Foxfire, Wolfskin: and other stories of shapeshifting women

‘Ze forest is a community,’ she says. ‘Pine talks to oak, oak talks to birch. Birch whispers to crow, who passes it on to grey owl. Deer comes along, hears what’s what from bear. Bear heard it all from mushrooms, whose network goes to root of things. Listen – can you hear it?

Snow Queen. I imagine you’ve heard of her. I imagine you think you know her. A bad sort, evil through and through. I thought it too. Believed the men who wrote down our stories, for didn’t they always know best? Didn’t they always know true? The men knew – or so they said. The men had always plenty of things to say.

A baby each year, till the black crows in their black-hearted churches frowned at their excess, and they started to sleep in different beds.

He was a strange creature, my selkie. When he was on land he longed for the sea; when he was in the sea he longed for the land. And is that not given to us all, to long for what we never can fully hold? Sometimes, love is like that. Sometimes, love can only exist while balancing, like angels, on the head of a silver pin.

My heart burning so brightly in my chest I could have scorched cities with it; my yearning so vast and deep it could have bottomed out the world.

It was weird, though, walking into the forest from the clearing where her house is. It felt alive, somehow.

Because the stories of this island are like the land itself: the interlocking textures of the Llewissian gneiss that bears us now, melted and banded, and all folded in on itself.

pellucid,

Learn to apprentice yourself to the work, and you will reap rewards of your own becoming.’