Chapter Text
Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide
No escape from reality
Open your eyes
Look up to the skies and see
I'm just a poor boy, I need no sympathy
Bohemian Rhapsody (Queen)
The honor of your presence
is requested at the marriage of
Takashi Shirogane
&
Allura Lyon
Saturday, the twenty-fifth of June
two thousand sixteen
at half past six in the evening
The Ebell of Los Angeles (1)
743 S Lucerne Blvd
Los Angeles, CA, 90005
Reception to immediately follow (2)
---
Keith re-reads the invitation as soon as he wakes. It is the seventh time he does this this week, and for the seventh time he stands by the window to read. Sunlight does not stream through the window blinds. There are no blinds at the window. The streaked panes lie bare in their wooden holds, rattling ever so slightly with each breeze that batters by. The storm is long gone, but the sky is heavy still, and black.
The sun will not rise for another two hours.
Still, he has woken. Still, he reads.
“The honor of your presence is requested at the marriage of Takashi Shirogane & Allura Lyon—” Here, he stops reading. Here, he starts again, from the beginning.
“The honor of your presence is requested at the marriage of Takashi Shirogane &—”
He stops again, but this time, he cannot go back and start over. There is no starting over. There never was.
He sets the invitation down. It stands beside a clock that somehow still works even though he threw it against the wall. Look! Over there, under the wall calendar to his left — there was the dent. It was still there. Sometimes, he thinks there are rats outside that try to gnaw the rest of the way through. He hasn’t found any yet, but he’s sure he will soon. There are always rats around.
He leaves the desk, turning away from the mess of paper to the mess of sheets and clothes on the cold floor. His futon needs to be washed. His clothes are scattered. He doesn’t know where his socks are, and the one shirt he has right now has a hole. He needs another one. He also needs ice. For that, he needs to leave — he needs to go out.
Today is a good day to go out, he feels. Or rather, that is what he tells himself, that he feels today is a good day regardless of what a good day is supposed to be; because somewhere, he once read or heard (or was it both?) that telling yourself “today is a good day!” will somehow shove a hot coal in the mouth of the demon whispering in your ear about all the ways “today” could go bad. He thinks that’s a crock load of shit, but sometimes — and he wants to emphasize that it really is sometimes — it works.
And today, it will work.
That’s what he tells himself.
He still can’t find his socks, but he knows where his shoes are. They’re in the back corner, by the desk, and he grabs them and stuffs them into a drawstring bag he’s picked up somewhere on the beach some time ago. “COMIC CON 2013” it says in thick black font, each word a new line across the front of the bag (3). He throws it on his back, then rolls up the musty futon and kicks it against the wall underneath his desk.
He opens the front door; it’s the only door he’s got and it creaks loud and tinny in greeting. The air is humid, but it blows coolly over his sweaty face. There is nothing he sees but rocks — big and black and jagged, wrapping around the abandoned shack he’s made un-abandoned over the years and hiding him away, tucking him neatly inside a junkyard cove the beach town forgot about for years. California does that, sometimes. It forgets what’s there and just chases after something else. Then again, so does everybody. Right?
He rubs his hands with wet sand, feeling the coarse grains stick wetly against the palms of his hands and it feels almost like he’s wearing a new skin, except this one falls apart as the wind blows and it dries out. He starts walking, striding along the rocky cliffs until he gets to that one rock that juts out at the weirdest angle. From there, he takes hold of the prop and pulls himself up, taking care to step in the right places as he hauls himself up and over the top of that first rock and carefully stretching over the jagged tip. After that, it’s a smooth slide down, as smooth as granite can be, and he barely feels the rough scrapes against his feet, the skin thick with calluses.
He lands on the last bed of granite, the one that almost feels like sandstone because of how much the sand has whipped against it, and stands on it for a while, looking out at a white beach and black waves and a rumbling sky. From where he stands, he can spot the boardwalk that used to be a highway until someone rich enough rerouted the entire area. It’s not clear now, but the boardwalk was once lined with corner shops and stalls and small eateries and everything else that was once there before gentrification came upon them like black mold. The only constant is Brok’ Da Mout, a Hawaiian pub that somehow managed to keep its place within this fast-paced, ever-changing locale of Southern California. So like the owner it was; hospitable, genuine, consistent.
It’s for the owner that he needs the ice.
He jumps down from the cliffs. His feet sink into the sand, and for a moment, he lets the earth swallow him up to his ankles.
Then he starts to run.
It takes about 1.6 times more effort to run on sand than it does to run anywhere else. This, he’s learned from when he was in high school, when he joined the track team and the football team and the soccer team and every other team that ever asked him to come along. He can’t remember them all, and it doesn’t matter anyway. He quit each and every one, and stayed holed up in the attic that was his room trying to figure out how he was going to pay for college if his dad was doing the dead man’s float in space somewhere and his mom was shooting up all the time.
He doesn’t have either now. He’s scared to admit that he no longer cares, so for the record — yes, he misses them; yes, he wants them back. Except, he really, really doesn’t. He doesn’t think he’s wanted them back since he was fourteen. But fourteen was when he found someone else, someone good, to hold him together. Fourteen was when he believed — truly believed — in “today is a good day!”
But he really needs ice and the sand is going, going, gone, and he’s standing on the warm asphalt of a parking lot and he doesn’t have time anymore to think about that. He takes his shoes out of his bag and puts them on. It’s only when he’s stuffing his left foot into his shoe that he realizes he’s not wearing his shirt.
“Fuck,” he curses, the sound bitter and hard in his ears. “Fuck.”
He kicks his shoes off and carries them in his hands as he runs back.
Rolo is not behind the register, which makes things a little difficult. But he strives on difficult, his life has always been difficult; so, maybe, this didn’t make things difficult at all?
There is a pretty girl where Rolo is supposed to be, pale with sun-streaked hair and eyes glittering an alien purple (were those contacts?) and chewing gum as she reads a book he’s pretty sure can be used as a brick. The girl doesn’t seem to realize he’s not going to the register, that he’s not carrying anything but a sack of ice and an empty drawstring bag, that he’s not wearing socks, that his shirt has a hole in it and that he hasn’t washed his hair with soap since— since when?
He’s going to make a run for it. He’s going to run and he won’t come back until he knows Rolo has come back. If Rolo comes back. Rolo might be gone for good, this time. That makes his insides churn because Rolo was how he even got here in the first place, and he doesn’t want to lose someone, even if he and Rolo weren't that close; but maybe, though, maybe Rolo thought he was a friend, and this is the thought that makes his stomach flip because, jesus, where is he gonna find someone else willing to ignore a bag of ice every now and then?
And then his stomach settles because no, he doesn’t need Rolo. He just needs the ice.
The girl at the register turns a page in that brick of a book and that’s when he runs, tearing through the dark in a burst of speed that makes his heart hammer in his chest.
Later, when he slumps against a streetlamp by the boardwalk, he wipes the sweat off his brow and laughs at the rawness in his throat and lungs because oh man, oh god, oh shit, that was crazy, that was so, so crazy — he was crazy.
“Shut up!” someone hisses from one of the apartments, and it just makes him laugh harder. “People are sleeping!”
“Fuck off!” he shouts back, laughter burning in his throat and lungs, and he gets this stupid, stupid urge to throw something — anything; except there’s nothing around him but a bag of ice in his hands and he needs it; he needs this bag of ice.
He stops laughing so loud only when he sees a light flicking on, because shit, he can’t get in trouble, not now, not again. So he picks himself up and runs, his feet pounding heavily on the pavement as he cradles the bag of ice to his chest like maybe his mom did for him some years back.
What a sobering thought; it kills his laughter and shuts him up, and he’s back to being silent and brooding in the dark.
He carries the ice clenched in a fist, because his shirt is wet now and there’s no way else to carry it except put it in his bag. But he thinks maybe that’ll make it melt faster, so he doesn’t carry it that way and that’s why it’s just in his hand now. He walks down the empty boardwalk, watching the sky churn grey and black like it can’t make up its mind.
He starts to see the telltale color of a yellow lamplight that glows eerily in the dark. It shines above the shuttered front of Brok’ Da Mout, and he wonders — What time is it? Is he running late?
The hollow sound of a window sliding open catches in his ears; he’s not even close to it yet, but that’s how dead it is out here. A well-known silhouette of a big man gets to the window. He can’t see, but he knows the big man is smiling kindly. “Keith!” the big man whispers, just loud enough for him to hear that yes, the big man is smiling, “You out to get ono?”
“Maybe. I’ll see you later, yeah?” He starts jogging away, and he hears the big man calling after him:
“Hey, don’t forget to eat something!”
He waves him off.
He drinks two big gulps of air before he jams his shoes back into the bag and chases the wind across the sand.
The ice is dumped into a cooler, and he shoves that onto the boat he filched from some man who used to live way up at the lighthouse. The lighthouse isn’t there anymore, and the old man didn’t have family, so he just took the boat right after the funeral.
Nobody came looking for it, so he figures it’s alright.
( sometimes, he has dreams where the old man steals away the boat and dumps him in the middle of the Pacific )
Before he leaves, he remembers to text Pidge that he was out for the day; no protection detail, no courier work, no strong-arming, no nothing today, only for today. He tosses the pre-paid phone somewhere and lets it clatter noisily against the wooden floor of the shack.
The nets are in the boat and the oars are still good, so all that’s left to get is the bait. He checks the tide pools that litter the sunny stretch of the cove to his left and digs right in with both hands. There’s one of those sea plant things (4) that he is careful to avoid because it can sting (at least, he thinks they can sting), and he’s lucky to find a collection of mussels gathered together along the sides of the rocks in the tide pool. He yanks them off and hurls them against rocks, picking out the meat from the shattered remains and holding them in tight fists. He goes back and forth like this, dumping the slimy meat on top of the ice in the cooler and going back to get more. He keeps it up for close to twenty minutes before he decides that’s enough and leaves some meat floating in the tide pool to attract scavengers — the bigger the bait, the bigger the fish, the bigger the price, and the faster he can do something this time around.
He quickly rinses his hands off in the water by the shore and jogs back uphill to dry sand. He toes his shoes off and kicks them away, running to the boat he’s got chained to an old dock, bleached white by the sun and sunken into the sand, attached to the shack. The tides at Black Rock never reach this far up the shore, but the old port denotes that they once did, and the knowledge is a haunting fact in the back of his head each time he closes his eyes to go to sleep at night.
He thinks about this as he unwinds the chain from a wooden post and snaps it free from the cleft of his boat. He gets to the stern and heaves and pushes and shoves the damn thing through the sand. It scrapes and hisses against the dry grains, getting louder and louder once it hits thick, wet sand; the sound screeches loudly in his ear but he no longer cares. The first few times he’s done this, he was paranoid somebody would find him and lock him up. But now, he knows nobody gives a damn because it’s the junkyard cove; nobody cares about the junkyard cove; the junkyard cove was the city alleyway, a gritty parking lot for a dumpster; it was the forgotten lane in the old country, all the sounds coming from it just a big ol’ waste uh time an’ effort in investigatin’ it. He was just that raccoon digging through the trash or that fox slinking around that rabbit hole. Nobody cared.
Finally, the bow gets to touch the water and he has to make sure the motor doesn’t break against the rocks that sit along the shoreline. He manages somehow, just like how he manages everything else, and, as cold water greedily gulps up his legs, the boat finally lifts and wades atop the shallow waves. He moves to port side, hands gripping the cleat as his feet start to slip and slide against slimy rocks resting along the berm.
When the water reaches his chest, he stops and hauls himself into the boat with a grunt. There is splashing and rocking and panting but he finally gets in, almost cutting his forehead against the sharp side on starboard when he slips his wet body inside. He lies in the boat for a little bit, exhaustion already creeping out of his bones to play with his head but he tells it to sit back and sit tight because he’s made a promise today; he’s gotta go see the big man today.
He sits up and grabs the oars and starts to row the boat out. It takes a while, and his shoulders and back, still sore, are already aching, but it soon goes away and he can feel the way his blood pumps through his body; it churns through his head, though his heart, and he feels it, feels life moving inside of him again and he doesn’t stop because he doesn’t want to forget how it feels to be alive.
When he’s far out enough so that, if he extends his arm and sticks out his thumb, he can erase the sorry shack from the shore, he drops the oars into the boat and reaches toward the stern to start the motor. It revs and it strains and he tells it, “c’mon, c’mon,” and then, finally, he’s shooting out into the dark, away from the shore, away from the black rocks, away from California.
He didn’t grow up in California. He grew up in Arizona, on a military base his dad never came back to and his mom never left. He got out of there when he finally got the balls to say “fuck it” and went to UCLA. He didn’t come back, even after he heard his mom had died. But he heard about that three months after it happened, so there was really no point in going back anyway. He wonders, sometimes, how his uncle thinks of him now; angry and defiant and ungrateful and gay — the second and only generation after his father, someone who was supposed to be a doctor or a lawyer or an ass-kisser and be a great man. Now he’s floating somewhere near the Pacific coastline in a stolen boat with a cooler full of ice and grainy shellfish meat.
He has the net, too. That’s important. That’s his net, really his. He bought it himself; though, only after selling his first catch with stolen nets. But still, it’s his . It’s a good net; ten-feet with an even half-inch mesh, machine-woven and made of mono-filament fibers (5) instead of nylon so the strings were weightless in and out of the water, and completely translucent. It’d been a hassle to figure out how to attach weights to the bottom because spectra-fiber twine (a purchase that had dug a deep, deep hole in his savings) was impossible to work with; he had to get creative and invent new knots worthy of at least five or six badges in some boy scouts group, he’s sure. If it weren’t for that weird, mustached guy by the wharf years back, he doesn’t think he would have ever gotten where he was now. The guy had tossed him a tin of beeswax at sundown; to keep the knots in place, the guy had said after laughing at the way he’d struggled all day in the sun, and it was worth the burning humiliation when he finally got the knots to stay and the net was done. He’s had it for three years now, and it hasn’t torn yet and it’s always gotten him something. It was more than he could ask for.
He feels some of that pride coming back as he gropes blindly in the dark for his net. He finds the pouch he keeps stashed by the motor and slowly, carefully, takes the net out and starts to untangle it and set the bait. He stands once he’s satisfied, feet quickly moving to a balanced stance along the bottom of the boat; he’s done this so many times he no longer has to think about how far apart his feet are and how rough the rocking of the boat is. He just stands and that’s it; that’s all he has to think about now — just standing on his own two feet.
He finds the looped hand line and puts his left hand though it, cinches it tight and starts coiling the rest of the line, nice and even, in his left hand. He remembers the girl who taught him how to do this, the dry-load toss (6) method; she was a nice gal with a sweet voice, and the big man loved her the way summer love songs always crooned about for months over the radio. Weave the hand down the netting, stop about two feet down. Grab that and move it to your left hand. Don’t let go of the hand line! They were still together; a long-distance relationship that worked just fine. She’d be here in a month or two, maybe sooner. Find the edge of the net with your right hand — no, not from the bottom, from the side. That’s right, there we go — Now start bunching it in your right hand until you’ve got half. Roll that half you’ve got over your left thumb . Keep it there — don’t let it slide off! He forgets her name. Shay, was it? It was short for something else, though. Sharon? Shannon? Or maybe it’s just a nickname and there was another name entirely. Ashley? Cerise?
He follows the instructions to the letter, then reaches along the bottom of the net to pluck at a spot about halfway with his pinky and raises it up to his teeth. He takes the rest of the netting, spits out the single string, and, carefully, tosses the entire thing like it’s a frisbee. The net bursts open; its strings are soundless and invisible in the dark; multiple splashes as the weights puncture the water are the only indication that he’s thrown the net at all. That, and the tugging against his wrist where he’s cinched the hand line.
The tugs brings him back to when he was young; he sees Shiro smiling and pulling his morose sixteen-year-old self through the school carnival on a Saturday afternoon; he sees Shiro’s broad grin (the same one he’s seen at fourteen meeting each other through the school’s “Big Brother, Big Sister” program) when they actually win a game of H-O-R-S-E against their basketball coach and their team captain. See? I told you I’d make it worth coming here, he hears Shiro telling him as they drank Coke from the same bottle. I’m sorry, he also hears Shiro telling him later that evening as they sat in Shiro’s car listening to The Police together, but I don’t feel the same way.
Slowly, he loosens the loop of the hand line from his wrist. His skin feels raw and cold, and he ignores the tingling prickles of ice dancing along his arm as he ties the hand line of the net to the cleat on starboard and sinks down to the bottom of the boat so his back lies flat. He starts to see colors in the sky —a dark grey and a sliver of dark blue —and thinks about Shiro’s car and how it never seemed to lock on the passenger’s side no matter how many times the car went to the auto shop. He wonders what happened to it; it was probably replaced now, of course. That was quite some time ago.
He rests the back of his hand against his forehead; his face feels cold but his hand is colder, and it makes a slight shiver pass through him, and then he is made aware of how his whole body feels chilled, even if the air is growing hot and humid with each moment the sun rises in the sky. He feels the way his clothes, sopping wet and frozen, stick to him like a second skin; it becomes an extra weight against his chest that’s barely there, pressing into him like an iron that has yet to be turned on. And suddenly, he is too deep inside the boat; he hears the water lapping against it as a sharp slap in his ears, feels the strong, firmness of the boat against his back, hot and sweaty, and sees the sky that starts to lighten as time pushes the clouds far away stretching higher and higher out of reach, and that’s when he starts to sink—
He sits up with a start, clammy hands running over his face, head whirling with the sudden change of altitude and his heart fluttering like a trapped bird in his chest, because that’s how he feels, every day — trapped; trapped in time, in his own head, unable to move on. He fishes his head out of his hands and looks up again to see how much time has slipped through his fingers. He sees a sunrise in the distance, soft pastels of pink and blue streaming from the horizon, and it makes his whole heart ache with a longing he hasn’t ever figured out how to get rid of because how, how can he move on; where was his sunrise, his next day; what did he have to do to find it; what was he missing; what was he doing wrong?
He presses the heels of his palms against his eyes and takes a long, shuddering breath. His nails dig into his scalp, and his hands are pressing against his eyes so hard he starts to see swathes of white in murky darkness until suddenly everything is white, and that terrifies him because it seems endless, and he pulls away at last, chest heaving and filling his lungs and mouth with air as his vision blurs with tears and makes the sky swirl with all the colors of Shiro’s fiancée, Shiro’s beloved, Shiro’s new wife.
He forgets all about his net and stays in the boat, drifting along in his memories somewhere out in the Pacific where there’s no one who can see him fading slowly away, because that’s what he’s been doing all these years, drifting and fading.
The sky is alight with a soft, gentle blue when he finally decides to remember the net. How long has it been since he cast it? Was there anything still there? Stupid, he tells himself angrily, you stupid dumb fuck; he’s angry at himself now because he’s out of bait and there’s probably nothing in his net because who would stay long after they’ve had their fill? No one, that’s who.
He took hold of the hand line and started pulling it back. Five seconds in, and the line goes taut. He can’t pull at it anymore, no matter how hard he strains. The line almost cuts into his palm; he stops when he feels the warning sting against his skin. He’s cut his hand trying to haul in an anchored net once before, and he’s inclined to leave the experience counter for that at a one.
Rocks, was his first thought. Trash, was the second. Remnants of anger from before come bubbling to the surface, renewed as frustration, and he lets go of the hand line, watching the string snap back into the water. He shucks off his trousers, peeling them off his legs with all the ease of pulling the skin off a grape, and jumps into the water. The water hits him with a shock of ice; he’s taken in immediately, head pulled down under and water filling up his ears. Then he’s bounced back up, breaking the surface and he takes in long, deep breaths. His arms and legs move quickly, treading water and keeping him afloat just long enough for him to take in a gulp of air and dive back down.
He opens his eyes and ignores the brief sting as seawater floods into his eyes. He can’t see the net very well, but he sees the hand line and grabs it, following it down and sinking deeper into the water and closer to the rocks at the bottom of the seafloor, and he hopes, he prays that the snag hasn’t ruined the mesh, hasn’t ripped the net, and maybe, could there be something inside — an abalone, a skipjack, something.
And there is something in his net, and it is a large something; a shimmering blue that he almost doesn’t see, except the sun is brightening overhead and his eyes are finally starting to adjust and he sees that, yes, there is a large ‘something’ in his net, a very large ‘something,’ and it makes his heart stop once he’s drawn closer and he— just— fre e z e s because . . .
There is a man in his net.
The man is not moving.
He breaks to the surface in record speed, gasping and legs kicking wildly underneath and palms slapping the water around him and he gets dunked underwater for just a moment and the sea makes him swallow its salty concoction and then he’s back up again gasping for air because oh god, oh no, oh no, no, oh— there is a dead man in his net, jesus christ, fuck, shit, there is a dead man in his net, FUCK, fuck, fuck, fuck—
He latches onto the side of his boat as his brain screams AIR AIR AIR and LEAVE LEAVE LEAVE at the same time; his heart pounds in his chest with thundering slams, each beat crying MONEY MONEY MONEY as his brain slowly chugs through what’s next, what now, what’s he gonna do, what’s he gonna need?
He needs his net.
He needs a catch.
He needs to get out of here.
He doesn’t know which one of those he needs first, and the part of his brain screaming AIR AIR AIR starts to die down as he stays hanging on the side of the boat and now all he hears is LEAVE LEAVE LEAVE and MONEY MONEY MONEY and the two voices become a warring chant inside his head and all he wants to do is bang his head against the boat and make it STOP because maybe, maybe this is just a dream; maybe he’s hallucinating; he hasn’t eaten, he hasn’t spoken to anyone in days except the big man this morning, so maybe he’s losing it, maybe he’s— maybe he’s crazy.
The sky brightens overhead, clouds rolling over his conflicted state because they don’t know, they don’t see, they don’t care. He starts to breathe normally again, slowly, and he tries to think again; what is he gonna do?
He needs to get the net back. That, he knows for sure. It is the single thread of clarity he has right now, because of course he needs his net back; he can’t continue living his way without it.
He needs to get the net back. Then, and only then, he tells himself, then he can leave. He can leave, get out of here, pretend he never saw anything, pretend he never found anything. He can go see the big man, he can text Pidge and tell her just kidding, he can work today. He can leave this behind and forget all about it; think of it as another job, the kind that paid real good; like last week’s job, the one from Pidge.
Okay, he agrees, okay.
He takes another breath of air, and plunges back down into the water.
Slowly, he sinks himself further and further, until he is close to the dead man. Light starts to filter through the water, and with this light it finally dawns upon him that the dead man… is not a dead man.
The dead man does not have legs. Instead, just below the navel the skin starts to overlap with thin, blue scales that become thicker and more vibrant in color the whole length down, ending with a split-fan tail, bright and shimmering like ice against the sea’s murky depths.
His mind refuses to use the verbiage it knows in describing the dead man. Because he will not acknowledge that he is looking at a— that, caught in his, is a—
He doesn’t know how to finish that without sounding like a madman.
Get the net back! his mind shouts, supplying him with thought and the motivation to move again; move, move closer to the—
He follows the hand line and finds the near translucent mono fibers of his net, picking along where the net has bunched shut at the top and then his fingers freeze and his mind threatens to run blank because he has to bring the net over the dead man to get him out of the net; he might have to touch the dead man.
Okay, he tells himself, okay, okay, oh god, no, okay, it’s okay, FUCK, it’s okay, he can do this, shit.
He swims back up for air. Stares at the hand line tied to his boat as his lungs take in mouthful after mouthful of warm, salty air. Stares at it for a while longer. Contemplates just cutting the line and getting out of here.
No, he needs the net. He needs the net.
“Shit,” he curses, slapping his hands against the water and kicking his feet out. The movement jerks him backwards in the water, and he treads water at the surface as he closes his eyes and, just, breathes, for a few moments.
Then he swims to his boat and unties the hand line from the side. He’ll get back to the boat. It won’t go far. This won’t take long. He’ll get back to it in time.
He takes another deep breath.
He goes back down.
He follows the hand line all the way down, getting to the handle where the net has cinched shut, and pulls it open like breaking open an orange from the center after you’be gotten rid of its peel. He has to be careful with the netting, and he pulls it open and drags it down, down, down until he reaches the dead man.
He is face to face with the dead man.
Slowly, carefully, he slides the netting over the dead man’s head. And then he stops.
Around the dead man’s neck is a stone. It glows against the dead man’s brown skin, and before he can stop himself he is grabbing the stone and lifting it over the dead man’s head. It feels warm in his hand, as if it is possessed with life. It shimmers in the water, in his palm, and he stares long and hard at it, then takes a look at the dead man’s face.
The dead man is still not moving.
He brings the stone around his neck and tucks it into the front of his shirt. A wild, mad thought surfaces to his consciousness; a voice tells him that he can see the stone through the dark fabric of his shirt, it’s a beacon of hope, a guiding light from deep within the ocean. He abandons the thought and continues opening up the net, pushing it down the dead man’s torso and limbs and even further, all the way down the full length of the dead man’s shimmering blue scales. His hand brushes against a tail fin; it feels heavy, as if it is made out of plexiglass sheets, and immediately, he looks up.
The dead man does not stir.
Of course, he thinks, because the man is dead.
He removes the netting from the tail, refusing to think any more than slide the mesh over, under, and— there we go, it’s come free! He swims up, up, up, legs and feet kicking powerfully under him and he surfaces again, arms carrying him the short distance to the boat that drifted a few feet ahead and, yes , he’s here, he’s here and he’s good; he’s here and he’s good and he’s fine, just fine. He hauls himself back into the boat, slipping and sliding and banging his knees and elbows and forehead and shit, is that another tear in his shirt? Fuck.
He shoves the net into the boat and doesn’t care that it’s a tangled mess and there’s seaweed, seaweed, and more seaweed tangled around and it’s all over the boat but he doesn’t care because he needs to leave, right now; he’s gotta get out of there, right now.
He fumbles with the motor and the boat launches back to the shore and he swears to god the stone feels like ice against his chest and he yanks it out of his shirt, and only when he’s got it dangling in front of his eyes does he realize with a sickening lurch in his stomach that oh shit, oh fuck, he took this, stole this, from a — from a dead man, a dead man with a— with a—
And with the sun rising hot and new on his back and his boat a roaring beast racing for land, he grabs the sides of his head, hunches over, and he laughs and he laughs and he laughs because, oh wow, oh man, jesus, god damn — he’s crazy; he’s so, so crazy.
The stone feels like ice the whole way home.
