Her Tune, In Truth

For our second free story of 2025, Marissa Lingen’s selkie tale asks: Who told you the stories that limit you?

~ Julian and Fran, January 5, 2025

January’s stories — by E. Catherine Tobler, Margaret Ronald, Marissa Lingen, and David Bowles — will all be free-to-read, and we hope that you’ll enjoy them and share them. However, it’s our paying subscribers who allow us to keep rolling throughout the year. If you haven’t already, please consider signing up.

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Her Tune, In Truth

by Marissa Lingen

I wasn’t singing, out there on the rock. There was not a sailor for leagues, and the beach was empty but for one woman in a drab brown woolen cloak, staring with sad dark eyes out into the waves. Her round face, the doleful way she watched the water, told me immediately that she was one of the kinfolk I was looking for. Even from that distance, I could see when she spotted me: She tensed and then slumped with disappointment. Some part of her had hoped not to see a stranger. I waved anyway.

Tentatively, she waved back.

I beckoned to her. She hesitated, so I beckoned again. It was a warm morning, for this part of the world, and the rock I’d chosen was not far, but I had no way of knowing whether someone was following her just out of sight. I wouldn’t be setting foot on this piece of land anytime soon, not with its reputation. If we were going to have a talk, she would have to do the swimming, not me.

I hoped she would. From the hunch of her shoulders inside that cloak, she needed it.

Sure enough, she cast the cloak off in a neat puddle behind her, then her dress to follow it. There were no shoes to cause trouble. Hers was not a prosperous enough household for that. She plunged into the waves in just her shift, very similar to the one I wore in this form. She was, as I expected, a strong swimmer even as she was. It only took a few minutes for her to clamber up on the rock.

“Do I know you?” she said. Would she have smelled of salt if she hadn’t just been in the sea? My heart said yes.

“I think we’re kin,” I said, and she looked away.

“None of my kin in these parts for years now. None but my children.”

“How many?” I asked.

“My babies are none of your concern,” she snapped, and immediately thought better of it. She looked farther out to sea. “I’m sorry. Three. Three, living.”

“How old is the youngest?”

“Five winters. Safe enough from the worst of the land illnesses, at least.”

I nodded. “Three strong children. I’m sure they’re a great help to you.”

Her fathomless brown gaze swung from the water to me. “Did I swim out here so we could chatter like market biddies about my children?”

“Why did you swim out here?” I asked reasonably.

“You asked me to.” And then, struck by her ridiculous situation, she began to laugh quietly. “I . . . There was something familiar about you sitting out here. My kin, you said. Which is why you’re not coming on land. You know better than to risk it.”

I waited.

“I wish I’d known better. I wish my mother had known better. And my children will say the same thing. I’ve never—”

A large wave crashed against our rock.

“I’ve never known one of us who wasn’t—like me. Trapped. But I guess that’s how it is, right? I don’t know how you’ve managed to stay free of it.”

“We should all be free,” I said gently. “Your children should be free.”

“I always thought that, but . . . I don’t see how it can happen. This is the way of our kind. You must be lonely out there, with the rest of those like us—skin-caught.”

She had said it, she’d admitted out loud to what we were. “It’s not the rest of us. It’s just some. I came back to try to make it one fewer. Or, apparently, four.”

Her laugh was bitter. “He took my children’s skins while I was still weak from birthing them. I couldn’t leave them even if I knew where mine was. It’s how all our stories go, isn’t it? It’s how my mother’s went, and now me.”

“Who’s been telling you stories?”

She shrugged. “Everyone. People.”

“Human people.”

That was where she flinched, like she’d cut her foot on a shell.

“Humans aren’t the only people. And theirs aren’t the only stories.” I didn’t think she was going to give me a better opportunity than that, so I grabbed at the chance: I took her hand, and I sang.

My song didn’t lure her—she was already there with me, perched on that rock where only our kind could be comfortable. But it enticed her all the same. I sang of swimming free, of coming ashore on islands to do whatever our human hands liked—weaving, cooking, building, painting. I sang of my father and my mother, their round snouts surfacing from the waves at the same moment, diving deep together. I sang of my aunt, who never took a partner and always knew the best kelp forests for a light, sweet massage, and which would tangle us deeper. I sang of my little nieces and nephews, staggering back and forth between forms, tiny, awkward, free.

A human trying to write my song would have made us queens of the waves, rulers of all we surveyed. But we were better than that: we were rulers of ourselves, and we shared the waves with otters, crabs, dolphins, sharks, fish of every kind. Her branch of the family, and mine, together.

And yes, sometimes we shared the waves with humans. When we could find humans who knew how to share. We weren’t the ones who wrote the stories that had kept her trapped for so long.

When my last note faded away, tears mingled with the salt spray on my cheeks. Hers were staunchly dry. She took a deep breath, as if she were about to dive. “I know what you are. I thought you said we were kin.”

“I didn’t say we were close kin.”

That made her laugh. I wondered how long it had been since she’d laughed.

I chased it urgently: “We’re close enough kin that we should help each other. If you bring your”—I couldn’t make myself say husband or spouse, not for someone who had treated her and her children the way he had, not for someone who had convinced her there was no way but his—“if you bring him to the shore, we will be here. We will lure him out.”

“But he still has my skin. Their skins.”

“When he’s—when we’ve got him. When your kin has got him for you. You can spend all the time you like looking for your skins, and who will stop you?”

She trailed her hand in the water, letting it swirl around her where the waves had already broken on the rock. I couldn’t tell whether she was relaxed or exhausted. It could have been both. I gave her what space I could with my silence.

“He had my skin from my father,” she said, and then: “He would do the same to our children. Give their skins for his own advantage. He will do it. Maybe not many years now; my oldest is eleven.”

I had already sung for her, pleaded with her. This part I had to let her talk through on her own.

“I don’t see another way.”

“If I had one, I would have told you both and let you choose.”

She looked at me closely. “I believe you would. Thank you. I’ll—I’ll do it. I’ll have him back here in three days’ time.”

I nodded. “Be brave. Be wise. You’re writing a new story for yourself. For all of you.”

She dove back into the water, but not before I could see the tears welling in her dark eyes.

I would return in three days. If she didn’t come, I would return again, and for her children. I could have used my song to compel her to come, to bring her man, but how would that have left us any better off than before? It would be her choice. But I thought I knew which way she would turn.

I slipped, self-contained and luscious, into my other form, into my soft, abundant gray curves and then into the sea, where the song of the water filled my head and I knew I was not alone.

Sometimes the stories are lies. Sometimes the stories are true. All the stories of sirena talk of the magic of our songs, luring sailors to their doom. But sailor or farmer or merchant or prince, they all tell each other not to listen to our songs, and they nod wisely at each other, and not one of them thinks to ask: What will the song tell me, that the others don’t want me to hear?

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Thank you for joining our journey this week.

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Marissa Lingen lives in the Minneapolis area with her family, atop some of the oldest bedrock in North America. In addition to previous work in Sunday Morning Transport, her stories have appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, F&SF, and Uncanny, among others.

“Her Tune, In Truth,” © Marissa Lingen, 2025.

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