Dialogue #3

Before she knew it, the tide had turned
and Solanna had lost her sealskin.

And not only that, now she had
arms and legs and feet like a girl.

She looked around frantically
for her sealskin,

couldn't see it anywhere
for an age,

and then, looking out to sea,
she saw it, bobbing on a big breaker

before it went under
and disappeared.

She tried to swim after it,
but not being a seal anymore,

she couldn't get past the waves
and was thrown back on the sand.

She started to cry loud
pitiful wails for her mother,

hitting her new legs and stamping
her new feet

and waving her long,
terrible human arms

and then she saw her mother
skim across the waves

with four salmon between her teeth.

"Mummy!"

Solanna roared into the wind
and the tide, but it was useless.

It was as her mother had told her.

Now, she was a seal maiden.

Alone and naked in a terrible body
that her mother would never recognise.

Even her voice
didn't sound like her own.

She watched her mother disappear
around the edge of the cliff

and wondered, would
she ever see her again?

It was dark when the fisherman
found the sealmaiden.

She lay on the sand asleep
with seaweed in her hair

and the sea in her dreams.

He gathered her up and carried her
to his house along the shore

and dressed her and fed her
and tried to make her talk.

The seal maiden wept and sang
and slept through days

and nights that seemed to go on forever.

The fisherman watched and waited.

He had heard of creatures
like her before,

creatures that come up out of the sea

and are stranded here among us,
lost and miserable.

He was kind to the creature and
taught her all he could about the earth.

At night, he could hear waves crash
and roll in her heart,

louder than the waves
down at the shore.

The sound of the tide
in her made him sad

for he knew that this little seal maiden
ached to be among her own kind.

But he was powerless to help her,

not knowing where her sealskin was
or how he might find it.

He noticed the only thing that brought
her out of herself was music

so he played his fiddle for her

and sometimes she would sing for him
all the songs she had learned under the waves.