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Welcome nicols On Media book Club, the only book club where you don't have to do the reading because I do it for you.

I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy and this week I'm going to read you a story by one of my favorite authors, Sophia's Semitar.

The story is called Selki Stories Are for Losers and it was published in twenty thirteen by Strange Horizons, and you can also get it in Sofia's twenty nineteen collection Tender.

This story was nominated for just a fuck ton of awards in twenty fourteen, basically the big ones, the Hugo, the Nebula, the World Fantasy Award, and the BSFA Award, which is the British Award basically.

And it's a Selki story, as you might have guessed because the title is Selki Stories are for Losers, and I guess we're all losers because this is a Selky story for us.

And Selkies are a part of Celtic and Norse myth originally, and Selkies are people, usually women.

They're se ole people and they can transform between seal and human form by putting on their seal skins.

In a classic Selky story, a guy will see like a hot seal lady and steal her skin, forcing her to be stuck as a human, and then usually he'll marry her and she'll be sad and lonely and miss the sea, and if she manages to get back her skin, she'll disappear and ditch her husband captor and her kids and fuck off to the sea.

There's a lot there, obviously from a feminist point of view.

One of the things that I find really interesting is that there's this sort of medieval European conception of women where it's not that women are like docile, like the way that the Victorian women is presented, but instead that women are naturally wild and untamed.

And you know, there's this been complete switch of what misogyny like it used to look like, calling us wild and untamed, and now it accuses us of being docile or whatever.

So the Selky myth ties so well into this idea that like women in their original state are these wild creatures.

Okay, that's the basic outline of what a Selky story might be for context, but it's not this story.

This story it's called selky stories are for losers by Sophia Somitar.

I hate selky stories.

They're always about how you went up to the attic to look for a book and you found a disgusting old coat and brought it downstairs between finger and thumb and said, what's this?

And you never saw your mom again.

I work at a restaurant called Lapacha.

I got the job after my mom left to help with the bills.

On my first night at work, I got yelled at twice by the head server, burnt my fingers on a hot day, spilled lentil parsley soup all over my apron, and left my keys in the kitchen.

I didn't realize at first I'd forgotten my keys.

I stood in the parking lot, breathing slowly and letting the oil smell lift away from my hair.

And when all the other cars had started up and driven away, I put my hand in my jacket pocket.

Then I knew.

I ran back to the restaurant and banged on the door.

Of course no one came.

I smelled cigarette smoke an instant before I heard the voice Hey.

I turned and Mona was standing there, smoke rising white from between her fingers.

I left my keys inside, I said.

Mona is the only other server at Lapacha who's a girl.

She is related to everybody at the restaurant except me.

The owner who goes by Uncle Tad is really her uncle, her mom's brother.

Don't talk to him unless you have to.

Mona advised me he's a creeper.

That was after she'd sighed and dropped her cigarette and crushed it out with her shoe and stepped into my clasped hands so I could boost her up to the window.

After she'd wriggled through the kitchen and opened the door for me, she said madame in a dry voice and bowed.

At least I think she said madame.

She might have said, my lady.

I don't remember that night too well because we drank a lot of wine.

Mona said that as long as we were breaking and entering, we might as well steal something, and she lined up all the bottles of red wine that had already been opened.

I shone the light from my phone on her while she took out the special rubber corks and poured some of each bottle into a plastic pitcher.

She called it the house wine.

I was surprised she was being so nice to me, since she'd hardly spoken to me while we were working.

Later, she told me she hates everybody the first time she meets them.

I called home, but Dad didn't pick up.

He was probably in the basement.

I left him a message and turned off my phone.

Do you know what this guy said to me tonight?

Mona asked he want a beef couscous and he said, I'll have the beef conscious.

Mona's mom doesn't work it Lepatcha, but sometimes she comes in around three o'clock and sits in Mona's section and cries.

Then Mona jams on her orange baseball cap and goes out through the back and smokes a cigarette, and I take over her section.

Mona's mom won't order anything from me.

She's got Mona's eyes or Mona's got hers, huge angry eyes with lashes that curl up at the ends.

She shakes her head and says nothing nothing.

Finally, Uncle Tad comes over and Mona's mom hugs and kisses him sobbing in Arabic.

After work, Mona says, got the keys.

We get in my car and I drive us through town to the bone.

Zone, a giant cemetery on a hill.

I pull into the empty parking lot and Mona rolls a joint.

There's only one lamp burning high and cold in the middle of the lot.

Mona pushes her shoes off and puts her feet up on the dashboard and cries.

She warned me about that the night we met.

I said something stupid to her, like you're so funny, and she said, actually, I cry a lot.

That's something you should know.

I was so happy she thought I should know things about her.

I didn't care.

I still don't care.

But it's true that Mona cries a lot.

She cries because she scared her mom will take her away to Egypt, where the family used to live and where Mona has never been.

What would I do there?

I don't even speak Arabic.

She wipes her mascara on her sleeve, and I tell her to look at the lamp outside and pretend that its glassy brightness is a bonfire, and that she and I are personally throwing every selky story ever written onto it and watching them burn up.

You and your selky stories, she says.

I tell her they're not my sulky stories, not ever.

And I'll never tell one which is true.

I never will, And I don't tell her how I went up to the attic that day, or that what I was looking for was a book I used to read when I was little, Beauty and the Beast, which is a really decent story about an animal who gets turned into a human and stays that way the way it's supposed to be.

I don't tell Mona that Beauty's black hair coiled to the edge of the page, or that the beast had yellow horns and a smoking jacket, or that instead of finding the book, I found the coat, and my mom put it on and went out the kitchen door and started up her car.

And do you know what, I think she was leaving the house to go?

Do I think she was leaving the house to take advantage of these products and services.

I think that's the most likely thing.

I haven't finished reading this story yet, so I don't know what's going to happen, But I assume that what happened was that she went out because she heard these acts.

And we're back.

One sulky story tells about a man from Merthur Toller.

He was on the cliffs one day and heard people singing and dancing inside a cave, and he noticed a bunch of skins piled on the rocks.

He took one of the skins home and locked it in a chest, And when he went back, a girl was sitting there alone crying.

She was naked, and he gave her some clothes and took her home.

They got married and had kids.

You know how this goes.

One day the man changed his clothes and forgot to take the key to the chest out of his pocket, and when his wife washed the clothes, she found it.

You're not going to Egypt, I tell Mona.

We're going to Colorado.

Remember that's our big dream, to go to Colorado.

It's where Mona was born.

She lived there until she was four.

She still remembers the rocks and the pines in the cold, cold air.

She says, the clouds of Colorado are bright like pieces of mirror.

In Colorado, Mona's parents got divorced, and Mona's mom tried to kill herself for the first time.

She tried it once here too.

She put her head in the oven, resting on a pillow.

Mona is in seventh grade.

Selkies go back to the sea in a flash like they've never been away.

That's one of the ways they're different from human beings.

Once my dad tried to go back somewhere.

He was in the army stationed in Germany, and he went to Norway to look up the town where my great grandmother came from.

He actually found the place and even an old farm with the same name as us.

In the town.

He went into a restaurant and ordered lutefish, a disgusting fish thing my grandmother makes.

The cook came out of the kitchen and looked at him like he was nuts.

She said they only eat lutfish at Christmas.

There went Dad's plan of bringing back the original flavor of lutfish.

Now all he's got from Norway is my great grandmother's Bible.

There's also the diary she wrote on the farm up north, but we can't read it.

There's only four English words in the whole book.

My God, awful day.

You might suspect my dad picked my mom up in Norway, where they have seals.

He didn't, though he met her at the pool.

As for Mom, she never talked about her relatives.

I asked her once if she had any, and she said they were no kind of people.

At the time, I thought she meant they were druggies or murderers, maybe in prison somewhere.

Now I wish that was true.

One of the stories I Don't tell Mona comes from a dictionary of British folklore in the English language.

In that story, it's the Sulkies little girl who points out where the skin is hidden.

She doesn't know what's going to happen, of course, she just knows her mother is looking for a skin, and she remembers her dad taking one out from under the bed and stroking it.

The little girl's mother drags out the skin and says, fair wheel pieri.

Butto she doesn't think about how the little girl is going to miss her, or how she's been breathing air all this time.

She can surely keep it up a little longer.

She just throws on the skin and jumps into the sea.

After Mom left, I waited for my dad to get home from work.

He didn't say anything when I told him about the coat.

He stood in the light of the clock on the stove and rubbed his fingers together softly, almost like he was snapping, but with no sound.

Then he sat down at the kitchen table and lit a cigarette.

I'd never seen him smoke in the house before.

Mom's going to lose it, I thought, And then I realized that no, my mom wasn't going to lose anything.

We were the losers, me and Dad.

He still waits up for me, So just before midnight I pull out of the parking lot.

I'm hoping to get home early enough that he doesn't grumble, but late enough that he doesn't want to come up from the basement where he takes apart old TVs and talk to me about college.

I've told him I'm not going to college.

I'm going to Colorado, a landlocked state.

Only twenty out of fifty states are completely landlocked, which means they don't touch the Great Lakes or the Sea.

Mona turns on the light and tries to put on eyeliner in the mirror, and I swerve to make her mess up.

She turns out the light and hits me.

All the windows are down to air out the car, and Mona's hair blows wild around her face.

Peery butto the book says, is a quote term of endearment.

Peerie butto I say to Mona, she's got the hiccups.

She can't stop laughing.

I've never kissed Mona.

I've thought about it a lot, but I keep deciding it's not time.

It's not that I think she'd freak out or anything.

It's not even that I'm afraid she wouldn't kiss me back.

It's worse.

I'm afraid she'd kiss me back, but not mean it.

But do you know what we say but don't mean that.

We love our sponsors here they are, We love.

Them and Rebecca.

Probably one of the biggest losers to fall in love with a selkie was the man who carried her skin around in his knapsack.

He was so scared she'd find it that he took the skin with him everywhere when he went fishing, when he went drinking in the town.

Then one day he had a wonderful catch of fish.

There were so many that he couldn't drag them all home in his net.

He emptied his knapsack and filled it with fish, and he put the skin over his shoulder, and on his way up the road to his house, he dropped it.

Gray in the front and gray in the back.

Does the very thing I lack.

That's what the man's wife said when she found the skin.

The man ran to catch her.

He even kissed her, even though she was already a seal, but she squirmed off down the road and flopped into the water.

The man stood knee deep in the chilly waves, stinking of fish, and cried in sulky stories.

Kissing never solves anything.

No transformation happens because of a kiss.

No one loves you just because you love them.

What kind of fairy tale is that she wouldn't wake up?

Mona says, I pulled her out of the oven onto the floor, and I turned off the gas and opened the windows.

It's not that I was smart.

I wasn't thinking at all.

I called Uncle Tad and the police, and I still wasn't thinking.

I don't believe she wasn't smart.

She even tried to give her mom a CPR, but her mom didn't wake up until later in the hospital.

They had to reach in and drag her out of death.

She was so closed up in it.

Death is skin tight.

Mona says, gray in front and gray in back.

Dear Mona, When I look at you, my skin hurts.

I pull into her driveway to drop her off.

The house is dark, the darkest house on her street, because Mona's mom doesn't like the porch light on.

She says, it shines in around the blinds and keeps her Awakea's has a beautiful bedroom upstairs with lots of old photographs and gilt frames, but she sleeps on the living room couch beside the aquarium.

Looking at the fish helps her to sleep, although she also says this country has no real fish.

That's what Mona calls one of her mom's refrains.

Mona gets out yanking the little piece of my heart that stays with her wherever she goes.

She stands outside the car and leans in through the open door.

I can hardly see her, but I can smell the lemon scented stuff she puts on her hair, mixed up with the smells of sweat and weed.

Mona smells like a forest, not the sea.

Oh my god, she says, I forgot to tell you tonight.

You know Table six, that big horde of Uncle Tad's friends.

Yeah, so they wanted the soup with the food, and I forgot.

And you know what the old guy says to me, the little guy at the head of the table, what he Goeste Bete mademoiselle, She says it in a rough, growly voice and laughs, I can tell it's French, but that's all.

What does it mean?

You're an idiot?

Miss?

She ducks her head, stiffling giggles.

He called you an idiot?

Yeah, bet, it's like beast.

She lifts her head, then shakes it.

A light from someone else's porch bounces off her nose.

She puts on a fake Norwegian accent and says, my god, awful day, I nod awful day.

And because we say it all the time, because it's the kind of silly, ordinary thing you could call one of our refrains, or maybe because of the weed I've smoked.

A whole bunch of days seemed pressed together inside this moment, more than you could count.

There's the time we all went out for New Year's Eve and Uncle Tad drove me, And when he stopped and I opened the door, he told me to close it, and I said, I will when I'm on the side.

And when I told Mona, we laughed so hard we had to run away and hide in the bathroom.

There's the day some people we know from school came in and we served them wine even though they were under age, and Mona got nervous and spilled it all over the tablecloth.

And the day her nice cousin came to visit and made us cheese and mint sandwiches in the microwave and got yelled at for wasting food.

And the day of the party for Mona's mom's birthday, when Uncle Tad played music and made us all dance, and Mona's mom's eyes went Julie with tears.

And afterward Mona told me I should just run away.

I'm the only thing keeping her here.

My god, awful days, all the best days of my life.

Bye, Mona whispers.

I watch her until she disappears into the house.

My mom used to swim every morning at the YWCA when I was little.

She took me along.

I didn't like swimming.

I'd sit in a chair with a book while she went up and down, up and down a dim streak in the water.

When I read Miss Frisbee and the Rats of nim it seemed like Mom was a labrat doing tasks the way she kept touching one side of the pool and then the other.

At last, she climbed out and pulled off her bathing cap.

In the locker room, she hung up her suit, a thin gray rag dripping on the floor.

Most people put the hook of their padlock through the straps of their suit so the suits could hang outside the lockers without getting stolen.

But my mom never did that.

She just tied her suit loosely.

On the lock.

No one's going to steal that stretchy old thing, she said, and no one did.

That should have been the end of the story, but it wasn't.

My dad says Mom was an elemental, a sort of stranger, not of our kind.

It wasn't my fault she left.

It was because she couldn't learn to breathe on land.

That's the worst story I've ever heard.

I'll never tell Mona, not ever, not even when we're leaving for Colorado with everything we need in the back of my car, and I meet her at the grocery store the way we've already planned, and she runs out, smiling under her orange baseball cap.

I won't tell her how dangerous attics are, or how some people can't start over, or how I still see my mom in the shop windows with her long hair the same silver gray as her coat, or how once when my little cousins came to visit, we went to the zoo, and the seals recognized me.

They both stood up in the water and talked in a foreign language.

I won't tell her, I'm too scared.

I won't even tell her what she needs to know, that we've got to be tougher than our mom's, that we've got to have different stories.

That she'd better not change her mind and drop me in Colorado because I won't understand.

I'll hate her forever and burn her stuff and stay up all night screaming at the wood because it's stupid not to be able to breathe.

Whoever heard of somebody breathing in one place but not another?

And we're not like that, Mona and Me and Selky stories are only for losers, stuck on the wrong side of magic.

People who drop things, who tell all, who leave keys around, who let go.

The end.

This story was picked out by my friend Hazel, who said this about it.

Selky stories are for losers, like they're for suckers.

But Selky stories are also for losers, people who lose people and need to make sense of that loss.

And we asked Sophia if there's anything she wanted to include in this reading, and she had this to say about the piece quote.

I think what I'd want to say about this story is that it marked a turning point in my writing practice.

Writing it, I understood for the first time what a short story was.

I learned this by studying Karen joifouls excellent story King Rat, which also uses a mixture of realism and folklore.

And that makes sense to me, because honestly, I am blown away by the craft of this story.

I think that this story is well.

I've already been saying for years that Sofia Samitar's story The Ogres of East Africa is my favorite short story, and it's true thematically and prose wise, but also just on this like craft level.

I'm just really.

Blown away by how Sophia writes.

I think that the way that this story, the Selky story, is telling two parallel stories at the same time, with these like brilliant overlaps and parallels that are still remarkably different, like culturally different, like you know, I'm afraid It'll be taken back to Egypt versus like I'm going to move to a landlocked state.

And obviously the parallel about the way in which both of their mothers have attempted to leave And it's interesting because, by default, when I think of Selky stories, I really think about, you know, the running back to the wild and sort of abandoning the family.

But then this story is, well, there's a little bit of that.

It's also just like clearly about like death and being sort of too wild to be alive in some ways.

And you know, when I hear a Selki story, traditionally my thoughts are like, fuck, yeah, she got away from that guy, right, But then positioning in it from the point of view of the kids, it deepens a feminist understanding of what it means to feel trapped by a family, you know, and it complicates it in this way that I think is necessary and makes it no longer.

So black and white.

So yeah, I've enjoyed the story every time I've read it, and I will probably come back to it just from a craft level to study it further.

I really can't say enough about it, but I will say that Sophia's most recent books, if you want to read more of her stuff, are the science fiction novella The Practice, The Horizon and The Chain, which was a finalist for the Hugo Nebula.

Philip K.

Dick and Locus Awards and Opacities on Writing and the Writing Life, A Meditation on Writing, Publishing, and Friendship.

And I'm going to go out and get both of those books.

And I have like a thing where I really like books about writing, but most of them aren't very good, and I suspect that this one will be very good.

And I really like how different every author who writes books about writing is going to write a book like it's a very you think it'd be a very like standard kind of textbooky thing, but everyone's books are so completely different, even like Jeffvandermer is two different books on writing and they're night and day different from each other.

One's called Wonder Book and it's like esoteric and feels like you're on LSD, but it also teaches you about story.

And one's called I think it's called The Writing Life or something, and it's just about how to not lose your brain.

Anyway.

I don't know what I'm talking about that, but if you want to keep up with Sophia Semtar's work, you can do that.

I believe she's not on social media.

I believe she is free, but she has a website.

Sofia Samitar dot com, which is s O F I A S A M A T A R dot com.

And I'm Margaret Kiljoy and you can find me at Birdsbefore Thestorm dot net.

It's a website that I never obtained.

I don't know why I'm telling you to go there.

I have an author website.

I've had it for a very long time, but I don't use it.

I am on social media because I am not free.

You can find me at either Margaret or Magpie Kiljoy on various things.

I don't know.

We search my name, you'll figure it out.

I believe in you, and I write a substack that comes out every week.

And I have another podcast it's called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.

And also I hope all of you are doing as well as you can during this moment.

I say this all the time, but it's not like things are.

It's always always a complicated time, and that's why we have stories all right by everyone.

It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.

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Thanks for listening,