‘Between Sea and Sky’ is concerned with the excavation of a Scottish town’s hidden secrets and underlying truths “except [a mother’s] own truth, of course. The truth of how she got me”. Composed of short narratives split between mother and son’s voices, this potent and dark retelling of ‘The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry’ brims with the affectual aspects of language, staying true to its folk-song origins. In the story’s opening, a mother sings to her baby who is strapped to her chest by a seal-grey sling:
“Oh my darling wee fishie, I won’t let go of you
I cannae hear you speak but I know you love me too
Oh my darling wee fishie, I’ll hold you close to me
I cannae see your eyes, but your love is clear to see”
Shortly after her son’s birth, she continues her work as an osteoarchaeologist, digging up bones that the locals in the town would prefer to keep buried– hidden with unspoken stories under the earth. She and her fatherless son are treated as outsiders, made to feel shame by a community of women who “each think it could be their own husband” she slept with.
I listened to this story within Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold in its audiobook form on a long walk in the local woods. When the narrative switches to her child’s longing to know the origin of his birth, I listened with a quickening heart. A story echoing my own. ‘Between Sea and Sky’ explores motherly love and also a child’s desire to know where they’ve come from. When the child discovers his father, he’s revealed to be a man of the sea, the child himself thus part-selkie. It’s then decided that the boy will spend six months in the water and six months on land, his mother continuing to speak to him in his absence. Though, as the child grows, his yearning to be with his mother throughout the year deepens. At six years old, he feels “apart and incomplete”, knowing the “time for words had passed; I needed actions”. On a stormy night, he leaves the sea to visit her, turning up at her small house by the beach unannounced. I will not say what happened next, but perhaps you can imagine. Logan’s tale crescendos with its raging storm. The border between sea and sky (or water and air) becoming fluid, undefined. When I heard the final lines of this tale, I can remember exactly where I was standing in the woods, the exact shade of light through the trees, the exact way the wind lifted, goosebumps rising like small worlds on my skin.
First published in Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold, Virago, 2020
A Personal Anthology 