Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and birds that fly above the earth across the expanse of sky

P H Lee returns to The Sunday Morning Transport this week with a yearning and a satisfaction.

~ Julian and Fran, February 22, 2026

For February, The Sunday Morning Transport brings you four stories to thrill, chill, and delight you, by Celia Marsh, David Bowles, Carrie Vaughn, and P H Lee. We are grateful for your support in helping us get here, and in continuing to bring more extraordinary writers and their work to the page.

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Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and birds that fly above the earth across the expanse of sky

by P H Lee

Most days, she does not miss the sea. Most days, she is too occupied with drop spindles and skinned kneecaps and wind-dried fish for market day and the snert overboiling and always the constant waves of washing—clothes, children, pots, floors, beds. That is the life that she has chosen: an endless torrent of things needing washing. So of course she does not miss the sea. She does not have the time to.

Even in the church on Sundays—the only time she had to think, most weeks, listening to the murmur of women’s prayers, too distant from the new priest’s communion to hear his susurrations—she mostly thought about her own soul. She had become a woman, yes, but—was Heaven closed to seals? She had asked the priest once—not the new priest, who had attended university and barely knew anything, who read treatises and had no patience for peasant superstition, no—she had asked the old priest, who had married them, who had served the island for many years and knew a little of the shape of things. He had said that God had made seals on the fourth day, along with the leviathans He loved, two days before He even made the first man and set him as the steward over all the world. “God loves all of His creations,” he had said, “seals no less than men. And Christ’s sacrifice was for every soul that accepts His baptism.”

(It was that same priest—the old one—who had baptized her. He had insisted on it, before they could be married. The water had felt no different than the salt sea of her birth, but what did she know of holy water? She had been a woman for less than a day, then.)

The priest’s words consoled her even now, after he had died. It was a comfortable explanation—serving as long as he had on this island, she could not have been the first seal-wife he had baptized. But still, sitting in the women’s pews, surrounded by the babble of a dozen different prayers, she wondered. Could she really be content in Christ’s eternal life? Was there really a place in Heaven for a woman such as her?

So, even in the church, she did not have time to miss the sea.

It was only on certain nights, after all the children were in bed, when she lay awake and listened to her husband snoring, when even bone-tired from all the washing she could not will herself to sleep, that she would get up—careful not to wake any of them—and walk out along the shore, staring into the black and endless sea.

Even then, staring out into the sea on a sleepless night, she does not forget the cruelties. She remembers her mother, biting and spiteful. Her sisters, barely any better. She remembers the danger in every direction, the sudden teeth of sharks, the sharp sting of jellyfish. She remembers—how could she ever forget?—the bulls, screaming their lust at her, the bulls whose favorite pass-time was to corner an otter pup and slap it one way, then another, until at last it died, and thereafter would take their turns with— She remembers. She cannot forget.

But yet—yet. She remembers swimming, diving through that cold and welcoming expanse, how it seemed that she could go anywhere. Here, walking on two unsteady legs through this life that she has chosen, everything is flat. She has no other choice but here.

Now, though in the morning she will fret that it might have been a sin, she will reach into the night-black water and move her hand—first one way, then another—feeling the resistance and the flow propelling her. On those lone night walks along the shore, she remembers, and though she does not miss that life, she misses—oh! She misses when she swam alone through that dark expanse of sea.