The Race
August was all salt.
Porgy and sweat and tears. The ocean rose and moved over land for her, to the point where breathing was more like drowning – but she filtered the moisture, took the salt, cured her body against future mistakes.
He wasn’t a mistake. That was hard to admit, at first, but when she saw him the first thing she thought of was cormorants. Their sleek, dark bodies.
His name was Keaton Russel, but everybody called him Russ. The couple who ran the deli, the bartender at The Point, even the deckhands on the boat that she fished with. The first day she saw him was out at the pier in the parking lot. She’d pulled the hood of her sweatshirt up and was untangling jigs when he walked through the lot, nodding when the deckhands shouted, hands shoved in his pockets.
She was sure he hadn’t seen her. And then one Thursday morning someone said, “What’s your name,” not like a question, and when she looked up from the box of donuts she’d devoured on the drive to the shore there he was.
Tommy, she told him, even though her full name was Thomasina.
“You come out here every other Friday.”
A sliver of fear went through her; she squinted at him, recalculating.
“Are you coming out?” she asked, jerking her head toward the Hellman, and his eyes darkened with distrust.
“No,” he said.
And that was it.
The mate called one last warning and she had to hurry, her steps loud across the dock, jumping the dizzying space between the wood and the boat.
In the parking lot he was already moving away; quick, dark. This time as the boat pulled out into the bay she kept her eyes locked on his straight back until the bridge horn blasted and jarred her.
*
The body hit the side of the boat hard. She felt it in her feet, unable to hear it against the slow churning of the engine and the boat rocking down into the waves. Further up on port side the men were shifting, pressing closer, arms and hands reaching over shoulders and past torsos, trying to help, greedy with curiosity. She stood nearer to the stern, sweating in the heavy waders, and watched. Each roll of the boat she shifted her weight, riding it out, waiting.
It came screaming the whole way. A froth of bubbles. The tail slapping out of the water. The shouts turning from “fish on!” to “what in god’s green waters -”, the shock of the deckhands as they reached for gaffs and nets and gaped at the water.
“Get rope.”
Dave, the mate, was the only one whose voice was loud enough for the others to hear. Everything was a low rushing, churning, humming sound that Tommy usually found calming, but annoyance was beginning to nest in her throat.
She felt a pull down deep in her gut, under her navel, and fought the urge to join them. Stare at the thing. Her brain wouldn’t let her say the word, but already the men were whispering it up and down the port side: Mermaid. We caught a mermaid.
She squinted as she watched the youngest crew member stumble out of the cabin with a coil of bright yellow rope. Quietly at first, it began to rain, in thin sheets that danced across the surface of the Sound.
The mass of men undulated, backed up and spread out, tightened again. Dave shouted incoherently and the majority gave him space. Bald or balding heads, heads covered with worn caps, sunburned heads, turned to one another. Tommy thought of salt again. The salt of sweat and the sea mingling.
Dave and the three other deckhands were leaning far over the side, far enough that a pang of fear went through her. She reminded herself again where the life ring was. This was her fourth ride on the Gulliver as a deckhand; she’d been lucky to get hired with little to no actual experience. But Tommy could recite the length requirements for most fish, and talked about the different kinds of fishing, baits, jigs.
So far she only knew Dave’s name and the name of the other older deckhand, Connor. The younger boys must’ve been fresh out of high school and only worked weekend night trips and Tuesdays, like today. She’d heard them saying that it was weird for a girl with no experience to want to work full time on a boat.
Dave and Connor worked confidently to pull the body up over the rail and onto the gritty deck. They stumbled back in their bright orange boots, trying to catch their weight against the movement of the boat, trying to keep the body, which was struggling now, trapped between their arms and chests.
“Got it?”
The question crackled from the speaker, reminding everyone that although he couldn’t be seen the Captain was watching everything. Tommy’s eyes swept up to the pilothouse. Thick windows reflected back the grey sea.
Dave motioned and the group of men shifted, moving back toward Tommy, who pressed herself up against the railing as they flowed around her in a mess of sore joints and phlegm-thickened lungs. She stood on the balls of her feet, trying to see over hunched shoulders and caps, wrinkling her nose at the smell of nicotine. Who lit up in the rain?
The deckhands, led by Dave, secured the body to the bait table, yellow rope flashing into view between elbows and thick waists. She saw bare skin, a flash of wet hair lashing out with the turn of a head, Connor stumbling back into the buckets where clam bellies sloshed in their own mucous.
Still she waited. They hadn’t called on her to help, even though she was good with a gaff and the nets, and it took her a moment to realize why when she saw the whole thing laid out on the table.
“You have to be fucking kidding me,” Connor said, voice somehow louder than the engine and the sea, the rain that had started to pick up.
Dave shot him a warning glare. But the rest of the men were muttering now, voices rising, and as Connor ran a hand through his hair his eyes searched her out, caught hers, tying a thread between her and the body, a thread that she had been working for years and years to cut.
*
On their fourth date Russ took her to the ocean and within minutes of standing in the water, a jawbone danced around her ankles. She picked it up and pressed her thumb against the cartilage, the pockets where flesh still feathered.
When he moved next to her his thighs fought the water. He reached out – brushed the bone with the tips of his fingers.
“What’s it from.”
“I’m not sure,” she answered, and began talking about bluefish and stripers. Fish he had never really seen. And she liked that about Russ. That he’d never dragged their bodies up over the sides of boats, put a foot on their hard heads, ripped hooks from their insides – never even touched a rod or set foot on a boat.
For her, it was different – a kind of inheritance the way diabetes and glaucoma were an inheritance. Her father and grandfathers had fished, and her great-grandfathers, and there were no sons in the family so now she fished.
It wasn’t a good day for the beach. The sand was a bleached beige, the sky more of the same, and the water lapped in against the shore restlessly, eating at her ankles. But he’d brought her here anyway. It was only them with the ocean in front and empty beach houses behind, blocks of blue and coral and grey.
Russ walked back up to their towels and took a beer out of his bag. She watched him snap it open but couldn’t hear the hiss of the carbonation.
With the jaw bone still in hand, thumb rubbing across the textured surface, Tommy turned and went to him. He held out the can, she swallowed two mouthfuls, and it was warm and heady. To their left the jetty cut a dark swatch into the water.
“Here,” he said, holding out a hand. She put the jaw bone there reluctantly, watched as he placed it down on her towel. “So it can dry,” he said, even though the sun was masked behind a film of clouds that hung low over them and the sand and the houses.
Tommy kept returning to the water. She liked watching the way it dragged at rocks on the bottom, the way the sand moved in rushes and bouts around them. More bones found her – smaller bones that didn’t look like they belonged to fish. Bones the size of her knuckles. So many bones that she couldn’t reach her hand into the water without them knocking against her fingertips.
They tumbled out of seaweed and settled on the bottom with the hermit crabs. From the shore Russ watched her. He stood still and upright. She gathered the bones until her palms were full, until a couple fell back into the water and whirled away, and then she cried for a little while, not understanding. She turned slightly to look back at the shore.
Russ had taken his shirt off and his skin, too, was as dull as the day and dark like toast. The hair on his chest stirred something in her that she didn’t want to acknowledge, so instead she crouched and waited for the swells to rock into her as they gathered momentum. Lifting her chin and closing her eyes, she sputtered at the bitter taste of saltwater. It dried out her lips, cracking the skin there. It was cold and bit into her, between her thighs, peaked her nipples under the t-shirt she wore.
When she stood up she went back to Russ with fistfuls of bones. His face didn’t reveal disgust, surprise, distrust. Instead he laid them out to dry carefully on the towels, and let her go on collecting them the way some people collect rocks or slipper shells.
*
“-when I was nine, my uncle saw one out on Rag Rock and no one believed him, but look at this. I wish he were still alive–“
Tommy flinched. The man next to her was well into his seventies, stooped, skin like jerky. He blathered away to the man next to him who nodded, eyes glued to the woman – the top half of a woman at least – on the bait table.
The rest of them men were doing the same; either talking incessantly or staring. Tommy, from the back corner of the boat, wondered briefly and darkly if it was out of surprise or desire.
Creature, she thought, which made it easier to squeeze between the men and look at the thing.
After all, she was the only woman on the boat once again. Had been ever since she was twelve aside from the occasional wife who would join their husband, swallow down Dramamine, get sick anyway in the little toilets that didn’t flush all the way.
It was different now that she was a deckhand and not just a fisherman along for the ride. The waders, cap, and a good hair tie were enough for their eyes to slide over her and forget her body.
“What the fuck, what the fuck,” one kid kept repeating. Tommy thought kid even though he must have been close to her in age, as was Connor. But Connor had a worn-down sense about him, a working-since-I-was-fourteen kind of thing going on. And Tommy, well, she couldn’t stop fishing, couldn’t stop subjecting herself to sexist jokes and sideways glances.
But this kid wore a shirt that said Beer, Fishy Fishy even though he obviously hadn’t ever fished before in his life. Already, forty-five minutes into the trip, they’d had to replace his jig twice; once for getting caught on the bottom, again for tangling it on the let-down. She tried to get a glimpse of his thumb, assuming the skin there was soft while her own was toughened by years of jigging. But he turned and grabbed onto the shoulders of another man who was staring, and kept saying “What the fuck, what the fuck.”
Someone stumbled into her and she looked up, barely catching herself against a stranger.
“You alright?” Connor asked in a low voice, his eyes still on the creature as it hissed and struggled against the ropes.
They had managed a sort of reverse-hog-tie; throat to wrists to tail, and it was struggling enough that blood ran in little rivulets from where the knots bit into its skin.
“Yeah,” Tommy answered, hearing her own voice as if from far away. “Yeah, I’m fine. Are you okay?”
“It got me,” he said, turning his arm over to show her the smooth underside, tan, heavily veined, and the slice of skin – perfectly clean.
She reached without thinking and pressed her thumb just to the edge of it, widening the cut. It wasn’t deep and didn’t bleed, but it was familiar.
“A fin?”
“Yeah. Somewhere near the elbows, I think, I’m not sure, I had it under the arms.”
Dave stumped up to them, his balance gone in the small crowd and confusion. His gaze cut angrily across the men and he wiped rain out of his eyes.
“We need to get the rods up, and get everyone inside. Captain’s orders.”
Tommy glanced down the port side at the row of rods, lines loosening and then pulling taunt. She could still feel the slick of clam bellies on her fingertips and fought down a grimace.
The horn sounded twice, in quick succession, but the men didn’t move.
Dave muttered under his breath and shoved through a few of them, herding them away from the table. The kid had his phone out now and was taking photos as the thing hissed at him. The boat rocked hard and it slid a few inches, enough that the tail grazed him and he stumbled back, almost fell.
“Everyone back to their rods!” Dave shouted, arms held out. “Reel in! Get your hooks up and get in the cabin!”
*
He worked at the submarine factory that everyone thought was shut down, testing turbines and steam systems. A month and a half into being together, he called her and asked if she could pick him up from the hospital.
“I wasn’t paying attention,” he said as she registered the beeping in the background, “but it only took two fingers. And when they were documenting for the incident report they found one in time, so it’s not too bad.”
In reality, he was down one finger and had about ¾ of the other below the first phalanx. The factory gave him four paid weeks off. By the second day, he had asked her to stay over if she wanted to, although there was an undercurrent of tension to the conversation.
“Okay,” she agreed. “But I was going to go out fishing Friday – do you want to come with me?”
He was quiet on the line for longer than was comfortable.
*
Connor’s hand gripped her forearm and she fought the urge to pull away from him at the same time as she fought the urge to lean into touch, a man’s touch, again.
“Stay and help,” he said quietly. “The boys can take the rods down.”
Before she had the chance to ask how the hell he thought she could help, he was stepping away to make sure everyone was inside.
“Don’t know why a thing like that would want to stay here,” one of the younger hands muttered nearby. “Nothing but trash in the water. It’s all exhaust and trash and dogfish that no one wants.”
“It’s been getting better,” the other nameless deckhand said, tightening the rope against the bottom corner of the bait table, his eyes warily on the edge. “Fishing’s been good this season so far.”
He wasn’t wrong. The last three times the Gulliver had gone out, they caught more stripers than Tommy could remember catching in at least a decade. One after the other they came to the surface lightly, barely fighting, it was so easy she felt guilty. Only a handful hit the mark for a keeping length anyway, but still, seeing so many come up sparked a bit of hope in her that she missed. Her dad would’ve loved to see them coming back.
Too bad she wasn’t out here for fish.
“Alright.” Dave emerged from the cabin, securing the shoddy door behind him, hauling his waders up. “We’re turning it around soon. Captain let the Coast Guard know, but they’re skeptical, no surprise there.”
He took a moment to eye the creature, and Tommy finally let her gaze be drawn to it now that it wasn’t crowded by heavy male bodies.
It looked unnatural on the bait table, like all fish did. Most of the muscles were rigid. The bottom half looked simple enough – somewhat like a porgy, actually, in color. Scales ranging from silver to pale cream to pink. She wondered if they would be as sharp against her fingers as all of the other scales were, and looked down at her wrist, littered with scales already from the hour of fishing they’d gotten in before someone landed this thing.
Her eyes skipped over the confusion of reproductive organs, a thought that made her face heat, and she pushed it down and reminded herself that this wasn’t a woman. But then the scales gave way to skin. Skin darker than she expected for such cold water, but then maybe that made sense; maybe it was some kind of adaptation to soak in as much sunlight as possible in northern waters.
The skin was tan with blooms of blue and brown like bruises in some areas, and in this blue were scattered more scales. Tommy recognized dips in muscle and flesh similar to her own. A navel, even.
Dave stepped closer to the table and was inspecting the creature carefully. He kept his hands behind his back and leaned forward, brows knit, studying it.
“Look here,” he said, dipping his chin. Connor had been right – just above the elbows was a series of small fins, sharp little triangles that flared erratically as it struggled. “It’s close, but not quite right,” he murmured.
The creature’s upper body – that’s what he was talking about. The bones. He was right, it was close, but off, there was almost an extra joint in the upper arm, the clavicles were more streamlined and pointed deeper into the chest, the shoulders more rounded.
But the breasts were the same. The rain picked up and came down harder, beading on the creature’s chest, rolling down to catch on the tight nipples.
Tommy glanced up to see Connor’s stare before he looked away quickly, eyes still wide, looking out blankly over the grey water.
She looked back at the creature and couldn’t help the realization that surfaced.
They were similar, similar enough in build. The dips at the waist. Small breasts. Even the rib cage, she watched it expand and contract, and then looked up at the thing’s throat, saw gills flaring open in a panicked way.
The wisp of empathy she’d felt rising in the pit of her stomach disappeared.
The gills were like gills on a bluefish. Raw and red, layered.
But it was breathing despite being out of the water. Its chest rose and fell quickly, faster than the gills opened and shut; they were out of sync, and Tommy felt disgust bury itself inside of her as the men’s eyes moved to the thing’s chest, to the shift of the breasts as the boat rolled slowly to the side.
*
He tasted like salt – that was her first thought, when she pressed her mouth to his throat. She suddenly remembered about tendons and collarbones. Her hands slid down his forearms and she liked the wiry hardness of them. She pressed her tongue against her teeth to lap at his skin.
And he waited – he laid stock still and let her touch him.
Outside they could hear the storm. Deluge, she thought, listening to the swell of the rain.
They had woken up to the sound of it. In the night, their clothes had been coaxed off because of all the moisture. Shirt sleeves trailed over wrists, pockets tugged at thighs, he had to work to get his fingers into the waistband of her underwear.
She lifted her chin to the scent of the rain as he wrapped an arm around her hips and pulled her closer, face buried in the pillow. She wanted to cry. She watched him listening, too, to the downpour. Watched the straight set of his mouth. Their thighs stuck together. She couldn’t separate the two of them. There was just so much moisture – her pores were open, detached just slightly, the storm humming and upsetting molecules. There was some kind of overlapping happening. She remembered about atoms and the space between them and how nothing ever really touches.
He pulled her shoulder blades tight against his chest and she didn’t know where the lines of her ended anymore. There was just the salt and the rain and their skin. The thunder quieting long enough that she could hear his even breathing. And maybe hearing gulls, too. Maybe hearing wings. Maybe hearing the rush of the fish’s body as it broke the surface of the water. She lost herself in the pull of it.
*
The Captain, whose name she didn’t know, finally showed himself.
He looked around at the group of them – five in total – mouth moving as though he were chewing on something.
“They’re animals in there,” he said. “All they want is beer. I had to let ‘em light up, or there would have been a riot.” He circled the table slowly, eyes calculating. The creature twisted against the ropes and hissed, an airy sound.
“Think it has a swim bladder?” Dave asked. He stood with his hands shoved inside of his waders, thin blonde hair plastered to his head, eyes narrowed.
The Captain nodded. “Sounds it.”
It was silent for a long time except for the sound of the rain on the deck, the shifting of buckets, the water.
“Are the Coast Guard coming out?” Connor asked.
The Captain shook his head. “Nah. They said to come in, and they’d meet us. They don’t believe it.”
“Can’t blame them,” one of the boys said.
The Captain began adjusting himself, hauling his pants up, mouth working, shifting his weight, and the rest of the crew followed unconsciously, except for Tommy who stood perfectly still near the bait buckets now.
Dave circled the table and tugged on the rope to make sure it was tight.
“So this is the plan,” Cap said, and everyone moved closer to hear him. “I’m keeping the rest of the group inside. I’m expecting it’ll start struggling harder, soon, when it realizes we’re heading in. Nate and Felix, you’ll need to start cleaning up.” He nodded to the two youngest deckhands. “Connor, Dave, Tom,” chucked his chin at the rest of them, “make sure it stays secure. Don’t let anyone near it, if they come out of the cabin. I’m thinking we douse it with water now and then.”
Tommy stared at the patches of scale embedded in skin, the gills sucking shut. Check the knots. Run the hose. Stay far enough away from the fins and tail to not get cut.
The shirt she wore, an old shirt of Russ’s, was sticking to her body. Her palms twitched. She looked around her, at the buckets full of clam guts, the gaff above her head, the two fillet knives wedged into the bait table.
She looked at the thing’s hands and realized that they were the same, almost exactly the same, as her own. Not feminine hands, but the hands of a searcher, a gatherer. The nails were short and just a little ragged. She remembered the feel of fish bones in her hands and wondered if the creature’s bones were the same, so light-weight, or if they would be heavy like her own.
And then she realized why she was there. The hands, the breasts. Her hair had worked free of the bun she kept it in, tight under her cap, and as it fell lank around her face the resemblance was almost painful.
She was a witness and a comrade. A woman there to console another woman, bound and watched.
Her palms itched and fingers twitched toward the knives.
*
It started after. After. She never actually thought the word, but there was a clear delineation in her mind; the before, the after. Sometimes there was the during, but that was mostly blank.
There were only the days with him and then the days without. And the days without were spent searching.
She thought that she’d feel differently after what happened – that she wouldn’t want to be out on the water again, with it moving constantly beneath her feet, taunting.
Instead she had never wanted to fish more.
It had been something to bond over when she was growing up, with her dad and her grandpa, and then just her dad when he passed away. And then just her for the last few years.
She liked fishing. But there were things she didn’t like: clam guts. Kicking the fish in the head until they stilled. Men pissing over the side of the boat. Fins slicing her fingers.
After, she didn’t care. Didn’t bother fishing from the Hellcat as a customer a few times a year anymore. She found the Gulliver, found Dave, asked him for a job. Cap had listened from the pilothouse and later, approved hiring her.
After, the violence didn’t matter.
She gaffed the blues when they fought and bled them just under the gills. She wrenched dogfish off of hooks and threw them back so that they circled in a confused way, spines ripped. She sliced squid and watched the ink pour out across the bait table and didn’t feel it anymore when hooks caught the side of her palms.
And she volunteered to do all of the filleting on the way back.
Connor thought she was crazy, but he taught her anyway. She never ate fish so she had no idea what she was doing. But eventually it was easy. A series of cuts, a few tugs, and the meat was off, the carcass was there, she searched every single one with her eyes.
If she was alone sometimes she searched them with her hands.
It had been all blues this morning and her waders were splashed with dark blood. Underneath the creature, in the body of the bait table, were canvas bags filled with blues and the few stripers that had been keepers. Dave had even pulled up a skate and decided to keep it for dinner tonight.
She watched Connor grab the hose, turn it on the creature, his eyes averted from its chest. For a moment it seemed like the thing wanted to lash out again, but its eyes widened and its mouth opened and she could see the hinges at the corner, there, where the lips met. Her eyes skipped down its throat, past the gills. She could see where she’d make the cut if she wanted to bleed it. And she didn’t want to stop searching.
*
Russ didn’t like the water.
He didn’t like being around when they brought a sub up into the work area, water sheeting off its metal siding. He didn’t like going too far into the surf at the beach. He didn’t even like taking baths, only showers, whereas Tommy could soak forever up to her nose in Epsom salt. Sometimes he sat on the bathroom floor next to the tub and they just talked. Sometimes he worried about how pruney her skin was getting, and poked his head in just to check on her.
He didn’t like that she fell asleep in the tub.
She didn’t know how to explain to him that it was okay. She didn’t know how she knew it was okay, that it would never happen that way.
Sometimes she felt like she could breathe water.
“You’re sure you don’t want to come?” she’d ask, standing in the doorway with the small cooler she always brought containing her hat, a book, loose dollar bills in case she lost a rig, sunscreen, rags.
“Why do you go, if you don’t eat fish.”
He asked very direct questions, and Tommy liked that about him. It saved her the anxiety of trying to figure him out.
“My dad,” she answered. “We used to go together all the time. I just kept going.”
“Maybe someday,” Russ said uneasily, shifting from one foot to the other. He never made any promises, but it was enough for her – knowing that he was considering it.
*
It happens so quickly that at first, no one reacts.
One of the fins above the elbows has managed to saw through the rope somehow. Tommy searches quickly and realizes; that strange extra joint. It has bent enough that the creature must have been working at the rope, conscious or not, for a few minutes now. Long enough that the rope frayed and with one jerk of its muscles, broke.
Dave shouts and Connor moves quickly, but there’s a hesitance in him as well. The two men try to navigate this new body. One grabs a rope tied around the base of the tail and holds it down, tight, against the table.
Connor doesn’t move quickly enough and Dave shouts again, struggling with the frayed end of the rope until Tommy steps up and takes over, wrapping it around her palm twice and pulling down.
The thing screeches.
It’s now that Tommy realizes there are no sea birds around. Usually, a handful of seagulls follow the boat, waiting for offal to be thrown into the wake. They laze about on the flybridge and shit on people, which is supposedly good luck.
The creature turns its head enough to meet her eye and it’s a relief when the eyes are strange, flat, otherworldly. There seems to be a kind of skin over them.
Connor is standing behind her with his mouth open, his big hands hanging useless at his sides. Dave quickly ties the end of her rope into a tight knot to a fresh coil and then leans to tie the other end, at the tail.
Once it’s secure, Tommy carefully unwinds her palm and stands back, thumb pressed to the raw skin. She’ll have a blister or two tomorrow.
The creature is only struggling harder now, tail warping out and chest rubbing against the strange texture of the table. Connor finally steps forward and wrestles it flat onto its back, holding it down by the sloping shoulders. It hisses up at him, teeth bared, and Tommy sees that they’re teeth reminiscent of a blackfish. Almost human, but slightly off somehow. Square and in a doubled row.
“Everyone okay?” Dave asks, voice tired, and for the first time Tommy realizes that he’s pretty old for a mate.
There are murmurs of reassurance, and Connor tries to look at her hand but she pulls it away. He watches her, hair falling into his eyes in wet chunks.
“Maybe you should try to calm her down,” he suggests. “Talk to her or something. Tell her a story.”
*
When they called her to tell her what happened, the person on the other end of the line sounded just as confused as she felt. She made them slow down and explain it to her again.
He had gone back to check on some welding on the outer hull that looked off, which wasn’t his job, so they didn’t know to keep an eye out for him. They sent the sub down into the chamber thinking that everyone was clear. Russ ended up between the sub and an access walkway -
"How?” she asked.
A mistake, they told her. He stumbled and couldn’t catch himself.
She tried to reconcile that fact with the Russ that she knew, always standing straight, lean, quick even down one-and-a-quarter fingers.
Someone saw the splash and stopped the sub dropping, but he was already in the water, and he couldn’t come up the way he went down, and they couldn’t understand why he didn’t just swim out through the doors that were still open and into the bay -
But Tommy knew as soon as they said that, even if he had never told her. It all suddenly came together in her mind, like an undertow in reverse, grains of sand gathering.
Russ couldn’t swim.
*
The engine slowed to a dull hum and from the look on Dave’s face, that wasn’t supposed to happen. They were still at least forty-five minutes out.
They could hear one of the other deckhands, who had been moving the rods into the cabin, shouting up to the pilothouse. Then the engine cut off entirely and they listed in the water, the boat turning slowly away from shore.
Voices rose inside. Some kind of argument, it sounded like, although no one could catch a word of it.
Tommy had switched places with Connor and was staring down at the thing’s tail. It was easier this way, seeing the scales as they dried and flaked. The pink ones were coming off first and skittering across the table. She was close to the knives now, close enough to reach out and run a thumb over the wooden handles if she wanted to.
The door to the cabin opened and a man with a large potbelly stepped out, holding himself steady against the wall. It had stopped raining a while ago but he blinked rapidly anyway.
“I say we keep her for ourselves,” he said to no one in particular. “There’s an aquarium no more than fifty miles away, academic at that, bet they’d pay a good price –“
Voices rose behind him, some against it, others supporting it.
Connor glanced at Tommy and she saw in his eyes that he was looking for comradery. But she only watched the scene play out, face still, mouth set. She picked at a scale dried to her wrist.
“We’re not auctioning her off.” Cap pushed through the back door and situated himself in front of the table, legs wide. “I told you, we’re bringing her in to the Coast Guard. I’ve already called it in. They’re expecting us in the harbor soon, and you’re holding us up with this nonsense – they won’t wait.”
“So be it,” said the potbellied man loudly. His eyes went to the creature’s breasts, hungry and wide. “I’d rather have cash in my pocket than those tight asses taking over the boat.”
Connor was still staring at her, his heavy-lidded eyes sadder than usual. She liked his eyes, but she often pushed the thought away, not wanting to encourage his interest. Now, she stared back at him, an idea forming in her mind.
She moved around the table to stand just behind the captain.
“We can’t bring her in,” she said.
The men crowded in the cabin stopped moving, captivated by the woman most of them were only just now noticing.
“And we’re not selling her to an aquarium, either,” she said.
Some of the men shouted angrily, but most stayed quiet, watching her. Connor looked relieved.
She couldn’t meet his eyes when she continued: “We have an opportunity here that we’ll never have again. A story to pass on, like the ones you all tell every damn trip. We cut open every fish that comes up out of the water. Why not her?”
She let her left hand fall forward, the hand that held one of the filleting knives.
Connor’s eyes widened. He shot her a look tinged with mistrust but she held steady, chin tipped up.
“You’re out of your mind,” a man, any man, it didn’t even matter which one, said. “We can’t just go cutting her up –“
“She came out of the ocean.” Tommy’s voice was flat. “Just like every other thing you’ve ever butchered on this table. She’s not a human just because she has tits.”
Her words were sharp, and most of the men had enough grace to blush or at least look somewhat ashamed. They looked anywhere but at her, as she was now very apparently a woman, not just a body in a dirty shirt and pants, a cap, rags shoved in the back pockets of slick orange waders. They suddenly noticed her throat and the slight swell of breasts under the baggy shirt.
“She’s not a human,” Tommy repeated, and reached out to press her hand around the thing’s throat, against the gills. The creature sucked in hard, head dropping back, and struggled the same way any fish would – rapid thumping.
If they had been able to look past the flesh, which they imagined was warm but Tommy knew now was damp and tepid, this would be the moment that one of them knocked the creature on the head to stun it. And then dug a knife in just under the gills to bleed it.
Her hand tightened around the handle of the knife. It didn’t matter if she got fired for doing this.
Cap’s mouth snapped shut and he started for her, protesting, but hands pulled him back into the cabin and then one of the youngest deckhands - Neil? Ned? - tried to stop it from happening, he got jerked in too, brought to his knees to disappear in a mess of Velcro shoes and stained jeans.
Connor spared her once last glance before shouting “Hey!” and disappearing into the crowd as well, but towering over them on his feet, fighting his way toward where the captain must be.
It was just Tommy and Dave and the potbellied man and a handful of others watching, now, as her grip on the smooth wooden handle tightened. In her head she was filleting flounder, just skimming over the bones, she wondered if it would be similar, or if she should go up from the navel -
Dave stepped closer to her and when she jerked back, he held his hands up, eyes going to the men who were moving in on him.
A hollow cry rang out and they looked up to find two gulls winging down just out of reach of the gaff. One of the men, who Tommy immediately didn’t like, grinned as his eyes went from the birds to her to the creature as it struggled weakly.
Blood was pooling under its wrists now and dripping down the side of the table where its tail lay. The scales seemed duller, greyer.
“Why are you doing this?” Dave asked. He didn’t make a move to stop her, but he looked sad and tired. She flexed her wrist against the light weight of the knife and imagined the first cut.
“It’s not human,” she repeated.
She could smell cigarettes again and the last pockets of exhaust drifting off. Above them, five gulls cried out now, demanding and triumphant. They were prophets; if they were here and they were calling, it was inevitable.
Tommy pressed a hand down on what would be a thigh if the thing were a woman, but it wasn’t, and it felt just like the lateral line on any other fish.
The men were rocking closer now on their unsteady feet, steadying themselves on railings and nets, watching and smoking and consuming it all.
They’d taken too long to get Russ’ body out of the water and the tide had taken it out and it had been four months now. He was somewhere out in the Sound, maybe, or washed up on one of the little stone and grit islands, or taken by the currents further where she’d never find him, but she felt the endless pull of it inside of her.
She pressed down harder and brought the very tip of the knife to the soft part of the belly. Sometimes when she was alone, she would take her time and empty out the stomachs to see what the fish had eaten. It was always amazing, the things she found: other fish, bits of plastic, whole hermit crabs, even a tampon once.
Dave leaned toward her and then away with the rocking of the boat. He pressed a weathered hand to his mouth, and then took it away, and asked, “What are you looking for?” and Tommy didn’t know but she started to make the cut.
***
Sarina Bosco is a chronic New Englander. She's a hoarder of myths and occasional poet.