But, alas, she was a manatee. Unlike the seals that capered round her she could not sprout legs and climb foot after foot upon the pebbled shore. She would have to watch from her kelpweed cove, head ducked like a button between her shoulders as the shrieks of their sunshine games bounced off the sandstone and racked her like crow caws.

She could bear the noise. The waves slurped much of it up, so if she made anything of their chirps and sighs she could pretend it an illusion of the trickster sea. But she couldn’t as well ignore the attention. It would come in the dull hours, when their sporting died down and they wandered the sands with listless, kicking treads and sifted for conches to braid in their hair. As the sun tossed diamonds over the waves, the seals turned back to admire the evening sheen on their hairless limbs—and remembered the lone manatee. For the kelpweed cove shone nicely at this time, playing quiver and shimmer with the tide pools ashore, except for one spot, our manatee’s. Occluded by her considerable hulk, by her dull, dried hide and the shadows it cut over the rock, this portion of cove held the light fast and unreflective. From this shaded recess she bore the seals’ stares, an unmoving blot as faithful to the scene, and offensive to it, as a lighthouse long forgotten and let to rot.

The seals doubled in fits when their seaglass eyes met her squinted black specks. The manatee hadn’t the audacity to expect their invitation, but still she bobbed her pricklypear head in greeting and hoped when their laughter subsided for some kind of acknowledgment. Yet the seals were recalled from her. The land seemed to yield precious secrets at this time, requiring acute fixation on the cattails and beach plums further ashore. The manatee imagined what important business the seals had to attend before nightfall, what earthly orders were entrusted to them, and admired their diligence.

For they were doubtless the erudite species, wild and oceanic, swimming further than she did, and faster, and learning in all their travels the secrets of the world, of both blue and green domains. They shot gleefully into the blacker deep and walked on tall two legs the shore she would not hazard, the land of harpooners and fish-eaters. Not that harpooners and fish-eaters frightened the manatee. Better their hooks than the shark’s jaws. What clung her to her cove, mostly, was modesty.

The seals were dauntless, splendid, and highly accomplished compared to the manatee, who would find the stone-and-muck plot of the walruses well within her right. But their conversations, yawning and tusk-lisped and drearily mundane, embarrassed her. She did not want to submit to the plainness of her right. She wanted to exalt, however impudently, among the seals, to philosophize with them on their beds of white powder or, otherwise, fantasize so doing from her cove.

The latter alternative grew ever less tenable every twilight. The seals’ coveward glances jolted the manatee from her imaginations, exciting, despite the impossibility of it, the feeling of possibility that she might indeed be beckoned and lengthened, granted their sorority as she climbed foot after foot after them. Why else would they look at her? Unless—and at this withering notion, she buttoned down further—unless she embarrassed them. Now, to do so from her distance would be quite a feat, but not one she would pride in.

A manatee couldn’t possibly bother a beach full of seals, and yet—she suspected she had caused some upset, something she could not pinpoint in her day-to-day floatings and sunnings, but something surely, an ugly deed she wanted desperately to undo but didn’t know how. Then the seals would quit looking and teasing—not that she could fault them for her feeling teased—and neither meet nor break her gaze again.

She could very well toddle her way to the eastward edge of her sunning spot, and disappear in the afternoon shadows so that the seals would not see her come dusk. But she had to be there when they looked back. She had to catch their momentary eye and feel in it the flicker of… of… Well, it was a thrum, she supposed. A thrum of recognition and something more she desired, something impulsive and indefensible which flew in the face of her clear and unequivocal inferiority:

Kinship.

As the night settled in, Martha, if we may grant our manatee the name, would return with the seals underwater, where they reassumed their aquiline shapes and whizzed cheerfully past her into the blue chiffon depths. Martha basked in the instant before their acceleration, in their company. The sheer energy of the seals caught her like an undertow, warming her as if with a last daytime ray, and lent her a feeling of lightness and direction.

But her spirits disappeared with them into the further murk. Day was done.

Occasionally the seals did engage her. On one such, when game was scarce and hunting (and hiding) slow, they flipped lazily around her and asked all sorts of questions.

What do you eat?

Are you a walrus or a seal?

What brings you to the ocean?

Why don’t you come ashore?

They listened politely to her answers, but any questions she asked them they seemed not to hear. After all, their speech was fine and eloquent. Hers was a lower sort, blunt and cloudy. So she bid them farewell and thanked them for their company, at which they waggled their whiskers, conferring secretly, tallying up, and stopped her short.

What do you mean? one of them queried.

She explained that she did not possess their talents. She could not speed or giggle, and her pelt, if it could be called such, would not make a fine lady’s coat, and she would never sprout legs and comprehend the earthly language of cattails and beach plums.

The seals burst in a flurry of somersaults, bumping each other and barking as she had never heard them before. Martha sank a little to have transformed the seals so thoroughly.

It’s the same with us, they rejoined. We could never live as you do.

We’re too restless to spend all day in one form.

We’re too slight to float as grandly as you do.

We’re too lovely to live as long as you will.

What’s more, they said: she was soft in her own way. Placid and pleasant as a mammal should be—

As a mother, Martha thought.

They chirped on. The ocean could use more Marthas to slow the currents and tame its creatures.

In their presence, and not least in their praise, Martha glowed. To swim with seals, and everyone a moonlit wriggle in the warm nighttime shallows, was more than her placid imagination could have borne. She felt truly, and perhaps for the first time, that she was a mammal: one among others. Her species did not matter. It was fine after sundown to be a blot among darts.

But seals don’t tarry long.

They slipped one by one into their secret ultramarine where Martha could not follow them fast enough. Then she was alone in the afterglow of their kinship, drifting the warm, bubbled wakes of their sudden departure and perceiving anew the pulse and swish of the sleeping sea.

Martha couldn’t help the indignant prickle of her hide-hairs. But, she checked herself, it was natural and necessary that the seals zip to. Their safety precluded a formal goodnight, as the harpooners and fish-eaters chased them relentlessly—mainly by day but perhaps too by night. Martha would not assume. The seals probably sensed the hunters’ advances, understanding in their two-legged selves the behaviors and movements of all two-legged things, and scattered on account of a nocturnal raid. Martha floated onward, unfazed, blessedly unwanted, and hoped the seals passed the night as favorably as she would.

For no one wanted to pierce her breast and make a mantle and sleeves of it and remember her fondly with each wear. No, she had never been fashionable. Her leathery hide wasn’t the right sort of leather, and her meat was undoubtedly bad too.

Depending on the season, Martha may have had another sort of creature to keep her comfortably distanced from the shore. They did not entrance her like the seals did or disgust her like the walruses. They frightened her, the gulls.

It would have been one thing if they swam the slippery sky where no sea or shore creature could go, but they were unaccountable. They sunned in the air and rent it like bolts with their swooping and screaming. They inhabited a separate domain, neither blue nor green but churning grey.

They didn’t bother her when the seals were playing. The gulls liked to watch. If the games got dull, the gulls helped them on. They would dive and nip the seals’ pearl backsides, pelt them with urchins as ill-advised presents and cause such an upcry that sent Martha further in shoulder-retreat.

Sometimes the gulls flapped at Martha. She knew these occasions to be oversights and forgave them as their jaunty squawks, in the instant of realization that she was no straggling seal, no broken beauty but a manatee, caught like gum up their windpipes and released in squeaks of mortification. At such times she didn’t mind the gulls’ shrill voices. They seemed a fitting expression of her own feelings. Eventually, though, the gulls learned to keep from her cove, thinking it the haunts of a humongous, humorless waterworm and a few thousand barnacles too dumb to know manatee from seal or too stuck to do anything about it. Eventually winter came, and the gulls flapped far away, farther perhaps than the seals went.

When they teemed the sky once more in spring, Martha felt she had almost missed them. But they must have forgotten how they had left things. They no longer squawked at her, at least, but they began to air their feathers upon her sandstone and pick apart there what snacks they’d filched. They left Martha a gentlemanly berth and left the bones and bags of their filchings for her to nose through at her leisure. They quickly stank the cove, but Martha rather liked their crackle and shine.

She did not run or shriek or bat them playfully, but they didn’t always require that kind of fun. The manatee was a different sort, pleasant. Placid. Soon the whole flock came to stay with her and together they made a curious colony, one hundred gulls and one manatee.

They asked her one day why she climbed upon the sandstone.

The rest of your kind never leaves the water, the gulls clucked. They keep close to the rivers and don’t care for the sun on their hides.

So, they quizzed, what’s wrong with them?

Martha didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t thought of it like that, what was wrong with the others. She had left them long ago for the sea and the wind, for she preferred their strangeness, their sting. The rivers flowed north to south. The waters were never the same, they argued, but could they ever really change if the same narrow, gray fish rode it in the same direction to the same inevitable conclusion?

Better the strange sights and stranger creatures of the turquois depths that, yes, drove her to retreat, but secretly thrilled her because she was one of them too, another lone sea-thing adrift in the shallows, where sun and shade intermingled and one thing could be two, where seals could play on land and a manatee could sun in her kelpweed cove and envision herself climbing the pebbles to her own beach plot. For recently she had left off the seals. She no longer fancied their rollicking fun, but imagined herself singularly stretched out on a bed of white grains, watching the sun ignite the waves.

She would never realize this dream. She would pine after it the rest of her days, until some drunken harpooner decided she’d fetch a decent market price and speared her through the shoulder and spread her meat in neat, pink cutlets over a bed of ice chips at the fishwife’s stall. Until then, however, she didn’t care that she would never sprout legs. She had the ocean, at least, and the cove, and the gulls. As far as the possible, she had done her best, which was fine.

For, alas, she was a manatee.

The harpooner that killed the manatee would be legally regarded a poacher. Of all things, too, the judge wondered, why a manatee? The poacher wouldn’t have cared for its endangered status, but what he should have noted before motoring out that day the kelpweed cove was her undesirability. For what were her meat, hide or bones any good? Justice seemed a generous term for the apprehension of someone so dumb.

Before he was found out, the poacher had dragged the manatee’s body to his cabin. This, by the way, he would have happily boasted. It was no small labor.

Whether she knew her hunting law or simply turned it aside, the poacher’s wife carved the manatee up and stitched a simple, hoar-haired mat to put outside the door.

Martha accepted her daily tramplings by him, his wife and his children with an easygoing civility. She took the sand and mud and grass from their shoes and welcomed them home every day. She was not an integral part of the home, or even the deck, which featured beside her a handsome green gurgling fish in whose open mouth the family stored their umbrellas.

But she did enjoy their company. More, at least, than the cardboard box she found herself stuffed into some months later. She was skinny, she supposed, to be so stuffed, but she was sorry to spend her foreseeable future in a cold, dry locker.