Wytch of the Sea

by Ella Scott

—

After a few decades, he would not remember how we met. He would claim his memories were a trick of the mind.

He would convince himself he had a simple marriage with a kind wife who died in childbirth, and not that a shipwreck led him to a sea goddess. 

He would not remember that he rowed out to sea every few days. He would not remember the nights we spent in each other's arms, looking out at the stars reflected over the unmoving ocean.

Nor would he recall my shimmering skin and blue glass eyes. The pearls dripped from my skin in lieu of human sweat or tears. Every item of clothing I wore was adorned with dropped pearls.

I will always remember it. After his long black hair went white with age. For hundreds of years after he was gone.

He called me by my Goddesses name without fear, “My love,” he would say. He was the only man bold enough to lay a claim to one such as me.

He would have our children to remind him that he had a lover once. But he would never be able to tell them who I was, what I was. They wouldn’t believe it anyway. 

Two children, I gave birth to. Boys. He held my hand and wiped my brow that day. I watched from my ocean perch, as they grew. Beautiful reflections of their beautiful father. 

If the rebels never set out against my kind, if they never killed my brothers, sisters, and parents…I would have never sent them to the mountains. 

I could have been a mother to my children. I could have been a wife to him. 

I am reduced to shipments of pearls that I send through shells, to ensure they have a prosperous life. 

I could have known my children’s children, and their children in turn. I could have known the two that hold my blood in their veins now. 

All the things that should have been and never got to be.

-x-X-x-