Illustration © Liam Lefr
Once upon a wave, the king of fishes delivered a creature to the shore. The wave was driven by spotted rays and the backs of whales, the muscles of kelp and the hearts of selkies. It broke on the beach with the force of birth, and as it drew back into the sea, it left the creature in two hundred and six parts, articulated as runes. The moonlight animated those parts, and they tried different shapes, finding places in one another that felt like home. Bumps found hollows, knots joined knotholes, balls discovered sockets. When every part was in position, the creature stood up.
Nestor bit back his scream, the salt in his throat rough as the sea and rising. She was standing twenty feet behind him, her wet rags dripping on the sand. Moonlight pearled her bones, and the darkness showed the spaces between them where the flesh should be. She stared at him sorrowfully, although he did not know how. She had no eyes in her sockets, only barnacles.
Nestor took to his heels as the rain began. Don’t show her where you live, his reason whispered, but his feet took him home to his hut. He threw open the door and slammed it shut again, bolting the lock. He dragged the salt-worn table in front of the door and stumbled back to the hearth. He sunk into a squat against a cob wall, trembling so hard it clicked his knees.
The noises outside were cold, wet slaps, like clothes left on the washing line. But Nestor did not have any washing on the line. Fishermen knew when a storm was coming. The wind groaned between the tin sheets like it would lift his roof, and Nestor, for the sake of something to do, made a pyramid of twigs in his fire-box, and blew on the kindling until the fire took. Then he crept between the flannel sheets on his bed and pulled them up to his chin.
After a few moments, he closed his eyes. The rain slowed and stopped. Nestor snuggled down between the fibres, and his eyes flickered to reassure himself that he was home, with a warm fire, and only his own company.
The bone-woman was in the room with him, white as the moon. She opened her arms. Nestor fell from the bed, stumbled from the tangle of sheets past the woman, and shoved the dresser from the door. It crashed on its side, spilling tackle and hooks and feathered lures. Nestor fled the cabin, and ran back to the beach, dragging his boat from the sand and into the water. When the shore vanished and all was black as far as he could see, Nestor collapsed onto the deck, the wood reassuring and dead below him. He was glad when clouds hid the moon and the night above him was black, like the sea, not white, like the bone-woman.
It was all the fault of the silverfish. Admiring its rare beauty, Nestor had thrown it back. To his surprise, the fish swam back up to the surface and rolled its jelly eye around to look at him. Not with the goggle-eyed vacancy of a fish, but with the animation of a god. His childhood came back to him, and the tales his mother told by his rope bed. One wish, he remembered.
“I wish for a wife,” he said to the fish.
He’d held girls in his arms before, as a sailor; but it wasn’t the same as a wife. He’d wanted that ever since his mother died; a woman to come home to, to hold on a cold night, who worried about him when there was a storm. It was an empty house, without a family. He would lie awake in his box bed, thinking about it.
Now the silver fish had sent him a wife, but she was of the ocean, not his imaginings. The ocean was a darker place than he’d ever imagined, though he’d sailed on it a hundred times. He shuddered as he remembered her ribs, fine and white as the fish-bones he pulled from his dinner.
Keep busy, he told himself, his hands shaking as he picked over a half-finished net. If you are busy, you cannot be afraid. But the salt wind and bone needle reminded him of what came for him in the night. Was she waiting for him back at the shack? What did she want? To eat the soft parts of a man, as nereids did? He blinked, his eyes struggling to loop the nettle-hemp line. Sighing, he locked the needle in his crewel-work, unfolded the woollen blanket in his stowage, and pulled it over himself. The blanket smelled of crab meat and cockles, but he would not go back to his hut in the dark.
When Nestor woke, he kept his eyes closed. He could not hear the waves against the hull, nor feel the morning sun on his skin. His fingers curled and felt the comforting flannel of his sheets. He was home, then, and it had all been a bad dream. His belly grumbled for breakfast, and he remembered he had not taken supper on the boat the night before. A kipper or two, and a seagull’s egg: that was the thing. He rolled to get up, and a body blocked his way. A horrible, white body, like a skeleton from the deep washed up on the shore.
The sheets slipped beneath him, and he fell to the floor. The bone woman’s face, like a rising moon, peered over the bedclothes. The holes between her bones had filled in with translucent skin, but she was still a thing eaten by fishes, eyeless, voiceless, hairless. Nestor stumbled to his feet and ran into the forest, leaving the door open behind him. The skeleton woman appeared in the doorway, one arm outstretched, staring after him with the black pits in her face.
It was the right season to gather nettles to make fishing line. What else could he do to pass the time? He could not go back to the hut, and did not wish to go back to his boat, where the sea air would remind him of his salt-wife’s breath. He pinched the lengths of nettle; he knew the trick to avoid the sting, but he let the poison hairs itch their way up the fleshy part of his thumb and encircle his wrist with fine raised lumps. The mild pain called his mind away from what waited for him at home, and that was a consolation.
He put the stems to soak in a rock-pool fishing-trap he kept over summer in the stream. There were two carp in the trap; he released one for luck and hit the second against a rock, for lunch. While the nettle fibres soaked, Nestor lay down by the riverbank, the warm earth reassuring his spine. The green canopy soothed his eyes, erased the horrors. His mind eased into his favourite fantasy: a woman at home to talk to, to cook his catch over the fire, to make his house a home. He curled up on the grass, imagining what it would be like to lie next to a wife. But instead of a face, a white skull lay on the pillow next to him, and his eyes flew open.
As the light faded, he pulled the stems from the fish-trap, swollen and dripping now. He pulped them by crushing them between rocks, peeling them apart to produce long, thin fibres that reminded him of the seaweed hanging from the skeleton woman’s bones. He shook the image from his mind, focusing on the task at hand. When dry, he would spin these into nettle-hemp twine that he could use for fishing line, nets and bow strings. Lying the tresses of fibre against a stone to dry, he went to sleep by the dying fire, his belly full of cold fish, listening to the cheerful sound of the brook, satisfied that he’d kept his hands and mind busy with real things he could touch and handle and not the ghosts of fears and nightmares.
His eyes fluttered open, heavy as if he’d been drinking. He knew he had not, since he fell asleep in the woods. But there was no burbling sound of water now, and above him was no canopy of oak trees, but the long rafters of his cabin’s ceiling.
He was not reassured that it was all a bad dream, not this time. He didn’t dare look at the spot next to him on the bed, but slipped onto the floor, taking wide steps to the edge of the room before he looked back.
A lump bulged between the sheets, a lump as real as any other woman would be in a bed. Her breath rose and fell like a real woman, too. He crept closer. She was thin, the skeleton woman, but had grown a little flesh on her bones. It was not absent, as when the gaps between her bone had been black nothingness. She did not wake up, and Nestor retreated to the corner and sat at the table, watching her. He did not take his eyes off her as the light from the eastern window slid across the floor. He only moved once, when he observed that the dresser he’d knocked over in his hurry to escape had been righted again and put back in place. He slid a drawer open to find his tackle ordered, all the feathers in line, hook, line and sinker.
Nestor did not go far that night. He was determined not to fall asleep, only to wake up in bed with the bone-woman again. Instead he went to the local tavern, where the men in the village were sharing stories of the selkies, who swapped their seal-skins for girlish ones. He said nothing of the skeleton woman to them, and wondered why. I do not know what she is yet becoming, he thought, as he tossed back dark ale. She is no selkie, I’m sure of that. But men in their cups judged all supernatural forces the same, so Nestor held his tongue.
The next day Nestor stayed in his cabin, watching the quiet form in the bed, struggling to keep his eyes open. Her edges blurred, as if she wore finely woven cloth, wrapped tight as a corpse on a bier. Sleep took him by the afternoon, and when he woke up in the early hours, the woman had grown into her skin, colourless as water.
Nestor woke to her hair the fifth morning, spread across his pillow like the fronds of seaweed that caught on his rudder when fishing. Her hair was soft, and smelled of warm woman, not salt and fish. By the sixth night, the skeleton woman had eyes: blue in the morning, green in the afternoon, and black at night, like the sea. She changed the sheets on his bed, left out food for the stray animals that skulked the woods, and was tender after Nestor returned with a poor catch. There was always a meal waiting for him, shrimp salad, mussel stew, clam chowder or seaweed soup. After a month, when she opened her arms to him, he slipped into them eagerly, resting his head on her coral-white breast. Perhaps that fish really did wish me well, he thought, as he watched her make him dinner over the fire. Perhaps that fish did me a good turn.
Fish, I have much to thank you for, he whispered, six months later when his sea-wife swelled with the promise of his first-born, her stomach swollen as a fishing float, her hips opening to the other world where babies came from. He felt his son or daughter swimming inside her, pushing their fins or flippers through the tight drum of her belly. She would smile and put her hand over his. It was enough; it was everything. It was all he wanted.
After a stormy day at sea, he came home after the catch to find her bent over, crying. He felt her forehead; it was on fire. She looked as if she would retch up her breakfast, and he felt as if he might retch up his, too, with worry for her.
“What is it, wife?” he begged, although she never spoke, and he had no reason to think she might speak now.
She did not reply, but redoubled her cries, as if they were not for him, but something larger, something that might respond. She threw her head back, her neck kinked as a sea-bird, cawed in an ancient voice. Praying to her sea-god, perhaps, Nestor wondered. Or a goddess. Or something darker and older than gods and goddesses.
The skeleton woman gave birth that night, to a babe of sorts; a babe half-grown, just a red promise of a babe. Nestor had not known it could go this way, though the village-women who came to deliver it said it was often the case, but men never spoke of it. But though she did not deliver a live child, a birth it was: his sea-wife screamed, she laboured, she swelled and contracted as the babe moved through her. Nestor felt a terrible hollowness after. He cradled the wee thing in the crook of his arm, before the midwife took her away, and thought how he would have taught her the names of different fishes and how to loop a net. But the midwife buried her among the herbs, and the cottage was empty but for him and the bone woman. She did not wail, or tear her clothes, as the women in the village did when they lost a beloved. She did not eat or rise from bed. She grew white again, and frail, and the colour drained from her cheeks and eyes.
“No,” he urged her. “No.” But she did not understand his wishes, just as she did not understand the vanishing swelling in her womb. Her bones probed the skin, as if they would break free any moment. He tried to grasp the flesh between them, tried to hold on to her, but he knew the truth of it. She’d been gone since that night her babe left them. Perhaps the babe was waiting, even now, for her mother to join her.
Nestor was not a warrior. He had never fought a battle, nor held a sword. He was only a fisherman. But he knew that when a special fish wished to return to the sea, you must throw it back. He had lain with her, laughed with her, made a home with her. He had no right to stop her unbecoming, if that was what she chose. You did not keep a fish that wished to return to the sea, not if it was one of a kind. He gave up trying to feed her, trying to rouse her from bed. Instead, he lay alongside her, feeling the last of her warmth, twining his fingers with hers, even as they became cold and fleshless. The bones that so frightened him, in the beginning. But they did not frighten him now. He knew better. Now he knew that they were the origin of everything.
The moon was out and full, the night he returned her to the ocean. He carried her in his arms, and she was as light as the babe they lost. She turned her face to him as he set her on the water, put her hand to his cheek, and he let the water take her. Nestor walked back to his hut, leaving only one set of footprints on the sand.
Footnote: Bone Woman was inspired by mixed folklore traditions, including the Inuit folk tale The Skeleton Woman, retold by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, the classic Grimm tale, The Fisherman and his Wife and the Scottish The Selkie Bride. This is a response to the Scrying theme.
Romy Tara Wenzel is a writer and artist on Melukerdee country, Tasmania, exploring mythology and ecology from an animist perspective. She is preoccupied with liminal states: the spaces between becoming and unbecoming, wildness and refuge, inter-species communication and ecstatic transformation. Recent work is published in Dark Mountain and Heroines Anthology. Find her on Instagram @the_quiet_wilds.