The Seas

by Samantha Hunt

We would see how the town stares out at the ocean it loves, never considering its other options. The town must be drunk to love the ocean because the ocean thinks the town is small and weak.

Having my grandfather in the house is like having a secret tunnel open to the distant past, where he lives.

I think my trouble seeing might be a characteristic of the depth of the sea where I am from. It is a region so dark blue the creatures from that depth have no pigment and neither do their eyes.

I take the opportunity to stare at him. His lips are very red. Tiny bits of skin are flaking off them. In the light creeping through the boardwalk cracks I see yellow deposits of wax in his ears. This wax intrigues me. It seems so adult, and all the things that make us different make me want him more.

Despite all the evidence in the house of objects surviving the people who once owned them, my mother and grandfather agree that if they hold on to everything their chances of surviving are better.

He is not my boyfriend. He says he is too old to be my boyfriend. But he pulls me onto his lap. He breathes in my ear. He has never kissed me despite his kissing most girls who live here, this far north. Jude thinks he is too old for me. I think I could cut a strip of flesh from his upper arm and eat it.

He has an old stethoscope. I’ll listen to his heart through his shirt so his scars of gill-cutting don’t show. I’ll close the bathroom door though not all the way. I’ll lift my shirt. Jude will peek through the half-closed door. I will listen to my own heart. Then I’ll hold the stethoscope above the mold in the shower and it will say, “We never would have left the ocean had we known what a horrible place this is.” And I’ll say, “Me too.”

The doctor calls me in. He asks me, “What do you see?” with his hand over one of my eyes. “Jude.” “Now the other?” “Jude.” “I see. Not much change. Well, at least it’s slow-moving.” I think of the patch of sunlight. “We’ll keep an eye on it,” he says. I drive to Jude’s but I don’t go inside. Instead I look at myself in the rearview mirror, looking for whatever it is that deforms me to unlovable—slime or freckles or a tail.

He tried to sleep but remembered a bird, a crow he’d found when he was a kid. The bone that kept the crow’s wing attached to the crow’s body had been popped, and Jude couldn’t stand to kill the bird so he left it there. Eventually other animals ate it.

Despite these odds Jude tries to make his house pleasant, or he tried to once, and the evidence of this effort is still visible, if barely.

I stand naked, looking at Jude, concentrating on becoming one hundred percent water so that I could slip down the drain and out to sea or at least I could slip down Jude’s wrong pipe and fill his lungs, lovingly washing away every breath he takes.

He closes his eyes and I’d like to wrap my arms around him. I’d like to push the hair from his face and trace the lines of his nose. I’d like to hold my finger below his nostrils for a long time, until it is damp from his exhalations. Then I’d put the finger in my mouth and drink Jude’s breath. It probably would taste like alcohol but I forgive him for that.

There are many things to make me angry here, many unbeautiful things, but I know the ice caps really are melting and it fortifies me when I remember that all these ugly parking places, all these red bags, will be on the bottom of the ocean soon.

I turn on my side so the water goes in my ear. I put my lips just on the surface of the puddle, without touching the floor. “Don’t go,” I say. I kiss Jude everywhere. I swallow him. I drink the water from the floor. I have to lap it the way a cat or a dog would. It is dirty with dust and sand and filth, but I drink it anyway, and when I can’t get anymore with my tongue, I sop Jude up in the bedsheet and wring the last drops of him into my mouth. “Jude,” I say once I finish drinking all that is left of him.

I have a Dixie Cup that I harvest my crying into so that later I can drink it, in case Jude is in there.