Dagger Key and Other Stories

Selkie’s belly quakes, her hips bridge up off the mattress as Annie thrust two fingers inside her. The cabin shrinks around them. There is no corpse abovedecks, no history of betrayal. All that exists is the sounds of rain and wind, the rolling of the boat, the bunk. Lost amid the recollection of other days with the rain sawing and wind gusting hard, the William knocked about on a choppy sea, Annie cuts away the panties and lowers between Mary’s legs, Selkie’s legs, making play with tongue, teeth and lips, until Selkie’s outcry lights the sexual darkness and her thighs clamp viselike to Annie’s head. They lie quietly for a time. Annie rests her head on Selkie’s belly, her mind thronged with contraries, the urge to have done with this fancy contending with the desire to linger, to make of the day an idyll, or more than a day. After three hundred years, she has earned a bit of freedom, has she not? She exults in the taste coating her tongue, the scent cloying her nostrils. Then Selkie, Mary…she shifts away and sits on her haunches. Tentatively, she fingers the top button of Annie’s shorts and, when Annie doesn’t object, she undoes the buttons and slides the shorts down past her hips. Annie’s momentarily put off by the sight of a man’s yard standing to attention between her thighs and, when Selkie takes it in her mouth, it seems unnatural to know a man’s portion of pleasure. But in that milk-pale face she finds the lineaments of Mary’s darker, angular face. She closes her eyes, holds tight to the dagger and recalls a fiercer delight.

In the afterglow of sex, Selkie cuddles, her arm flung across Annie’s chest. She whispers, “Oh, Annie. It is you!” She, Selkie, claims to have been awakened by Annie, a process that began when she met him at the café. Met her, rather. It’s all so confusing! When she touched her hand, she had this curious frisson, a sense of there having been something between them. Does he remember that moment? Did he feel it, too? Ever since, bits and pieces of memory have leaked into her head. And then the kiss…She’s sorry about that. Alvin forced her to paint her lips with the drug. Of course, she was a willing complicitor. She hadn’t recognized Annie yet. Not entirely. But when they kissed, that’s when the memories really started to come. She can’t recall much about their time together, mere fragments, but she will remember, she thinks, with Annie’s help. And now, well, they’ll sell the cross and then they’ll travel, just as they always wanted. England and the Continent. Asia. Annie is charmed by this portrait of an ideal life and makes an affirmative noise, and Selkie, appearing to gain in confidence, prattles on about getting a little cottage somewhere, a home base. For the most part, Annie believes none of what Selkie says, yet she can’t discount it utterly, because Selkie’s physical reactions remind her so much of Mary’s. When Annie toys with her nipples, she shivers and gives a little musical sound that’s identical to the one Mary used to make. She thinks it strange that Selkie’s pillowy breasts would respond the same way as Mary’s, which were the size of onions. Yet all her soft cries and responses bear an astounding similarity to Mary’s and, as a result, Annie allows herself to be seduced by Selkie’s dream of the future, however calculated it may be. It’s as if the cabin has been crammed with the invisible furniture of another life…

…with bolts of silk,

half-unrolled,

gold coins spilled from a chest

the size of a piglet,

the sound of Jack pissing

into a pewter jug,

a tall mirror with an ebon frame

reflecting the tumbled bed,

two tousled female heads,

and beyond,

past the window frame,

a dawn sky, a flotilla of lavender clouds…

Annie lives among those clouds

for a time.

She breathes in spices,

tastes a softer clime…

Then, shocked from that dream, perhaps by some ancient reflex, a sense of wrongness, a ghostly alarm given, or perhaps it’s simply a matter of the overcast brightening, the squall lessening, the change in the weather alerting her to the need for action, she makes one of those abrupt decisions upon which her life has always turned. She leans over Selkie, who’s half-asleep, and, using the point of the dagger, nicks the artery in the side of her neck. Selkie’s eyes snap open. She clamps a hand to the wound to stifle the blood spray. She mouths a word: Annie. She pleads silently for a life that’s spewing out between her fingers.

“Go,” Annie says to her, retreating from the bunk. “Hurry from this world.”

Selkie gurgles; her eyes widen further.