The Seas

by Samantha Hunt

It was a dark and stormy night, and the ship was on the sea. The captain said, “Sailor, tell us a story,” and the sailor began. “It was a dark and stormy night, and the ship was on the sea . .

Then there is the ocean, mean and beautiful.

The air smells like a terrific storm that came all the way from secret strata high up in the atmosphere, a place so far away it smells unlike the tarred scent of sea decay we have here.

I feel buoyant. I feel light and ready. I feel like we are getting out of here and mostly I feel Jude inside me and it feels like love. Jude is being very quiet

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. The ocean always beats the town throughout the hardest winter months, pulling down houses and ripping up boats.

The color blue fills the entire mirror and, watching it, I think that is how a small northern town in America works. It enlists one beautiful thing like the ocean or the mountains or the snow to keep people stuck and stagnant and staring out to sea forever.

am the town’s bad seed. I am their rotten heart.

My mother is regularly torn between being herself and being my mother. Her internal argument is sometimes visible from the outside, as if she had two heads sprouting from her one neck. The heads bicker like sisters. One says, “Be sensible for your daughter’s sake. Three meals a day. Brush teeth at night. Organize. Comet. Pledge. Joy.” While the other head says nothing. The other head is reading a book about whether life exists outside our solar system.

We watched the water between us. “You do now.” The water rushed back out to sea and the ocean filled up with words, like Jude was bleeding all the things he couldn’t tell anyone because it might kill him. The rest of the story.

I liked it in the tub because from the window I could see stars and the ocean and sometimes, if it was calm, I could see the stars in the ocean. I liked the tub because if I slept with my ear against the drainpipe I could hear my parent’s conversations all night long, metallic talking that made its way up through the plumbing.

“I remember how the moon shines into the ocean and the pattern it makes on the sea floor.”

People often suggest that it would be better if we knew for certain whether or not my father is dead. That, to me, seems cruel, as if they want me to abandon all hope. That’s how dreary people try to keep things here on dry land.

We don’t move away from this small town because we are waiting for him to return.

bridal–adj. of or relating to a bride or a marriage ceremony. bridle–n. a harness, consisting of a headstall, bit, and reins, fitted about an animal’s head and used to restrain or guide the beast.

If you can trace a characteristic—curved fingernails or pointy canines or alcoholism—back to one ancestor, I can trace my hatred of the dry land back to her. She had more reasons than anyone to hate the dry land, having lived through a war that she had nothing to do with.

After the first hour or two his brain began to repeat words in the same patterned battering his boat had suffered. Oddly, he felt that the words did not grow out of him but came from some exterior source. The words were, “The girl who sold seashells will someday rot in hell. The girl who sold seashells will someday rot in hell.”

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

“Those cuts on my ribs are because I am trying to open gills before the flood comes.” So he doesn’t really have any secrets and he doesn’t really have any gills because where he cut himself scarred up with thick, white, foamy tissue and nobody could breathe through that.

She has some more of her cigarette, “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.”

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 three sisters is what they are called. Just like the dry land to name the cruel things in the water after women.

My mother is a small woman, five two. She is strong but her bones are tiny, and sometimes when I hug her I can feel her heart beat through her chest like the battering of an insect trapped in a lamp.

This town goes to bed very early but my mother does not. She doesn’t sleep well without my father and so she avoids sleep or she fakes it. She likes the town better at night. She likes things to be quiet. It is what she is used to.

After that, the two of them always had it in their heads that they could talk to animals, even dead ones, and that was how they enjoyed themselves on the island.

When she met my father she was still really good at being quiet. When she met him she realized how she had been collecting silence in a slender, delicate glass jar behind her ribcage. The bottle was not corked and so she always had to be very careful not to spill it. When she met him what happened was he took her out dancing and told her, “You make me feel like a pony.” She didn’t know what the hell that meant, but it made her damp inside like a flood, so the bottle broke and she didn’t care anymore as long as she could have him.

All the good silent things she’d been saving up, like lights off in the distance at night or fog in the morning, ricocheted around her insides freed and she’d never felt so good. She went wild for him, taking on his habits, like drinking, driving with only one hand on the wheel, and other dangerous interests, as though they were a new coat cut just for her. 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.

This explained a lot. From my father I got many recessive genes. Fair eyes, fair skin, and the mermaid part. The surrender places. I did not get a torso of ice, though sometimes it feels that way, as if something solid that once was there melted now and still aches with the vacancy of him when it rains.

These are the parts of him I find impossible to cut myself loose from. They are beautiful qualities. But beauty is heavy, and though I’m young I am getting tired from carrying around the bits and shreds of my father’s beauty.

“You might be living on dry land but you’re still subject to our laws,” and he’d mean the ocean’s laws. I would be relieved to hear this because it would give me comfort. I’d rather be subject to the ocean’s laws than the laws that apply to young girls trying to become women here on dry land.

When you are young, living in the North, sadness can make you feel like you have something to do. Sadness can be like a political cause, almost, or a religion or a drug habit.

It is a lot of work to stay sad.

I suspect that she wants her boyfriend to stay in prison for a long time so that every year she can add another drop until they reach below the collar of her shirt and everyone who sees her will say, “My. There’s a sad girl.” She’s like an animal with her foot caught in a trap. In the wave of pain that rushes over her, she looks to the sky and she is braced by the color blue there. For a moment she imagines she can escape this ugly town and her imprisoned boyfriend, so she tries to use a knife on her bone above her ankle to free herself from the trap. Sadly, the knives they give out as amusement park prizes here don’t have the blade for any real cutting, and anyway she doesn’t have the money to move away.

“Don’t forget that the ocean is full of everything except mercy.”

But I’d let the children live. See, I have mercy. I push and push King Neptune and then I give up. And then I can see clearly. King Neptune isn’t, and underneath my cut hands is a rock shaped like a king, a rock deposited on this beach when the ice age flowed home, beaten, in retreat.

Even if I added up all the things Jude’s name rhymes with and all the words I could spell with the letters of his name it would not measure up to him. A phrase like, “Calm as the bottom of the sea” comes closer. I would be a sloppy typesetter using the more economical “Jude” in lieu of, “Smooth night with stars for navigation.”

He tells them and he makes the world seem enormous. The stories are a torch he is shoving into the dark corners, pushing the perimeters back farther and farther. It was Jude who told me about the great polar explorer. It was Jude who tore his photo from a magazine and pinned it to my wall so I’d know how big the world is.

Jude is my only friend here apart from my mother and my grandfather. But Jude is my best friend and no one ever bothers me when I am with him. Still, I must be careful because Jude is two people. He is a tender sailor whose hands seem too rough and large for the delicate way he makes me feel watched over. But he keeps this version of himself locked behind his ribcage until he sees me. The rest of the time he is somebody else. He is a man who lives here and so fills his mouth with all the cheap and garbled words in this town.

Down at the ocean I stare out at the horizon also. I see my grandmother Marcella walking on the line that makes her name. Mare. Ciel. Seasky. She is the horizon line. She’s as big and bright as a setting sun. I stare at her long enough so that she looks blue in an afterimage on my eye. I burn the sight of her into my pupils, and that way, I can keep her with me for a few burnt hours.

“Are you a mermaid?” I finally asked her, and she lowered her arms, stared straight ahead at the drain lever, and said nothing, as though she hadn’t considered that before and was stumped, or as though that was a sad topic she had almost forgotten and wished I hadn’t mentioned it.

At the factory, by 4 o’clock our hands are silver and slick from scales and soya oil. If I knit my fingers together my hands become odd fish themselves. They even try to swim away but I catch them.

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

When I reach the top of the stairs looking for the fonts, there is a moment when my eyes have to adjust to the attic’s darkness. That moment paralyzes me. The moment opens wide like a door. I see a man standing in the gray against the back wall of the house. The man looks at me and then cocks his head slowly to the left.

I spend most of my time here waiting. Waiting to grow up. Waiting for my father to return. Waiting for Jude. Waiting for something big to happen. I wait in the water of my bathtub.

When I was young I retreated here rather often because from the peak of the roof I would will myself to imagine the entire town getting flooded and filled as the ice caps melted, as the ocean crept higher and higher. From my roof I thought I’d watch those boys sputter and drown. It wasn’t an experiment. I thought if they tried to grab hold of my roof while the water was rising, I would walk over to the rain-gutter edge and squish their pale fingers underneath my tennis shoe, though usually in my imagining I had on my father’s steel-toed work boots because they were more effective at finger crushing.

He takes Undine back down under the water and tells her she must kill Huldbrand or else he will.” “What does she do?” I ask. My mother looks at me and pulls her shoulders back, pulling away from me to gauge my reaction. “Undine kills him.”

“No. It’s the little house love moved out of, maybe a hermit crab moves in and carries the house across the floor of a tidal pool. The lover sees the old love moving and it looks like it’s alive again.”

They are all wrong. There’s a reason why we have no word for it. You don’t get to keep the feelings for someone you once loved. Once you’ve washed your hands of that person, all those feelings, all that dirty water is washed out to sea. There is no word for that dirty water.

He spreads the map out before me while she looks over my shoulder. He points to Greenland. “This is how a nineteen-year-old girl sees a man like Jude,” he says. “The Mercator projection. It’s making Jude look a lot larger than he actually is. The truth is, Jude’s a drunk from a very small place who doesn’t say much because there’s nothing to say.”

I thought the wolf-boy was fine because lots of people had strange reactions to the war and what they saw. A lot of us started to wonder why we were there at all. So being a wolf didn’t seem so bad, not nearly as bad as what some of the other soldiers did.”

“Walking with my shoulder pressed against something as large and as old as the ruin, the war seemed tiny and the purpose of the war looked like a pinprick, like a damn dim light because people die so quickly already without war. I thought about how, to the ruin, people must be mayflies, measly, annoying mayflies and mayflies only live for one day. Then I imagined a war among the mayflies but anybody at all could see how stupid a war among mayflies would be. People die so quickly already.