Free So Long Been Dreaming by Nalo Hopkinson

another cigarette, her mouth pursed fish-like against the paper tube.
    Of course, my mother won’t believe this either. There’s no ocean where she comes from. She was born in Saskatchewan. Grandmother’s skin is the colour of the teak coffee table.
    The scaly patches prove love, my grandmother says.
    What they never talk about in that selkie story, says my grandmother, is the bed. How important the bed is. If the man’s nonexistent in bed, then why would you stay?
    According to the rules, if my grandmother, being a selkie, ever retrieved the skin, she would leave immediately. But she’s the one who left the water, saw the liquid muscles of her future lover’s forearms, the silver bubbles trapped among the hairs. Watched her fisherman up through the waves and fell in love with the vibrations in his throat, the cracked skin on his fisherman’s hands. And he stared back at her in water, couldn’t believe his eyes.
    Mixed marriages never work, people say, but my grandmother stumbled up into air, her addiction to cigarettes and wearing men’s trousers more a problem than the fact that she enjoyed her fish still gasping. Scales, gut, and open fish mouth pulled down her throat.
    Toot sweet, she says, and smacks her lips.
    She kept her skin like a wedding gown wrapped muslin, stored in cedar to keep away the bugs. Kept the key on a chain around her throat and as far as we could tell, never opened the chest again for as long as she lived.
    I, on the other hand, open her chest again. And again. And again.

    Matricia slides in and around and among the neighbourhoods like a crocodile in a sewer looking for me. Too much time in the world and she looks at her watch.
    Matricia comes for me. She smells exactly like the ocean.
    We were the only two black kids in the junior high school, Matricia and I, and then her father kidnapped her and I was the only one. Or so the legend went.
    The legend goes like this: We are the only two black girls in the school. Matricia wants to be my friend, but this is against the rules. I ignore her. She disappears. Her father stole her, everyone says. My horror mouth open because I didn’t save her. I remember the dandruff flecks in her hair, the green tinge on her fingernails, the seaweed smell of her skin.

    I will eventually be kidnapped by water for good. This is how all women in my family die. When the water finds me, when it inflates my lungs, it will be crammed with the faces of drowned relatives. Women in our family avoid river banks, cliffs, wave pools, backyard fish ponds, sinks too full of water, they move to the centre of islands, high on mountains, buy dishwashers, but water always finds us.
    I am not safe anywhere.
    I kick my rubber boots hard against the polished floor of the museum, the security guards run, their basset-hound jowls and full bellies bouncing, navy-blue security jackets streaming past glass cases, marbles of naked women, paintings of ornate gardens, and they try to grab me by the collar of my shirt, my sleeves and legs, try to pull me from the canvas-painted oily storm. I will hang in the water for hours before they can retrieve my body. My pockets filled with priceless, deformed pearls.
    I die for love. Matricia, body sleek in waves. I die for love.

    Her skin is the same. Her skin is the same as mine. She is my ghost. Digging for treasure, I found mismatched pieces, assembled and resuscitated her. She tastes like licorice. Water beings always have the faint aftertaste of licorice. I have tasted licorice myself on their lips when they come up from between my thighs to kiss me.

    I wanted to steal her skin. Force her to marry me.

    When Matricia left, I got up from my bed and pretended to steal another motel soap.
    They say fish never blink; selkies don’t cry. I wait for the diamonds to come trickling from my eyes. I have not been a maid since I was sixteen and she stole my maidenhead.
    In love with the ocean through my rubber boats.
    Asthma returns with a splash on the