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Empowering Generations

The Last Selkie

Picture of Killian MacDonald

Killian MacDonald

American
Writing from UK

My grandmother walks me down to the sea’s edge, the lights in their variations shimmering in the sky above the Shetland Isles. She whispers into her smartwatch to dim the lights back at our house up the cliffside, and as the porch vanishes into the darkness, the stars interlocked in the colours above us brighten even more.

“It gets darker every year as more of the Shetlanders move away. The Mirrie Dancers are coming back to us, Eilidh.” She says my name with the same Gaelic lilt each time, as if she can hold onto it instead of the generations that lost the language and this old croft.
“This croft is your grandmother,” my mother used to say before taking the engineering job in the new city. “She brought our family back, reclaimed the land, after generations of our bloodline growing up in Canada.”

The aurora starts to fade, and yet Màmó smiles brighter. I want the colours to come back.
“Mamaidh is working on an aurora simulation at the cultural centre in Scotia Gael. She’ll take me there when we move.”

“Your mother will never recreate this. Close your eyes and listen to the sea. This is more than the sky’s Dancers. Do you hear the waves?”

Màmó ignores my mention of Scotia Gael, starting the selkie tale again. “Long ago, selkies were seals in the sea, but they could shed their skins and become human. They were beautiful, mysterious, and lived among us, sometimes marrying and having children. But they always longed for the sea, returning if they found their seal skins.”

I cut her off with my usual question before she speaks of our ancestors. “If we are Selkies, then where are our seal skins?”

“I’ve always said we lost more than the land in the clearances.”

“We lost our culture, our language, our way of life,” I rattle off the list of everything she still holds as the consequences of over 250 years ago. The list of everything she fought so hard to reclaim.

“But still I hear the sea calling to us, her children, don’t you?”

I shrug but try to listen to the waves.

There’s no ringing. Nothing vibrates against my pulse. No sharp tone of frustration or
worry as my name echoes in the wind, getting summoned from the house. How else would the sea call one of her children? All I hear is the slap of waves.

“Màmó,” I moan. “It’s cold, and I have to be on the network for chemistry class early. Can we go home?”

She doesn’t move.

My grandmother was fourteen when her parents could finally afford a trip to Scotland, the first time our bloodline returned in eight generations. Thirty more years passed before she found the records linking our ancestors to this croft and the Shetland shore.

At fourteen, I’m packing my last box to be sent via Scotia Transit as we leave the croft for Scotia Gael: a futuristic utopia where tradition meets innovation, and my mother has worked on its planning since before I was born. It’s a place far from the quiet remoteness that has isolated Shetlanders for centuries, where every citizen’s needs are met by advanced AI systems, ensuring efficient resource distribution, excellent education, and unrivalled healthcare.

I touch Màmó’s hand and notice the wrinkles forming, like the patterns the sea leaves on the sand as the tide recedes.

“Try one more time, Eilidh,” Màmó whispers. “The sea doesn’t call with words but with the pull of tides in your blood. Close your eyes and feel it.”

I close my eyes before she starts her old tales again, letting the sound of the waves wash over me. As she tightly holds my hand, I imagine, just for a moment, the cool, slick touch of a seal’s skin over my bones, the saltwater in my veins.

When I open my eyes, Màmó watches with a knowing smile. “You felt it, didn’t you?”
I nod, though it already feels like just my imagination. I try to smile as I whisper back, as though sharing her secret, “Maybe we are Selkies after all.”

Màmó’s smile widens. “We are, Eilidh. And whatever happens next, you mustn’t give up on the sea. Not forever.”

Back at the house, I can’t sleep, so I keep packing, dropping my wetsuit into the box marked for repurposing.

***
My grandmother smiles as the other girls in Year 11 do their Gaelic recitations. I don’t
know how to tell her that we all memorised the sounds of our passages quickly last night and barely know what we are saying.

She likes these parts of the Highlander Cultural Centre in Scotia Gael, not the parts that are Mamaidh’s pride and joy: the simulations and expansive walls live-streaming from remote parts of the land we’ve all left. Màmó only watches the smaller window we installed in our flat in Tower 46. I haven’t looked out the window once. I’d rather see the city full of bright colours like the old painted fisher houses along the coast of the Isle of Skye and cylindrical farms layered to mimic a horizon full of Highland hills.

When the assembly ends, I meet my friends in the main hall, and a few students point to the small live streams and data sensors on the three-storey map of the Highlands, checking in on their original homes.
A fellow Shetlander squeals when our islands light up, Orkney quickly following to mark that the Mirrie Dancers have been spotted in the north. Synchronized with the magnetic activity detected by the sensors, the hall darkens as projected lights flare across the ceiling, twirling and fluttering with the Auroras in the sea.

“Isn’t it amazing?” I hear a girl in Year 12 exclaim. “It’s like we’re there.”

I nod with the others, but my thoughts drift back to that last aurora I saw with Màmó two years ago on our croft. Luckily, that slick, cold sensation doesn’t come over me again. There’s no slap of the waves trying to lure me into the depths of the sea.
The one my mother made is better than the real thing.

***
My grandmother’s brow furrows, a familiar reaction whenever Max speaks. Since his proposal, he has stopped trying to include her in conversations.

I thought she’d love him and bond over his fascination with land outside the cities. As an agricultural geneticist, Max came to Scotia Gael from Edelweiss City in the Alps on a transfer programme when Parliament completed the lowland preservation projects and declared the Highlands ready for rewilding.

“Ignore my mother-in-law,” my father advised Max after our celebratory dinner a month ago. “She only tells old stories. I doubt she’s even accessed the news on her lenses in years.”
But tonight, we need her. Tonight is about the croft.

When we tell Màmó that my parents and I have decided to gift the land for expansion into Shetland, she cries. Dad predicted she’d love the idea of the croft being cared for rather than sitting empty. Mum had whispered, “But she is the croft,” before promoting the rewilding projects at the cultural centre.
Later, I sit at Màmó’s feet as she knits by the livestream window. It feels like a small gift to soothe her, reminiscent of the times before we left Shetland.

“I worry, Eilidh, that’s all. The croft is your way back home.”

“This is home,” I remind her, squeezing her hand. “Mum and Dad are renting a flat in Tower 72, so Max will move in here after the wedding. You can go with them, stay with us, or find your place. Max would love you to stay.”

Or at least Max loves me enough not to suggest otherwise. Still, her hands tremble, and the stormy grey in her eyes fades.

“He doesn’t know the sea. How can he rewild our land when he doesn’t understand what wild means to the sea? Think of all the things he could find and never understand.”

“Màmó,” I say, exasperated, trying to divert her gaze from the window to me. “Has any woman in our family had a seal skin in generations? Perhaps the gift is long gone even if we found one.”

“The water remembers,” she quips, as confident as every time we stood with our toes in the sand. “The sea calls, even if the world finds silence. Her rhythm will continue to beat on the shores of the Isles.”

***

My grandmother holds my two-year-old daughter in a distant embrace. “She doesn’t look like a Shetlander.”

“Mother!” Mum scolds.
She sees Fiona’s darker skin and the coiled texture of her hair and thinks that is what Màmó refers to. Somehow, I knew what Màmó sought in my daughter.

And it isn’t there as though the colours of the Mirrie Dancers wouldn’t reflect right in the eyes of someone who may never see them for herself beyond the simulation. Or that a
splash from the sea wouldn’t pearl into droplets in the same pattern on her toes if she didn’t grow up with them buried in the cold, seaweed-coated sand.

Màmó doesn’t see a child that could be wrapped in the skin of a seal. Had she once said the same thing over my cradle? Or at least wondered it?

I snatch Fiona from Grandma’s lap.

This child, my child, is our family’s future. Not our past.

The past isn’t meant to survive.

As I turn to find one of Fiona’s toys, I only notice that Grandma has stacked a few of
her favourite sweaters near her beloved chair in the fisheries pattern of our specific isle. She didn’t look at me when she cut the cuff of one and unravelled the yarn.
By morning, the spools of yarn from three vanished sweaters rested on the shelf where we had begun to keep Fiona’s things, and a new blanket started on Grandma’s needles. When Fiona cries from the nursery for her formula, goosebumps race up my arms as her cry echoes an eerie sea.

***
Grandma’s been gone since Fiona’s fifth birthday, yet today, her ashes are what I notice most when we return from the doctor. She’s just the first layer in the new government- issued urn on the mantle, allowing us an ounce of ashes from the biological recycling centre as a memory.

I wonder who my ashes will rest between and if the layers will mix when the urn is one day moved off the planet. When that happens, will it matter if mine are layered before Fiona’s, or will I still be able to spend eternity with my baby girl enveloped in my embrace?

Max and I haven’t spoken on the Glide home. He slips away in silence to Fiona’s room, where he’ll fall asleep at her side. I can’t watch her sleep anymore. Her room is clinical and cold, no matter how much I try to drown out the beeps and soften the bedding.
When I’m alone, I turn on the livestream of the Croft. “Show me the sea,” I whisper.

There’s no aurora tonight, and to get a clearer view, the streaming drone shines its light to illuminate the coast. I dreamed of a lifetime for my daughter to see the aurora simulation at the cultural centre. If I only had time to give her one sight, would it not have been better for it to be the real thing?

The coastline is now a wild, untamed paradise, with native grasses swaying in the wind and seabirds nesting undisturbed. Seals bask on the rocks, and otters play in the kelp- rich waters. There’s no path consistently trodden as the women who came before me walked down to the sea in the moonlight, listening to her call and singing the song in our bones.
Grandma rebuilt that path. And I never cared to walk it again.

As I watch the waves lapping on an empty shore, the doctor’s words echo in rhythm with the sea: “We’ve never lost a child in Scotia Gael. And I promise I’ll do everything I can to ensure your daughter isn’t our first. That’s why we’re all here, isn’t it? To ensure every child is close by for the best of care.”

And as the tide pulls out each time, I hear the sea whisper back: they may not have lost a child, but they’ve killed many a selkie.

“Eilidh?”

Max finds me sitting on the living room floor, still staring at the livestream.

“I need you to go to the croft.”

He kneels behind me, wrapping his arms tight enough that our hands overlap. Will we
get wrinkles here? Or will we choose for every mark to be wiped away until Fiona’s grandchildren are born?

“I have no reason to go. We’ve finished our work there. You know I’m due in Orkney for a survey this week.”

“Make an excuse. Please. For Fiona.”

“You’re sounding like your grandmother.”

The words come as fast as thick, hot tears. “She needs the sea. That sea.”

“The land is supposed to be untouched from now on. That’s what we agreed to. And
even if I managed to get some, they’d never let me bring it back to Scotia Gael.”

“Find a way,” I plead, my voice breaking. “Don’t you hear it?”

“The sea?”

“No,” I say, salty tears blurring the view of everything that’s changed. “The silence.”

**
Fiona sleeps amidst the whirring of machines, never having learned to sleep any
differently, though their number increased as her health declined.

Max returns late, his clothes damp and his face drawn. He carries a small, sealed
container, the kind used for transporting delicate samples. He places it gently on the table, his eyes meeting mine with a mixture of relief and something darker.

“I got it,” he says quietly. “But it wasn’t easy. There are patrols now, and the weather… it’s unpredictable.”

I reach for the container, my hands trembling. “This is how we save her. I’m sure of it.”
He nods, but his eyes flicker with unspoken worries. “Be careful, El. The sea is different now. It’s not the same as it was.”

I nudge her arm to the side, gently tugging out the blanket my grandmother made her. As I pour the vial along the edge of the wool, that slick, cold feeling creeps over my skin for the first time in twenty years.

When I wrap the damp sweater around Fiona, I whisper, “Maybe this will be enough. Maybe this will give you your selkie skin.”

Max watches us, his expression unreadable. “I hope so,” he murmurs. “I hope so.”

Later, as Fiona sleeps peacefully and the monitors seem to calm, I sit by her side, clutching the edge of that blanket. For a moment, I wonder what might linger in my bones if I found my way back to the sea.

But no one sees the Mirrie Dancers anymore, so no one is guided home.