Blue and green fish scale pattern on thigh

There was a girl from the fish market, Nessa Gallan, who gutted cod for her mother and never once looked at the water while she worked. One evening a fisherman brought in a net that had caught something that wasn't a fish, a thing with a tail that shone like wet slate turned to glass. Nessa cut it free because it was tangled and bleeding, and it pressed one scale into her palm before it slid off the gunwale. The scale was no bigger than a thumbnail, blue at the heart, green at the lip, gold where the sun had got to it.

She kept it in a tin on the windowsill. Each night the lamp swung across the bay and the scale took the light, and each night she found another beneath her pillow, laid in overlapping rows like the slates of a roof. By spring she had enough to cover her forearm and the sea had gone quiet, no more fish in the nets, no more creature on the rocks. The fishermen said she had taken the sea's armour, and they stopped buying her gutting knife.

Here's the turn. The night the last herring came back through the gap, Nessa walked into the surf with the tin under her arm and tipped every scale onto the water. They floated, caught the beam, and sank in a long bright line toward the reef. My grandfather swore he saw them lay down a path for something to follow. Me, I just know the boats came home that week, and nobody has seen the girl since, only the scales washing up now and then, still warm.