A (21:30)
And we're back. Probably one of the biggest losers to fall in love with a selkie was the man who carried her skin around in his knapsack. He was so scared she'd find it that he took the skin with him everywhere when he went fishing, when he went drinking in the town. Then one day he had a wonderful catch of fish. There were so many that he couldn't drag them all home in his net. He emptied his knapsack and filled it with fish, and he put the skin over his shoulder and on his way up the road to his house he dropped it. Gray in the front and gray in the back is the very thing I lack. That's what the man's wife said when she found the skin. The man ran to catch her. He even kissed her, even though she was already a seal. But she squirmed off down the road and flopped into the water. The man stood knee deep in the chilly waves, stinking a fish, and cried. In selkie stories, kissing never solves anything. No transformation happens because of a kiss. No one loves you just because you love them. What kind of fairy tale is that? She wouldn't wake up, Mona says. I pulled her out of the oven onto the floor and I turned off the gas and opened the windows. It's not that I was smart. I wasn't thinking at all. I called Uncle Tad and the police and I still wasn't thinking. I don't believe she wasn't smart. She even tried to give her mom cpr, but her mom didn't wake up until later in the hospital. They had to reach in and drag her out of death, she was so closed up in it. Death is skin tight, mona says. Gray in front and gray in back. Dear Mona, when I look at you, my skin hurts. I pull into her driveway to drop her off. The house is dark, the darkest house on her street, because Mona's mom doesn't like the porch light on. She says it shines in around the blinds and keeps her awake. Mona's mom has a beautiful bedroom upstairs, with lots of old photographs and gilt frames, but she sleeps on the living room couch beside the aquarium. Looking at the fish helps her to sleep, although she also says this country has no real fish. That's what Mona calls one of her mom's refrains. Mona gets out, yanking the little piece of my heart that stays with her wherever she goes. She stands outside the car and leans in through the open door. I can hardly see her, but I can smell the lemon scented stuff she puts on her hair, mixed up with the smells of sweat and weed. Mona smells like a forest, not the sea. Oh my God, she says. I forgot to tell you. Tonight, you know. Table six, that big horde of Uncle Tad's friends. Yeah. So they wanted the soup with the food and I forgot. And you know what the old guy says to me, the little guy at the head of the table? What? He goes. Vous ete bette, mademoiselle. She says it in a rough, growly voice and laughs. I can tell it's French, but that's all. What does it mean? You're an idiot, miss. She ducks her head, stifling giggles. He called you an idiot? Yeah. Bet. It's like beast. She lifts her head, then shakes it. A light from someone else's porch bounces off her nose. She puts on a fake Norwegian accent and says, my God, awful day. I nod. Awful day. And because we say it all the time, because it's the kind of silly, ordinary thing you could call one of our refrains, or maybe because of the weed I've smoked. A whole bunch of days seem pressed together inside this moment, more than you could count. There's the time we all went out for New Year's Eve and Uncle Tad drove me, and when he stopped and I opened the door, he told me to close it and I said I will when I'm on the other side. And when I told Mona, we laughed so hard we had to run away and hide in the bathroom. There's the day some people we know from school came in and we served them wine even though they were underage and Mona got got nervous and spilled it all over the tablecloth. And the day her nice cousin came to visit and made us cheese and mint sandwiches in the microwave and got yelled at for wasting food. And the day of the party for Mona's mom's birthday when Uncle Tad played music and made us all dance and Mona's mom's eyes went jewely with tears and afterward Mona told me I should just run away. I'm the only thing keeping her here. My God, awful days. All the best days of my life. Bye, Mona whispers. I watch her until she disappears into the house. My mom used to swim every morning at the ywca When I was little she took me along. I didn't like swimming. I'd sit in a chair with a book while she went up and down, up and down, a dim streak in the water. When I read Ms. Frisbie and the Rats of NIMH, it seemed like mom was a lab rat doing tasks, the way she kept touching one side of the pool and then the other. At last she climbed out and pulled off her bathing cap. In the locker room she hung up her suit, a thin gray rag dripping on the floor. Most people put the hook of their padlock through the straps of their suit so the suits could hang outside the lockers without getting stolen. But my mom never did that. She just tied her suit loosely on the lock. No one's gonna steal that stretchy old thing, she said. And no one did. That should have been the end of the story. But it wasn't. My dad says mom was an elemental, a sort of stranger. Not of our kind. It wasn't my fault she left. It was because she couldn't learn to breathe on land. That's the worst story I've ever heard. I'll never tell Mona. Not ever. Not even when we're leaving for Colorado with everything we need in the back of my car and I meet her at the grocery store the way we've already planned, and she runs out smiling under her orange baseball cap. I won't tell her how dangerous addicts are, or how some people can't start over. Or how I still see my mom in the shop waiting windows with her long hair the same silver gray as her coat. Or how once when my little cousins came to visit, we went to the zoo and the seals recognized me. They both stood up in the water and talked in a foreign language. I won't tell her. I'm too scared. I won't even tell her what she needs to know. That we've got to be tougher than our moms, that we've got to have different stories, that she'd better not change her mind and and drop me in Colorado because I won't understand. I'll hate her forever and burn her stuff and stay up all night screaming at the woods because it's stupid not to be able to breathe. Whoever heard of somebody breathing in one place but not another? And we're not like that, Mona and me. And Selkie stories are only for losers stuck on the wrong side of magic. People who drop things, who tell all, who leave keys around, who let go. The end this story was picked out by my friend Hazel, who said this about it. Selkie stories are for losers like they're for suckers. But Selkie stories are also for losers. People who lose people and need to make sense of that loss. And we asked Sophia if there's anything she wanted to include in this reading. And she had this to say about the piece. Quote. I think what I'd want to say about this story is that it marked a turning point in my writing practice. Writing it, I understood for the first time what a short story was I learned this by studying Karen Joy Fowler's excellent story King Rat, which also uses a mixture of realism and folklore. And that makes sense to me because, honestly, I am blown away by the craft of this story. I think that this story is. Well, I've already been saying for years that Sophia Samatar's story, the Ogres of East Africa is my favorite short story. And it's true thematically and prose wise. But also just on this craft level, I'm just really blown away by how Sofia writes. I think that the way that this story, the selkie story, is telling two parallel stories at the same time with these brilliant overlaps and parallels that are still remarkably different. Like, culturally different. Like, you know, I'm afraid I'll be taken back to Egypt versus, like, I'm gonna move to a landlocked state. And obviously, the parallel about the way in which both of their mothers have attempted to leave. And it's interesting because by default, when I think of selkie stories, I really think about, you know, the running back to the wild and sort of abandoning the family. But then this story is. While there's a little bit of that, it's also just, like, clearly about death and being sort of too wild to be alive in some ways. And, you know, when I hear a selkie story, traditionally, my thoughts are like, fuck, yeah, she got away from that guy, right? But then positioning in it from the point of view of the kids, it deepens a feminist understanding of what it means to feel trapped by a family, you know? And it complicates it in this way that I think is. Is necessary and makes it no longer so black and white. So, yeah, I've enjoyed the story every time I've read it. And I will probably come back to it just from a craft level to study it further. I really can't say enough about it, but I will say that Sofia's most recent books, if you want to read more of her stuff, are the science fiction novella the Practice, the Horizon and the Chain, which was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Philip K. Dick and Locus awards and Opacities on Writing and the Writing, a meditation on writing, publishing and friendship. And I'm going to go out and get both of those books. And I have a thing where I really like books about writing, but most of them aren't very good. And I suspect that this one will be very good. And I really like how different. Every author who writes books about writing is going to write a book. You think it'd be a very Standard kind of textbooky thing. But everyone's books are so completely different. Jeff Vandermeer has two different books on writing and they're night and day different from each other. One's called Wonder Book and it's esoteric and feels like you're on lsd, but it also teaches you about story. And one's called, I think it's called the Writing Life or something. And it's just about how to not lose your brain while writing. Anyway, I don't know what I'm talking about that. But if you want to keep up with Sophia Samatar's work, you can do that. I believe she's not on social media. I believe she is free. But she has a website, sophiasamatar.com, which is s O F I a S a M a t a r.com and I'm Margaret Killjoy and you can find me@birdsbeforethestorm.net, it's a website that I never obtained. I don't know why I'm telling you to go there. I have an author website. I've had it for a very long time, but I don't use it. I am on social media because I am not free. You can find me at either Margaret or Magpie Killjoy on various things. I don't know, search my name, you'll figure it out. I believe in you and I write a substack that comes out every week and I have another podcast, it's called Cool People who did Cool Stuff. And also I hope all of you are doing as well as you can during this moment. I say this all the time, but it's not like things are. It's always a. Always a complicated time and that's why we have stories. All right, bye everyone.
