, a lone man stood at the counter amongst the tile and stainless steel. Blood of the daily feeding rations spilled over the fillet of the edge of the prep table, dripping onto the floor and escaping toward the drain. Even in death, the creature’s most core fluids sought home. 

If only you knew how far from home you were, little ones. 

The last carcass from the styrofoam crate, another one identical to it’s disemboweled kin in the bucket, it’s eyes glazed over and staring into the next plane, the man-shaped creature rubs a thumb along it’s agap jaw. Oh to see this lifeless little being move and writhe, to feel that rush of a hunt on an empty belly. His body tingled with yearning at just the thought of it. With no one around to observe, with no warden around to chastise him, the beast opened his muscular jaw to reveal teeth that did not give way to mastication or grinding, only ripping and tearing.

Around the head of the fish it clamped, teeth sinking in and breaching the wall of scales. The mackerel’s cold and stiff body hanging as lifeless and dull as a soft cock out of his mouth as tissue gave way to his formidable fangs. The spine severed, the body dropped to hang by a tendril of gore before finally that lifeline snapped and the meat landed on the cutting board, splashing the pool of bile and filth from it’s fallen brethren. 

Staring out the window that sat above the cutting board, the man with the webbed fingers watched the morning sun peak over the horizon. Far, far from any ocean, was this bastion of suffering. Chain link fences, glass walls, concrete pens, these kept the prisoners in place as tourists passed through for gawking rights. On the far end of the complex was a pen that stood empty, a shallow pool coated in cracks, stains, and algae was enclosed by a rusted fence. Merely feet away from fallen leaves and trees that he should have never of seen in his natural life. Now they grow and die, just to grow again, mocking him with their timeless freedom that he once had. The pen stood empty, amongst the decorative placards about ‘Leopard Seals’ there was a stained and distressed sign that stated ‘I’m on Vacation!’. 

The warden had her jokes.

To be ancient does not require for one to be wise. Foolishness and vanity carried Lagan to the humans, it carried him to the warden. She promised him understanding of his secret, she promised to show him to world. 

He had been as foolish as any other mortal man to have believed her. 

What the humans lacked in longevity, they made up for tenfold in cruelty and craftsmanship. They’d mastered the trap and the cage, they’d prided themselves on ways to keep prisoners. Sometimes beasts. Sometimes one another. Bindings and cages come in different shapes and forms, just like the selkie did. 

The dolphins were bound here by walls the could never hope to climb over. He was bound to this place by distance from home and the complications of this society that the humans had dreamt up. The hall door opened and footsteps and the jingling of keys echoed by the sounds of someone bound here by a paycheck, to pay for the debts that the same society had dreamt up.

No longer alone, Lagan chewed on his mouthful of stale, decaying mackerel head, crushing it easily as if it were the consistency of a fortune cookie. A young human, barely an adult, walked by and murmured a groggy ‘good morning’ as they passed by on the way to the lockers. He didn’t respond. The warden didn’t like it when he tried to talk to her fellow humans. 

Swallowing down his treat and rinsing his hands of the sins against the fodder, the bucket was lifted with a creaking groan from the handle. There was miserable work to be done.