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.

The guys working the docks said they saw shadows crawling out of the water in those twilight hours when it's hard to know what you're looking at. The other locals called them loony, boozy, minds addled by boredom and whiskey. I knew in my gut all those things were connected, but couldn't have told you why, so I kept my mouth shut.

Better that than running it, or so I'd learned.

Years passed, and I kept to myself in the corner of my tavern. I tipped Lor, I stayed polite, and sometimes she'd wave me over and push a drunk girl into my arms with nothing but a significant look that I'd long since learned to interpret. I'd walk the girl home, no fuss. Or help her out the back, if her boyfriend was at the bar getting rowdy. I even smuggled a couple into my truck, once, when they'd belatedly realized the Clam wasn't always a friendly place for folks like us. But it got a little better every year, a little more tolerant of those who wanted nothing more than to live and love in peace, and I liked to think Lor and I were a part of that.

"Why do you keep coming back?" Lor asked, once, when I returned from a long nighttime walk.

"It's the only place I know," I said, and meant it. "And besides, you make a mean fish pie."

And at that point, I guess, it'd have felt wrong to walk into a pub and see anyone but Lor behind the bar. I didn't belong, and neither did she, and we were alone-together.

I climbed the ladder on Vigilant as the years passed, keeping my head down and hustling until I earned the chief mate's position and a hefty bump in pay. My first season running the deck went as smoothly as a becalmed sea. But one night, setting hooks out on the banks, we got a snag in our trolling gear. I headed aft to clear it and the thing freewheeled—we never did figure out what happened—and I got a fish hook straight through my hand. Before my body registered the stab of white-hot pain, I was out and over the side, dragged overboard by my hand into the night's cold-slap water.

It hit like a shock, setting my scalp on fire. I only had a fraction of a moment to let out a garbled shout at Vigilant, bobbing behind me in the waves, before the hook dragged me down into the sea.

Darkness closed around me. Pressure beat at my head. I tried to keep calm, to keep my breath, because if I let myself flail, let myself panic, I'd run out of air and that'd be it—the end. I kicked my boots off and grabbed for my knife, tried to take it to the line, but fumbled. The blade slipped through my fingers and disappeared into the deep.

And then I saw it. A shadow in the murk. A slick, long body, slipping through the water like a torpedo, straight for me. It grabbed my arm. I shut my eyes.

Nothing happened.

When I opened them a crack, the blurry shape of a seal hovered in front of me, shark-edged smile bared. It closed its maw around the fishing line, severed it, left me with a hook in my hand and a straight shot to freedom. I was weak and slow in the water, but it bumped me from behind, something familiar in the fin that slapped across my back. So I kicked.

I broke the surface with a heaving gasp, lungs burning, ears ringing. I spun, but the seal was nowhere to be found. On the water, a bright orange life ring surged my way. I grabbed it with my good hand and pulled myself up. Only then did I see the commotion on Vigilant's deck—Vigilant, who blessedly hadn't steamed on after I fell. I couldn't hear a thing above the rush of water around me, but the life ring had a light, and the high beam from the helm station found me. Even though I shivered, even though my hand throbbed like a wild thing and coughing rattled my bones, I knew I'd be alright.

The fishhook was still buried in my palm, a severed line trailing from it. I replayed the memory like a fever-dream while Vigilant circled ever-closer: going over the side, sinking. A seal swimming up, looking right at me with its squally eyes.

Squally. What the hell kind of seal had grey eyes?

I passed out before they got to me, but woke up on board, wrapped in a bunk with the hook still in my hand. It wasn't until we got ashore and I saw the doctor that the thing came out—with no small amount of griping and cussing on my part, I'll add. But sure enough, I got a clean bill of health and a 'you're damn lucky to be alive, son,' which wasn't much news to me, and I found myself shouldering through the door of the Clam by sunset.

"Glad you're with us, kid," Lor called from the bar, pouring a round on the house for the crew of the Vigilant.

I thanked her and ordered my usual fish pie, keeping to myself in the corner while the lads tied one on and told the story of my heroic rescue to anyone and everyone who'd listen. I was alone at the table when the plates came, Lor handing out silverware with the brisk efficiency of a woman who'd spent a lifetime keeping a bar afloat. Only when she'd bustled away did I look down at what she'd given me. On my left, one of the Clam's battered forks. And on the right—

My knife. The one I'd last seen drifting down to the deep as I nearly drowned with a hook in my hand.

My head snapped around to the bar. Lor stood there, filling another beer. She caught my eye with hers—with her squall-grey ones—

And she winked.

I know you'll say this is all a loony tale, woven by a fisherman gone out of his gourd with boredom and whiskey and too much time at sea. But hear me out. The bartender is a selkie. And if you don't keep yourself in good form while you're in her establishment—

Well. Don't say I didn't warn you.

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