[story] six feet from the shore
author: half_sleeping (half_sleeping)
3AM fucking phonecall.
"Jason," said David very levelly and, he fancied, coherently, "What do you want."
"The dolphins needed me," said Jason. "But I can’t tell exactly what they want and they won’t give me the Squeaker so I can ask them about it."
Somehow, David could and did imagine exactly what had happened. Working off a retooled app which gave people synthetic voices - simplified for use by, say, kindergarten-age children - which he’d gotten by throwing together some geek and some teaching-studies hotshot, Jason had put onto an ipad and thrown it to the dolphins as part of his ‘research’. He’d also hooked it up to his own phone, by means that David didn’t want to know about. You expressed interest - or, God forbid, enthusiasm - to Jason at your peril.
"I repeat," said David, though he already knew. "What. Do. You. Want."
"Well," said Jason, blankly. "Can... you do anything?"
"Probably," said David, yawning.
"Okay... will you do anything?"
David sighed, and thought of Jason who (he knew) was already at the aquarium, staring worriedly at the tanks and wandering around in the half-dark because switching on the lights would upset their sleeping times. It was possible that he hadn’t rolled out of bed in the middle of the night, half-dressed or whatever it was he wore to sleep, possible that he had grabbed a flashlight or his cellphone or his keys and possible that the dolphins were not just once again being assholes.
Impossible that David could just go back to sleep, when he’d be awake in what, four hours? No time at all.
"I’ll be there in twenty minutes," he said. "Try not to fall into a tank and drown until then."
"Okay," said Jason peaceably, and David tried very hard not to hear the doubt in that voice.
Swimming when you were sleepy was something a seal learned on the swim, turning on your back in the currents and letting them carry along the way, half-doze and half-dream, the sky sparkling above and, if you were lucky, the sea sparkling below, parting around their bodies and clinging to their fins, the sea-glimmer of phosphorous plankton lining the long spiraling swirl of the life-giving current, bearing you on to rich feeding grounds; safe habours; family; home.
The cars trundled by on the highway, and the streetlamps burned a tired dingy orange on the side of the road.
"I rue the day you decided to teach these assholes to communicate with you," David said, instead of good ridiculously early morning or I’m incredibly annoyed with you or why are you so stupid.
"They seem to like it, though," Jason said, hopefully. "And they seemed so sad when I tried to take it away from them, they kept squeaking at me and their smiles drooped."
"They’re not actually smiling," David pointed out. "Neither are dogs. Nor are sharks, killer whales, or anything else which is possessed of a great many sharp teeth and a complete lack of compunction about eating you if the chance presented itself."
"They were very happy to see me," he offered.
"I seriously don’t doubt that at all."
For the longest time, David knew that baring your teeth was a warning, a threat, a promise of violence and lessons best long-ago learned. A bull yawning too-slowly at a cub who was too clumsy and ill-mannered for his own good. A cow’s nip meant that she wasn’t about to let someone else’s pup nurse from her, college roommates or no.
The yawning maws of sharks and killer whales were a level up. It was bad when you spotted their open mouths - it meant that they’d gotten close enough to bite you and take you down. It was danger in murky waters and fighting on the beach with your friends and fiercest competitors, counting the scars on your father’s hide from fighting his friends, the marks of that mechanic’s mouth, the time the salesperson from Colorado thought to take the nesting-spot.
It was the fixed grimaces of suspicion, framed by softness and smiles, a battle lost without even knowing the way or why of it.
When he got there, in the half-darkness and against his tanned skin, Jason’s grin cut a slash across his face, distorted by the rippling of light through water and relief.
They were indeed very happy. Obscenely so.
David stared at them with a look of utter loathing and homicidal intent. Their beady black little eyes gleamed back at him with mocking glee, and they did backflips in the water.
The damn little iPad was floating back and forth in the water. It, at least, was being treated with the appropriate reverence. It produced food, toys, treats, humans, and also an angry selkie to taunt.
Just get in the water, seal-boy, they said, interweaving in their complex patterns. Get in the water and we’ll see how tough you are.
David wasn’t going to rise to the bait. One or two, he’d have taken on gladly in his seal-skin and come out with a few nice scars to show for it, and a deep and abiding satisfaction for having done his part in a centuries-old debt. There were five in the tank, a group banded together by the sheer depth of contempt they had for their caretakers and the aquarium visitors. Probably they would beat him bloody, but the true shame would be letting the glorified fish get the better of him.
"Just because you got some good press," he murmured to the glass, and gave them the evil eye. All selkies had ever gotten was a reputation full of the kind of sexual stereotyping and gender dysfunction that made his mother froth at the mouth.
"I can’t believe you got out of bed for this," he said to Jason. "I can’t believe I got out of bed for this."
"But they look so sad," Jason said, peering hopefully through the glass. "They won’t stop pressing the food button."
"They wouldn’t eat it," David said. "They’ll just play with it until they get bored and then they’ll leave it and let it foul up the tank."
"Maybe they’re lonely," Jason cooed.
"Maybe you should grow a brain," David said, irritably. "They’re screwing with you."
"Oh, they’re bored," he said. "The poor things."
"They’re sociopathic assholes who would as soon beat you to death as play with you."
"Do you think they’d like it if I played with them?"
David considered if Jason’s epic lack of awareness was actually leeching his own patience and energy from him. It certainly seemed as if he was about to fall over, though maybe that was because David still couldn’t tear his eyes from the endless mesmerising patterns the dolphins were making. They, at least, were wide awake.
"I’ll fetch the iPad," David said, levelly, "Then we are clearing out of here and getting some sleep."
"Oh, I couldn’t," Jason said. "I mean, from my place to here - I might as well stay and - oh, swim with them! I think they’ll like that."
"Don’t."
Jason blinked at the selkie. "But why? I think they like me."
"You really don’t want to ever be allowed back into the tank ever again, do you?"
Jason looked sad and said, "But they’d like it!"
David struggled with the impulse to point out that they would like it very much, and instead hauled himself up and over to the rim of the tank, stripping off his shirt as he went. He’d long-ago learned to wear swim trunks as a matter of course when coming to the aquarium.
"Eee, eeeee-eee," said the dolphins threateningly.
David lifted his lip in a snarl that longed to be several gleaming inches of ripping, tearing points. "," he barked to them, and was off.
They’d been making something - no, everything - a game of keeping the electronic device away from Jason and whoever Jason had conned into coming here to make his research look less like ‘watch the dolphins fuck around with technology with glee’, and they were practised and skilful at it by now, taking it from one another, hiding it in the corners of the tank, swimming with it just out of reach until the human had to come up for air.
Selkies didn’t need to come up for air.
Well, mostly. David needed to gulp before he went in, and he’d never pushed past twenty straight minutes in human skin even when coral-diving off resorts, but in seal-skin it seemed like the world went soft and still under the water, and time disappeared as he - they - everyone - slipped through icy, inky darkness for eternities at a time, travelling the great routes and hunting on the stroke, safe and endless in the water as they never were on land, never were on two legs.
He didn’t need his skin, though, for chemical-scented water lit with fluorescent bulbs and occupied only by five fat fish who had all been born inside tanks of glass and never known anything but their meals brought twice a day and their paltry, demeaning acrobatics.
They’d never known humans could move that fast, could know the water like the cradle of a mother’s arms, without the instinctual fear and hesitation that the land-creatures felt for the empty, yawning sea. They knew what he was, and not what he was.
He was in and out and victorious before they knew that he had come.
He climbed out clutching the iPad and caught Jason’s eye as he came, gleaming and dark and excited, full of awe and fascination for the creature which David was.
He thrust it at the other man roughly. "Here. Don’t let them keep it next time."
"It just makes me sad, is all," Jason said. "When they want it so much."
Learning to walk on land was a wrench after knowing to swim in water. His mother was as merciless about letting the sand take his falls as she was letting the waves take his fumbles.
But the world of men was so wide, so open, in way that wasn’t at all like the sea, that was the sunrise in a song and the waves in a walk and the tides in the thrum of a voice that could shape bull-bellow and pup-cry.
Do not forget, o my child, that even you were born on land, born in your seal-skin upon the stones, his mother sometimes crooned to him, in the crux between one wave and the next, demanding to know why they weren’t there yet and why he had to go and attend school.
"It’ll be good for the pup to take the long way around the Atlantic," she agreed with his father once, her belly swelling with his sister, planning to visit the seal-nurseries again. "Learn the taste of some good clean salt."
"I have school," said David. "And my job at the aquarium."
Her face fell, and she sighed. "You never come on the trips anymore. Don’t you miss the sea?"
David pointed out, "We’re close to the beach."
His father sighed as well, the well-trodden argument. "It’s not safe, son. It’s too close. We weren’t meant to mix like this. The sea is the sea, and the land is the land."
David’s rebuttal, as always: "Then why is there such a thing as the shore?"
He met Jason on the shore, where it seemed he lived when he was not at the aquarium, permanently tanned, generally salt-marked, and always longing for the sea, the waves lapping at his sides, the smell of it, even human-marked, filling the nose with joy.
He’d taken a job at the aquarium and told David it was because he liked to sit near the big tanks and stare and pretend he was really there, on the sea floor, with the shadows passing overhead, he thought it was beautiful and loved it, loved it so much it made his face glow like the moon reflected in the curl of the tide.
David thought of endless dark waters where it was all you could do to navigate by taste and feel, and smiled whenever Jason said it.
How many months had it been since? How long since he realized the beat of salt on his skin was no good without the furry flanks which would cut through like a stone sinking to some purpose, that the shore sapped his strength when all he wanted was the - the--
"We can go get breakfast," said Jason, brightly. "I mean, I’ll spring, since I dragged you out and all, and we can look at this and see what they wanted and try to teach them about colours."
A nice strong cup of coffee and the crisp crunch of French bread, omelet and bacon and the warmth of sun on his ski-
"We could," David allowed, and thought, colours. There was nothing to see in the ocean but endless shifting gradients of light and shadow and only those in between. "We’ve got hours yet before morning, though." He paused, and said, not-not-fondly, "Idiot."
"I was worried it was him again," said Jason darkly.
"Yes, yes," said David, taking on an absent, soothing edge, only half-listening, already thinking about breakfast by the sea, and maybe a dip on the shore.
the end
3AM fucking phonecall.
"Jason," said David very levelly and, he fancied, coherently, "What do you want."
"The dolphins needed me," said Jason. "But I can’t tell exactly what they want and they won’t give me the Squeaker so I can ask them about it."
Somehow, David could and did imagine exactly what had happened. Working off a retooled app which gave people synthetic voices - simplified for use by, say, kindergarten-age children - which he’d gotten by throwing together some geek and some teaching-studies hotshot, Jason had put onto an ipad and thrown it to the dolphins as part of his ‘research’. He’d also hooked it up to his own phone, by means that David didn’t want to know about. You expressed interest - or, God forbid, enthusiasm - to Jason at your peril.
"I repeat," said David, though he already knew. "What. Do. You. Want."
"Well," said Jason, blankly. "Can... you do anything?"
"Probably," said David, yawning.
"Okay... will you do anything?"
David sighed, and thought of Jason who (he knew) was already at the aquarium, staring worriedly at the tanks and wandering around in the half-dark because switching on the lights would upset their sleeping times. It was possible that he hadn’t rolled out of bed in the middle of the night, half-dressed or whatever it was he wore to sleep, possible that he had grabbed a flashlight or his cellphone or his keys and possible that the dolphins were not just once again being assholes.
Impossible that David could just go back to sleep, when he’d be awake in what, four hours? No time at all.
"I’ll be there in twenty minutes," he said. "Try not to fall into a tank and drown until then."
"Okay," said Jason peaceably, and David tried very hard not to hear the doubt in that voice.
Swimming when you were sleepy was something a seal learned on the swim, turning on your back in the currents and letting them carry along the way, half-doze and half-dream, the sky sparkling above and, if you were lucky, the sea sparkling below, parting around their bodies and clinging to their fins, the sea-glimmer of phosphorous plankton lining the long spiraling swirl of the life-giving current, bearing you on to rich feeding grounds; safe habours; family; home.
The cars trundled by on the highway, and the streetlamps burned a tired dingy orange on the side of the road.
"I rue the day you decided to teach these assholes to communicate with you," David said, instead of good ridiculously early morning or I’m incredibly annoyed with you or why are you so stupid.
"They seem to like it, though," Jason said, hopefully. "And they seemed so sad when I tried to take it away from them, they kept squeaking at me and their smiles drooped."
"They’re not actually smiling," David pointed out. "Neither are dogs. Nor are sharks, killer whales, or anything else which is possessed of a great many sharp teeth and a complete lack of compunction about eating you if the chance presented itself."
"They were very happy to see me," he offered.
"I seriously don’t doubt that at all."
For the longest time, David knew that baring your teeth was a warning, a threat, a promise of violence and lessons best long-ago learned. A bull yawning too-slowly at a cub who was too clumsy and ill-mannered for his own good. A cow’s nip meant that she wasn’t about to let someone else’s pup nurse from her, college roommates or no.
The yawning maws of sharks and killer whales were a level up. It was bad when you spotted their open mouths - it meant that they’d gotten close enough to bite you and take you down. It was danger in murky waters and fighting on the beach with your friends and fiercest competitors, counting the scars on your father’s hide from fighting his friends, the marks of that mechanic’s mouth, the time the salesperson from Colorado thought to take the nesting-spot.
It was the fixed grimaces of suspicion, framed by softness and smiles, a battle lost without even knowing the way or why of it.
When he got there, in the half-darkness and against his tanned skin, Jason’s grin cut a slash across his face, distorted by the rippling of light through water and relief.
They were indeed very happy. Obscenely so.
David stared at them with a look of utter loathing and homicidal intent. Their beady black little eyes gleamed back at him with mocking glee, and they did backflips in the water.
The damn little iPad was floating back and forth in the water. It, at least, was being treated with the appropriate reverence. It produced food, toys, treats, humans, and also an angry selkie to taunt.
Just get in the water, seal-boy, they said, interweaving in their complex patterns. Get in the water and we’ll see how tough you are.
David wasn’t going to rise to the bait. One or two, he’d have taken on gladly in his seal-skin and come out with a few nice scars to show for it, and a deep and abiding satisfaction for having done his part in a centuries-old debt. There were five in the tank, a group banded together by the sheer depth of contempt they had for their caretakers and the aquarium visitors. Probably they would beat him bloody, but the true shame would be letting the glorified fish get the better of him.
"Just because you got some good press," he murmured to the glass, and gave them the evil eye. All selkies had ever gotten was a reputation full of the kind of sexual stereotyping and gender dysfunction that made his mother froth at the mouth.
"I can’t believe you got out of bed for this," he said to Jason. "I can’t believe I got out of bed for this."
"But they look so sad," Jason said, peering hopefully through the glass. "They won’t stop pressing the food button."
"They wouldn’t eat it," David said. "They’ll just play with it until they get bored and then they’ll leave it and let it foul up the tank."
"Maybe they’re lonely," Jason cooed.
"Maybe you should grow a brain," David said, irritably. "They’re screwing with you."
"Oh, they’re bored," he said. "The poor things."
"They’re sociopathic assholes who would as soon beat you to death as play with you."
"Do you think they’d like it if I played with them?"
David considered if Jason’s epic lack of awareness was actually leeching his own patience and energy from him. It certainly seemed as if he was about to fall over, though maybe that was because David still couldn’t tear his eyes from the endless mesmerising patterns the dolphins were making. They, at least, were wide awake.
"I’ll fetch the iPad," David said, levelly, "Then we are clearing out of here and getting some sleep."
"Oh, I couldn’t," Jason said. "I mean, from my place to here - I might as well stay and - oh, swim with them! I think they’ll like that."
"Don’t."
Jason blinked at the selkie. "But why? I think they like me."
"You really don’t want to ever be allowed back into the tank ever again, do you?"
Jason looked sad and said, "But they’d like it!"
David struggled with the impulse to point out that they would like it very much, and instead hauled himself up and over to the rim of the tank, stripping off his shirt as he went. He’d long-ago learned to wear swim trunks as a matter of course when coming to the aquarium.
"Eee, eeeee-eee," said the dolphins threateningly.
David lifted his lip in a snarl that longed to be several gleaming inches of ripping, tearing points. "," he barked to them, and was off.
They’d been making something - no, everything - a game of keeping the electronic device away from Jason and whoever Jason had conned into coming here to make his research look less like ‘watch the dolphins fuck around with technology with glee’, and they were practised and skilful at it by now, taking it from one another, hiding it in the corners of the tank, swimming with it just out of reach until the human had to come up for air.
Selkies didn’t need to come up for air.
Well, mostly. David needed to gulp before he went in, and he’d never pushed past twenty straight minutes in human skin even when coral-diving off resorts, but in seal-skin it seemed like the world went soft and still under the water, and time disappeared as he - they - everyone - slipped through icy, inky darkness for eternities at a time, travelling the great routes and hunting on the stroke, safe and endless in the water as they never were on land, never were on two legs.
He didn’t need his skin, though, for chemical-scented water lit with fluorescent bulbs and occupied only by five fat fish who had all been born inside tanks of glass and never known anything but their meals brought twice a day and their paltry, demeaning acrobatics.
They’d never known humans could move that fast, could know the water like the cradle of a mother’s arms, without the instinctual fear and hesitation that the land-creatures felt for the empty, yawning sea. They knew what he was, and not what he was.
He was in and out and victorious before they knew that he had come.
He climbed out clutching the iPad and caught Jason’s eye as he came, gleaming and dark and excited, full of awe and fascination for the creature which David was.
He thrust it at the other man roughly. "Here. Don’t let them keep it next time."
"It just makes me sad, is all," Jason said. "When they want it so much."
Learning to walk on land was a wrench after knowing to swim in water. His mother was as merciless about letting the sand take his falls as she was letting the waves take his fumbles.
But the world of men was so wide, so open, in way that wasn’t at all like the sea, that was the sunrise in a song and the waves in a walk and the tides in the thrum of a voice that could shape bull-bellow and pup-cry.
Do not forget, o my child, that even you were born on land, born in your seal-skin upon the stones, his mother sometimes crooned to him, in the crux between one wave and the next, demanding to know why they weren’t there yet and why he had to go and attend school.
"It’ll be good for the pup to take the long way around the Atlantic," she agreed with his father once, her belly swelling with his sister, planning to visit the seal-nurseries again. "Learn the taste of some good clean salt."
"I have school," said David. "And my job at the aquarium."
Her face fell, and she sighed. "You never come on the trips anymore. Don’t you miss the sea?"
David pointed out, "We’re close to the beach."
His father sighed as well, the well-trodden argument. "It’s not safe, son. It’s too close. We weren’t meant to mix like this. The sea is the sea, and the land is the land."
David’s rebuttal, as always: "Then why is there such a thing as the shore?"
He met Jason on the shore, where it seemed he lived when he was not at the aquarium, permanently tanned, generally salt-marked, and always longing for the sea, the waves lapping at his sides, the smell of it, even human-marked, filling the nose with joy.
He’d taken a job at the aquarium and told David it was because he liked to sit near the big tanks and stare and pretend he was really there, on the sea floor, with the shadows passing overhead, he thought it was beautiful and loved it, loved it so much it made his face glow like the moon reflected in the curl of the tide.
David thought of endless dark waters where it was all you could do to navigate by taste and feel, and smiled whenever Jason said it.
How many months had it been since? How long since he realized the beat of salt on his skin was no good without the furry flanks which would cut through like a stone sinking to some purpose, that the shore sapped his strength when all he wanted was the - the--
"We can go get breakfast," said Jason, brightly. "I mean, I’ll spring, since I dragged you out and all, and we can look at this and see what they wanted and try to teach them about colours."
A nice strong cup of coffee and the crisp crunch of French bread, omelet and bacon and the warmth of sun on his ski-
"We could," David allowed, and thought, colours. There was nothing to see in the ocean but endless shifting gradients of light and shadow and only those in between. "We’ve got hours yet before morning, though." He paused, and said, not-not-fondly, "Idiot."
"I was worried it was him again," said Jason darkly.
"Yes, yes," said David, taking on an absent, soothing edge, only half-listening, already thinking about breakfast by the sea, and maybe a dip on the shore.
the end