Once upon a time a boy who hid from life in a library, found a book…

It wasn't much of a book, but you read it anyway, having just read the first book of the set of Encyclopedias: Aardvark (Lame!) –Aztec (Cool! They pierced their tongues with thorns to make blood sacrifices to the gods!)

You were not up to tackling "B" and whatever "B" covered including "Birds", but some asshole had checked out the big Audubon book on birds that you really wanted to read.

Well, not exactly read, you liked to look at the pictures and dream, not of birds, but of a freedom you'd never known... so the strange little book on Irish folktales or whatever they were, had to fill in the gap.

It was totally lame, but one story stood out:

"…one rainy night the year the seals disappeared from the village harbor, Seamus brought home a bride, a silent foreigner with long, dark hair and darker eyes, wrapped in his coat against the rain."

(So what?)

"In silence she cooked and she cleaned in Seamus's swaybacked little cottage overlooking the seal-less harbor, dark hair cropped at the village barber's as he towered swaying and red-faced over her and the barber, reeking of strong drink. When the last long lock drifted to the floor, Seamus paid the man with a sea-worn coin, silent bride following him out of the shop, eyes bruised."

(Stupid bitch, should have run when she had the chance!)

"Childless years passed with Seamus spending his evenings at the pub while she stayed home, one eye blackened, sometimes both, ever shifting bruises on her neck, silently tending Seamus's scrawny cows and pigs, with him drinking the money she earned selling the few eggs from Seamus's starveling chickens and the vegetables from Seamus's windblown garden at the weekly market, even as she made the bed ready for his staggering, nightly return past the rocks where the seals once sunned."

(Should have found a better man, you stupid bitch – wish I could smoke in here!)

"There came a night one dark October when the wind was bad and the sea rough. Padraig, Seamus's best mate swore to any who would listen that he saw Seamus chasing after his wife, who ran naked but for a tattered sealskin coat wrapped 'round her shoulders from the cottage and into the sea. But Padraig was a drunken fool, not to be trusted."

(What the fuck?)

"Seamus was found washed up and torn as if by dogs on the sand in the next cove; eyes missing and lips pulled away in a grin aimed blindly at the sky, for once no bottle in the claws of his hands."

(Whoaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh… cool!)

"As for Seamus's silent bride, naught was seen of her again after that long gone October night when the seals returned at long last, barking and playing in the pale sunlight against the storm-gray sky. Seamus's cottage now stands roofless to the sky, a broken open wooden chest carved with seals laying on its side, sand drifting in and out where the waves crash upon the shore."

(I don't get it, stupid book!)

But now, years later, as you rock barefoot and hollow chested on the bare attic floor of your prison, cast out by your own selkie when she found the truths you'd hidden away, you get it.