Hook, Line, Sinker

The bartender is a selkie. Hear me out—I have evidence.

Her name is Lor, and she's been tending bar in our waterside hole-in-the-wall for as long as I can remember. All the older guys at the docks claim they were there when she started up, but if you get into the nitty gritty with them, the stories don't match. Some say she's been here for twenty-odd years. Others say ten. The tourists who believe them take one look at Lor and start asking dumb questions about her skincare routine, and whatnot, because she can't be a day over thirty, and who would have hired a child to tend their bar?

She isn't as old as the yardies claim, but sometimes she seems even older, with her thousand-league stare and that thick, wheaten hair she wears up in a braid. You could wind back time to when the inn was built in the 1700s (if the plaque outside isn't made-up tourist bullshit) and she'd be right at home with her cheeks so pale they're ruddy and eyes like the sky before a blow. There's something timeless about her, is what I'm saying—something that belongs here but doesn't. Something eerie that the other guys sleep on.

But I notice. I'm like Lor that way. I keep to myself, and I watch.

I was sixteen when I first met her. Book learning was never for me, and I'd dropped out of school to take up the trade with my older brother. He pulled some strings and helped me get a good berth on Vigilant, the sword-fisher. I was so excited I didn't even mind the work they put on greenhorns—all the worst watches, baiting hooks, scrubbing toilets.

We pulled into Gloucester on the eve of my first big trip so we could tie one on at the Clam before heading for the banks. It was tradition, I guess, to humiliate the greenies, and they hauled me up to the bar by my collar and told Lor I had my eye on her. I turned red as my hair, I'm sure, and stuttered and stammered something embarrassing enough they laughed 'till they fell off their bar stools. Then Lor—and I'll never forget this—flashed me a smile, a sawtooth smile, and asked,

"What's the matter, boy, I'm not pretty enough for you?"

It was the last question I wanted to be asked, then or now, really. I'm not ashamed, but my business is no one else's. I had to answer or risk offending her, and offense was the last thing I wanted to deal. The guys had failed to warn me about plenty of the pitfalls of late-season fishing, but they'd sure told me to take care with Lor.

"It's not like that, ma'am," I said, and hoped I didn't deal offense with it, since Lor didn't look old enough to be a 'ma'am' to me. "No one's my type, really. Don't mean no harm by it."

Turns out it wasn't Lor I needed to be worried about, because the good ol' boys you sometimes find on fishing crews were plenty miffed to learn I had no interest in girls.

'Or guys,' I tried to tell them, but I guess all queers are the same to them, and I prayed I hadn't ruined the whole thing by opening my stupid mouth.

But then something happened, and I don't know what it was. Lor hummed under her breath and took my glass from my hands, topping it up with a wink. "It's on the house, kid," she said. "You're always welcome here."

And just like that, her smile transformed from something shark-edged to a normal one, a human one. My chief mate slapped me on the back, toasted Vigilant's greenhorn, and went on as if nothing had ever happened.

I thought about it a lot in the rocking, rolling days that came afterward. For a long time, I blamed it on the drink. But then I started noticing things—small things. An angry drunkard had his dory float away on him in the middle of the night so he couldn't row home to his missus. One of the regulars, a guy name Eds who always pinched Lor on the backside when she came out from behind the bar, dragged anchor in a squall, wrecking his boat on the jetty. Billy's exhaust sheared the day he tried to argue his tab down. When a rumor went around that Clay and his buddies slipped something in a tourist's drink and took her home, two days later, their sport fisher snapped its mooring and drifted off to sea. The Coast Guard found the boat five days later, but Clay and his buddies were gone.