Bonewhistle
Short Fiction - A Ferris Island Love Story
Greetings, Talebones Readers!
I couldn’t let February go by entirely without sharing at least one piece of short fiction—it’s been too long! So here it is, squeaking in right at the last minute. Sure, Valentine’s Day was a few weeks ago, but you know what? This lil love story wanted to be told.
So here she is! I hope you enjoy!
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She leaves the severed wing of a starling on the walkway to the ferry dock and wonders, before she leaps back into the sea, whether or not she’s leaving the right gifts.
It’s been so long since she’s known what it’s like to have only one skin.
But he’s sure to see it, because he walks this way every single day, so she leaves the wing sitting there and slips back into her fur and waits in the harbor—spiraling lazy little bubbling loops—and thinks about what he might say.
And then she sees him walking and he stops and sees the wing and she holds her breath, and he looks around and sees her in the harbor blowing the seawater out of her whiskered little muzzle and he smiles, and she’s not sure if he’s smiling at the wing or at her or at something else entirely…but he walks on. He’s got work to do.
***
Warren Wharton yawns and punches into the time clock.
It’s five in the morning, still dark and cold, and the commuter cars are lining up in the ferry lane as the first shuttle bus pulls into the small Park-and-Ride lot up at the top of the rise. It’s the same faces and the same cars as every weekday; he recognizes them as they arrive.
They are all dressed for work. Corporate work. Important work. They are going over to Port Townsend, or to Sequim. Some of them might be going further on, to Kingston, Poulsbo, or taking a second ferry to Edmonds. Off to wherever they work. Off to wherever makes it worthwhile to live on sleepy little Ferris Island.
Gladys at the ticket booth has the local volunteer radio station turned on louder than necessary, the bored-sounding morning announcer reading off the news, weather, and traffic. No matter where you are on the island, KVFI always seems to come in sounding like there’s water in the speakers.
Warren puts on his jacket with SECURITY emblazoned on the back, adjusts his big flashlight and the other doodads in his utility belt, and makes his first rounds. Checks the CCTV cameras from the night before, along with the little nooks and crannies in and around the terminal. There’s never anything to see, never any trouble to report; Portview is just a stop between here and there. No one stays.
No one except Warren.
On the walkway above the little harbor next to the ferry dock he finds a pile of mussel shells, neatly stacked as if on purpose, and he stops to look at them for a moment. Slick like obsidian and open like mouths. In this same spot he’s found other things over the last few weeks: coils of seaweed, dead fish, bits and pieces of birds and rodents.
He looks down into the harbor, but the water is dark and still in the breakwater and the marina lights are old and fluttery, so he can’t see anything clearly.
Sometimes he sees things down there, beautiful wild things like herons and seals and otters. He even saw a fishmaid, once, though it was just a fleeting glimpse. It’s one of the few joys in a very dull job.
But not this morning.
Warren heads back to the terminal when the ferry begins to board, the Pilapila’s engine humming steadily as a ripple of ignition rises like a tide through the waiting cars. He smiles to the walk-ons at the gate, and some of them smile back over their glowing phone screens and cups of coffee in steaming travel mugs.
He presses the button and the doors slide open to let them stream past him, onto the Pilapila and away into the world.
***
When the light rises, she slips out of the water again and leaves her fur behind. She finds the old canvas bag she keeps stashed in a bush and dresses in the clothes—soft with wear, but not so soft and warm as her fur—then carries the bag up to the concrete waiting area of the ferry terminal. She is not waiting to board the boat, but instead pulls an instrument out of the bag.
It’s a long whistle made of bone. She made it herself, years ago. And she stands off to the side—polite—and leaves the bag open, because she knows that the humans like it when she does that, and she plays.
The people who walk onto the boat will stop and listen, but they are busy. Always so busy. And they’ll listen for a little while, and maybe throw some money into the bag—they seem to like to do that—and then they’ll move along when the boat arrives.
But she knows that he is watching her, because she knows that he loves the music, and so she plays for him alone as the people and the cars pass her on their way to wherever they go.
***
Warren hears the low whistle of the busker’s music and his heart leaps within him. He has no idea who she is. She just turned up one day in the cold of winter, sometime after the new year, and starting busking in the terminal.
Gladys disapproved at first. The whistle music competed with the radio and the rules about street performing are a little hazy here on the island. But Warren doesn’t have the heart to move the busker along. She’s got a way about her. Dark eyes and hair the color of a creek-bed and long, lithe fingers that dance over the whistle as if it’s part of her.
And the music is haunting, unusual. Deep as deep and yearning like dusk.
Warren loves it, and the commuters don’t seem to mind. They’re busy, anyway.
Everyone is always so busy.
***
They met once. She’s not sure if he remembers it. But she does.
It was morning, before dawn. She had been slipping and sliding lithe and blithe as you like through the black breakwater in the little harbor, chasing the small fish that shelter under the rowboats and sailboats, when she swam too close to a poorly-stored fishing net and got herself caught in it. She struggled and squealed and scrambled but only served to tighten and trap herself more, and she was afraid because she realized she might drown.
But then, she felt strong hands pulling at the net and she struggled to get away, afraid of humans who catch creatures and sell fur and teeth.
But it was him. He must have been on his usual rounds past the marina and noticed her thrashing. He had a small, sharp little knife in his pocket, and he cut the cords—even though she struck and bit and lashed with her tail—until she was able to wriggle free. And though her prey-heart pushed her to leave him there on the dock without a single look back, she was haunted by the closeness, by the sight of his face above her as he freed her.
She had never noticed, until then, how sad his eyes were.
***
Warren has a recurring dream that leaves him waking with a thundering heart.
In the dream, he’s standing at the side of a dark highway in the early moonless morning. He knows he should be getting ready for work, but instead he’s standing on the road, waiting. Nothing but rainwet asphalt stretching out on either side. He knows the road. It’s an island road, just like so many in this place. A lonely stretch of nothing between here and there.
Sometimes that’s all the dream is. Just him standing there, alone, for a long time.
But some nights, in some dreams, the glow of headlights rises in the distance and Warren lifts his thumb, a feeling of desperation taking hold of him.
Please take me away from here. Please.
But the car always passes him by. And from behind—down the pitch-black mouth of a driveway that he never turns to look at, because he already knows what’s down there—he hears someone calling his name. Willing him to stay.
Don’t go, Warren. Don’t leave me.
You promised.
***
One morning, she’s playing her bone whistle in the early hours as the commuters pass her by, dropping coins into her bag, and suddenly she looks up to see him standing there, watching her, closer than usual.
She finishes playing and he smiles, drops a paper bill—five dollars?—into the bag.
“Beautiful,” he says, and his sad eyes mean it more than his lips do, but he scurries away before she can reply.
***
Warren hides in the ticket booth, feeling ashamed.
Beautiful? That’s all he could think to say? Stupid.
He imagines her laughing at him and he sighs.
Gladys frowns at him over her shoulder. It’s a quiet moment between boardings and she’s playing Solitaire on the booth’s computer.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asks. “Sick?”
Warren shakes his head. “No, I’m fine.”
“You need a vacation.”
Warren shrugs. “I’m fine.”
She swivels in her chair, gray hair poking out from under her Washington State Ferries hat, glasses smudged. “You’re too young to still be doing this job every day. I take my vacation time every year like clockwork or I’d go crazy. Here’s a question. If you could go anywhere, where would you go?”
Warren tastes pennies, adrenaline, like a trapped animal. “I don’t want to go anywhere.”
It’s a lie, and Gladys knows it. But she’s not interested in playing therapist. She swivels back to her computer.
“Your folks are gone now, Warren,” she says. “It’s time to make your own life.”
But he doesn’t know how to tell her that he can’t. That he doesn’t know how. That he made a choice a long time ago—out of love and loyalty, he thought—and didn’t realize at the time that it was a locking door, a shot of paralytic to both legs. He’s stuck, now, even if the cage door is open and has been for a long time.
Cage-bound, they call it. Afraid of any other reality.
Desperate to leave, and terrified to go.
***
When he approaches her next, she’s ready. She finishes the song and lowers the whistle, smiles at him. But to her surprise, he speaks first.
“I’m Warren,” he says.
“I know,” she replies.
He waits, like he thinks she’s going to say something else, and he’s probably waiting for her to say her name, but she hasn’t chosen a new one yet. So she just smiles.
“I really like…your music,” he says.
She nods. “Thank you.”
He’s struggling to know what to say, and she can tell, so she asks, “Want to walk with me?”
He looks over his shoulder at the gray-haired, slouch-shouldered woman in the ticket booth, thinks, then seems to make up his mind. “Yeah, sure. I can take a quick break.”
She packs up her bag and they walk down the walkway toward the harbor where they met, even if he doesn’t remember that. Today she has left a faded pink crab carapace in the place where she leaves things. He stops and looks down at it.
“It’s funny,” he says, “there’s always something here.”
She nods. “Gifts,” she says.
“Yeah, something like that.”
They continue on, down to the dock. They talk a little, point out things they see. At the place where the dock ends and the water begins they stop, wind tousling hair, clothes, reaching for eyelashes and lips. She can hear music, even if he can’t.
The ferry leaves, slicing through the water and away to the other side. He watches it, and the sadness in his eyes takes on dimension.
“You want to go,” she says, not a question.
He shakes his head. “No, not really.”
But he’s lying.
“Why don’t you go?”
He’s thinking, and she knows that. He’s wondering how much to tell her.
“I promised I would stay,” he said.
“Who did you promise?”
“My mom.”
“Where is she now?”
He swallows. “She’s…she’s not alive anymore. She died eight years ago.”
The wind whips his words away, a sudden gust, and he realizes how long eight years really is. He’ll be forty soon. How did that happen? Where did the time go?
He continues, quiet, “When my dad died, I promised my mom I would stay here and help her, and I did that, and I was happy to do it. But now I don’t know what to do except make the same promise over and over again to no one. I think I knew what I wanted, once, but I don’t anymore. I’m stuck.”
She considers this. She has two skins, and she can’t quite understand what it means to stay in one place, to feel forced to do so. But she imagines it like the sharp pain of net, holding her underwater, threatening her with drowning. She imagines that, and she shudders.
It’s a difficult thing to ask him, but she must. It’s the only thing she can offer him besides starling wings and mussel shells and crab armor.
“Do you want me to free you?” she asks.
***
Warren looks down at the busker. She’s beautiful in a way he’s not used to. Beautiful in a difficult way, something unpolished and unkempt and all the better for it. Beautiful like stone, like the whorls of a tree’s bark, like the strange patterns in a bird’s wings, a secret language.
He doesn’t know how to answer her question.
“What do you mean?” he asks.
She looks out at the water, breathes deeply. “I can give you another skin,” she says. “And then you can decide what you want to do with it.”
He believes her, but he doesn’t know why.
On the dark highway, the cars always pass him. This is the first time a set of headlights has slowed. Eight years is a long time to dream the same dream.
“I’m afraid to say yes,” he replied. “I’m afraid of leaving one trap and stepping into another one.”
She nods. “Traps abound, both on land and in the sea. There will always be dangers. But two skins means a choice. Two skins means permission. Change. Possibility.”
Possibility. That’s a word he feels like he hasn’t heard in a long, long time.
He turns to face her. “Why are you offering this to me?”
She meets his eyes without a flicker, without fear.
“Because you freed me first,” she says.
***
The commuters wander busy up and down the terminal, back and forth. They stop and listen to the low whistle of the busker, smile at the security guard who is there every day. They don’t notice that the guard’s steps are lighter these days, that his face is youthful and his eyes are bright.
That he orbits like a sunning planet around the busker with the bonewhistle, and she plays only for him.
When the day is done and the commuters disembark the ferry in the late afternoon, climb the hill to the Park-and-Ride or drive up through Portview to go home, they don’t stop. Too tired. Too ready to go home after a busy, busy day.
But if they paused for just a moment and looked down into the harbor they might catch a glimpse of two lithe and blithe otter-things, pelts slick like black stone, bodies spiraling together, tumbling as they chase the little fish in the breakwater and climb the rocks of the island’s shores and race the Pilapila as it makes its final journeys of the day.
They make the night their own. Free.
They sing to each other as they swim, a low and ancient music taught by a ceaseless sea.
Deep as deep, and yearning like dusk.
END
Author’s Note:
The creature in this story is based on the Kushtaka (Kóoshdaa káa), an otter shapeshifter from Tlingit folklore.
Like many creatures from Indigenous folktales, the Kushtaka has been adopted as a malicious monster in most modern American stories. But the original creature was a more nuanced being, sometimes a bloodthirsty trickster and sometimes a savior of the lost traveler and helper of young children.
But one thing is relatively consistent across the stories: the Kushtaka likes to transform humans into fellow Kushtakas. Their motives—good or bad—are always their own.
I love this so much! I love selkie stories but I didn't know about the Kushtaka - now I kind of want to find one 😉
Lovely. My first thought was she was a selkie... interesting how cultures as widely divergent as the Celts and Tlingits independently conceived nearly identical "mythical" beings.