The Seas

by Samantha Hunt

Jude thinks he is too old for me. I think I could cut a strip of flesh from his upper arm and eat it.

“I always thought it was because the ocean is like a one-of-a-kind thing, like there is nothing else similar to it in the entire world and so the ocean feels no love, no mother, no father or husband, like a space alien. I always thought that just made it an extremely nasty and greedy thing, like an only child.”

Just like the dry land to name the cruel things in the water after women.

She tore about town like a match that had just realized it could burn down the entire village if it wanted to, and she did.

“Nudity is more painful to me than loneliness,”

Those are the choices for women who live here. Dirty. Domesticated. Deaf. Deformed. Slithery. Siren. Psychotic. Silent.

m’aidez, Mayday.

I’d sit in his dirty laundry for days and he would understand.

I will conduct an experiment to measure whether the ocean is good or bad, because I have a hypothesis that it is neither. I think I can prove that as a scientist.