Today, we are pleased to share Haley Kennedy’s “Sealskin,” selected by The Masters Review as the honorable mention in this year’s Flash Fiction Contest. “Sealskin” explores communication and memory as the narrator reconstructs a lexicon to understand her parents and their relationships with each other, with her, with her extended family. “I remember mamma in pieces.” Read on below.
In the summer, the wild swimmers came. A crew of all-age, untethered women. They bobbed with the cold waves, clustered together in joyful gossip. They laughed in loud, uproarious barks.
I remember mamma in pieces. Fragments of memory worn down like seaglass. When I was little, she made a mobile from bits of glass we scavenged. When we opened the window, the breeze would clink the glass and their tinted light would dance along the kitchen tiles.
From this came the first word she taught me.
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mareldphosphorescent light in the sea
Break it down and the meaning is clearer.
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marthe sea
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eldfire
I liked having this word that no one else knew. I felt close to her in those small phrases, the broken bits of her mother tongue.
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faren i dorafelarbroken into pieces
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farengone, obsolete
