Fictober 2022 | Day 11 | Deep Water Prompt #2815

Photo by Edward Howell on Unsplash

❝Cautious selkies bring me their pelts to protect, for a fee. I have stabbed more fishermen than I can count, in the dead of night, at the foot of the safe.❞

On those nights, I think of my mother. I think of my father. I think of myself, and what my life would have been like, had my mother had someone like me, to protect her pelt. Had my father been someone like me, protective of her pelt and willing to return it when she asked for it, interested only in keeping it safe, rather than keeping her. 

I wonder if she would have loved him for it. I wonder if he would have loved her, truly. I wonder who I would be, if my father hadn’t been a captor and a thief, if my mother hadn’t been a prisoner who escaped and never returned. 

Would I still be guarding pelts in a safe I constructed? Would I still be giving selkies the bodies of the fishermen who would be thieves, to bury out at sea? Would I still have blood on my hands but a lack of regret in my heart, only wistful grief?

Fictober is a challenge where writers respond to a prompt a day for the whole of October.
This year's prompts are from Deep Water Prompts on tumblr.