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Please feel free tae ignore, ridicule, scorn, criticise, whatever....I`m fairly thick skinned...I wrote this a long time ago noo, one o` the greatest things in life I was ever given was the love o` reading, and books have enriched me life a very great deal. I`m nae great writer but like tae hae a go at the occasional short story, and this one was cast up by the beautiful Orkney shorelines.

"Where are the sealfolks now, I wondered, walking along the shore. In a wind grown bonedeep cold I buried my nose in the scarf and peered at waves grown huge and cold looking and fierce, tumbling onto the shore with no little force. These were never the waves that gently lapped foreign, golden shores in warmer climates. These weren`t the waves you would see folks surfing in, like merfolk they could seem skimming the sea on sealshaped boards.
These waves belonged to the North, the icelocked lands not so far away, and you could smell the cold in them, you could smell the briny air of shingle shored lands where the great whales swam and the huge white bear birthed her cubs.
So I kicked the stone into the water, staying well enough back not to get wet.
It was winter now. In summer these shores were barely warmer. But the sea now, in summer, the Sea Mither quietened a bit. Enough to watch the seals come to shore and follow your path along the beaches.
With their dog faces and their doe eyes they popped up and down beneath gentler waves and if it was an especially quiet sea day, you could follow the shape of them, quick grey darts beneath turquoise glassy water.
The sea belonged to them, the seals. Ungainly and heavy on land, they became beautiful beneath water, graceful, fair formed like the Sidhe women who captured the hearts of men deep in hollow hills with song, with dance, with a glance beneath long sweeping lashes....
Once selkie women graced the rocks of these islands. Once the lore of them was known to every child, every adult every gull carrying the sighting of them for folks with the ears to hear.
Once merfolks lived in the shallows and lured sailors to deep cities where old gods dwelled with fins for feet and ridged spines along their backs, gills to breathe water, they had...
Once the gods of the waves demanded gild price for travel in stormy weather and every sailor who valued life paid it....once the god of the deep demanded blood for the survival of a doomed ship far out to sea, and every sailor who valued his own skin paid it, yet one would lose....
Where are they know, the sealwives, the mermen, the temperamental gods of the sea?
All that survives is the dim memory of superstition, when sailors will offer their spit alone over the side for a fair wind, or toss a meagre silver coin of little value to the denizens of the deep.
Do they hide their form from us, our cousins who love the water? Are they glad to be shot of us, with our arrogant trespass upon their realm?
Or somewhere is there a mourning of sorts, a waterlogged hall wherein dance mermen with courtly grace borne of weightlessness, where upon a coral throne like old worn bone sits an ancient god with sight turned inward, thinking on times past when he netted his coin in great vast catches of respect and the dialogue of ritual?

None of this shows upon the violent, stormy surface of the sea. Like the breath of a vast ice beast the chill from the water mists the shore, like the drumming of the oldest, weariest heartbeat, the waves beat the shingle.
It is no great distance to turn home. One short walk along a track where sand sits under the rock.
There had been no real need to visit the shore on this day. But I was glad I had. Closer to the edge of it, I listened for the song of the merfolks, that eerie haunting ballad which captures the heart and mind and lures you to take ship and journey.
I looked over foam and ice-blue caps for fin or nose or bright liquid doe eyes.
Nothing moved on the surface of the water excepting the mist spray of the foam blown by the winds.
I mourned a little. Where are the children seeking the selkies, where are Ran`s daughters, Manannan`s riders?
I turned my back on it all and hunched deeper into my coat.

And behind her a graceful head rises from the violent waves, grave green eyes watch her head for home, strong muscled arms and fin-bedecked legs tread water, and a salt laden tear adds to the great grieving ocean.