I turn my back to the cave wall and look out. The slope of the hill and a little green bramble with a spray of yellow flowers partially obscures one side of the opening and on the other side I see the green-gray sea reaching to the horizon. I think, I could live here if I had to.

THE TRAGEDY OF THE ROSEMARKIE SEAL BY EMILY NEVES 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 103

A sign says, “Caird’s Cave, 1.2 km”, with an arrow. If there’s a cave I have to see it. I take up the trail, the hills I hiked earlier that day springing up to my left, a patchwork of emerald and muted rust and gold and winter-tree gray against a sky the color of an old, dingy sock. The churning bay roars softly to my right. The crunch of gravel beneath my boots, the whistle of the coastal wind, and the cool mist on my face lull me into a sort of walking trance.

I attempt the math of converting one-point-two kilometers to miles but decide I don’t care. It will take the time that it takes. Crunch, crunch, crunch go my boots.

Then I wonder what would happen if I fell. How long would it be before someone found me? I have my phone and a power bank to charge it. I could call for help. Still.

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Ever since you died I do not fear death. All things die. All is fair because nothing is fair. Nature is not so much cruel as indifferent. She took you from me all too soon but not out of malice. All life is transitory and not a day passes without the excruciating brevity of your life reminding me. You went and then Christian went 10 years later, dumping me twice into the wine-dark depths of grief. While I did not dissolve into the abyss, its alchemical brine changed me forever.

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This place seems so remote but then I spy a woman with her dog down on the beach and realize it isn’t as far-flung as it feels.

I leap over a stream that flows into the sea. I press higher. After a while there is nowhere further to go. I turn back and I am startled by how far down it is to the stream. I step unevenly on a rock and it flips out from under my boot. My body lurches backward, my feet sliding out from beneath me. I bend my knees like a surfer and coast. The toothy tread of my boots grips the soil, and I grab an outcropping of granite.

My heart pounds like a tribal drum and my vision quivers with each thundering contraction. I take a deep breath. I note that I might not be as fearless as I thought. In some alternate timeline, I think, I just plummeted to my death.

Making my way back down I scan the trail to the end of where I can discern it, I try to track it past the stream. I can’t. I walk closer to the bank opposite where the footpath meets the stream, and there, I see it. The path is obscured by tall marram grass this side of the syke, a few feet downstream.

Rounding a little outcropping, I glance up, and the misty majesty of the Scottish coastline stops me in my tracks. I take out my phone and frame the landscape, the rust and yellow grass at my feet, the black granite crumbling into the green-gray sea, and three cliffs beyond, like the extended front paws of giant sphinxes, each more muted than the last by the distant, vaporous air. The sea and the sky are almost the same color, the sea slightly darker and greener, and the sky holding more blue tones. As soon as I take this photo I make it my home screen.

Breathing in the cool, wet, salty air, I feel more at home here than anywhere else on earth. Here all illusions of separation from nature evaporate into the fog with every exhalation. I am the burn that flows into the sea. I am the rock and the sand. I am the dormant grasses and dripping emerald moss. I am the churning bay.

My eyes scan the terrain to my landward side, and I see a gaping black maw in the foot of the ancient granite. Pareidolia takes over and I perceive a ghastly face lying on its side, the visage of a slain giant, the trail furling out from its mouth, a lolling, serpentine tongue cutting through the marram grass.

I raise my phone and hit record as I approach the mouth. “Dare I enter?” I whisper to myself and my future audience. “I think I do.” Of course I do. This is what I came for.

Crunch crunch crunch crunch, up the tongue path into the yawning craw of the decaying giant. I enter. I stand perfectly still, breathe in, and taste the dank, earthy air. I creep further in, to the narrowing back of the cave. My heart sinks a little when I see it does not extend further into the hill, and I express my disappointment to the camera. I add, “Not that I would go in.” The truth is I would go in.

I turn my back to the cave wall and look out. The slope of the hill and a little green bramble with a spray of yellow flowers partially obscures one side of the opening and on the other side I see the green-gray sea reaching to the horizon. I think, I could live here if I had to.

The sound of my boots is broader on the larger stones, a rocky splash and clatter, and I clear the cave’s damp mouth and return to the crunch of the gravel path.

Standing in front of the cave’s opening I look down to the beach. I remember the woman and her dog and think, I can go back that way.

I step onto the hard, wet sand, stopping to marvel at the black rocks shot with veins like rust, jutting out of sand the color of a perfectly baked croissant. I wonder at the white and rust striations in the rock. What geological event formed them? I scan the bright array of pebbles that litter the beach, and I pick one up. White-gray quartz shot through with veins of that same rusty red orange. I pocket it and keep walking.

The phone battery is drained so I plug it into the charging bank. As I zip up my pack and put it back on, I look out to sea.

That’s when I see it. I gasp. A seal. Not a very big one. Two and a half feet long at most. It lies on its side, and as I approach its head, I see little, round, black eyes, vacant, but still wet, blood on its snout and a dark spot of blood on the sand beneath the little thing’s nostril. The sight of the pup’s whiskers seizes my heart and squeezes.

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The night before, as the thunder rolled and the rain pattered the window of my hotel room, I was reading in bed about the Cailleach from Celtic mythology, the Queen of Winter, the mother of all gods and goddesses, a giantess who raised the gale that night in her yearly battle to beat back the advent of spring, when winter goes down fighting, before the Cailleach turns to stone and the marram grasses wake.

“Cailleach,” I whisper, calling upon my ancestors to help me wrap my tongue around the words as I look at the poor little creature. She did this. This little seal is a casualty of her warpath.

I consider taking a picture of the seal but shudder at the thought. I can’t. I don’t need to. The memory will never leave me so why capture it digitally?

I never saw your body before the paramedics came to take it to the funeral home. Mom asked if I wanted to and I said no. You weren’t in there any more. I am grateful to my past self for making that choice.

I have learned that you cannot shield yourself from the sight of death. Death is everywhere, around us all the time, and we will see it. It may be that the more we try not to see it, the more violently death will thrust itself into our line of sight. Brothers die. Brothers get cancer just when they had started to figure out their lives and death takes them within four months of diagnosis.

I think about you. I think about our first baby half-brother, Christian. About the difficulty of both your lives before they were cut short, 10 years apart, both 28 years old.

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I don’t know when the tide came in or went out that day at Rosemarkie beach, but I know that baby seal has not been there long. Its eyes are still shiny and whole and wet-looking. They are glassy and empty, inanimate, but they have not been pecked at by scavengers, and eyes are usually the first things to get eaten.

I think about how if I did have to live in Caird’s Cave this baby seal would be a different kind of gift. If my survival depended on it, I might have to eat it. Of all the thoughts I’ve had in the moments since I found the seal, this one brings me closest to tears.

As I walk away from the little seal pup there on the sand, I say aloud to myself, above the whistling wind, “Sometimes things just die.”

Later I tell the cab driver, Gary, the Tragedy of the Rosemarkie Pup. “Och, it’s so sad. I bet it got killed in the storm last night.” He goes on, “Ye hate to see it, ye know? Just like wee Labradors those things.”

That night, as I sit in a diner around the corner from my hotel in Inverness, warming my mist-chilled bones with a pint of Stella Artois and some haggis bites, I think again of you and Christian. I wonder if I am being unkind as I draw the comparison between you both and the seal pup. Too young to withstand the tempest. Too weak to fight the current. Dashed against the rocks.

But what about me? I was born into the same storm, the same tempestuous family. I was no stronger than you, just luckier. I was farther from the treacherous shoreline, closer to our mother’s side, usurping your place and claiming her attention just 13 months after you were born. I was easier for our father to understand and accept. Queer, but not as noticeably queer. I was guarded from the perils of the generational squall and jagged granite. I was not vulnerable to the tragedy that haunts our family’s male line. Somehow I feel that’s why I am here. Maybe I incarnated in this life to investigate, to find the origin of this cruel line of fate. I have come to break the curse that claimed you.

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EMILY NEVES

My writings are chronicles of my conversation with nature, my dead, and the dialogue (or sometimes the battle) between my light and shadow. I write to soften hearts and turn readers’ attention to the dying planet and the unseen world. I write to induce trance states in myself and my readers. I write to crack open what capitalism does not want us to attend. I live in Texas and I travel as often as possible. I get as far away as I can, then return with new knowledge and the spice of experience to sprinkle among the strip malls and parking lot birds. I work in anime, as a Senior Adaptive Writer for Crunchyroll, making cartoons sound good in English and fit the mouth-flaps that were animated to a vastly different tongue. I don’t speak Japanese—someone gives me a raw translation and I adapt it—but I do speak English fairly well. IMAGE BY JORDAN FRAKER

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