He reeked of sweat and wine and rotting fish, and so did everyone else who sat shivering and trapped in the gristled black of the beast. The man squatted alone in his tweed rags to prod the thick shallows with a sharpened pole. He waited, silver-haired and asthmatic, with his hands shaking and coralled over in splinters. He couldn’t see a thing, there, in that sweating dark. Not his hands, not the pole. Not the bitter winds from humid chambers breathing deep one way and the other. Thick winds that carried time, and the vapors of other men, other lives washed away to drops of water and mucus and blood. The drops also in the thick shallows at his feet. This was something like fishing.
When finally the pole pierced flesh, he pulled the squirming thing up out of the shallows without misstepping down into them. He didn’t want the muck to erode him any more than it had and didn’t want the others, hungry and desperate, to trap and tie him up—and the unseen liturgy that would follow. Another ship was already swallowed up before he got there. It was a big cruise ship full of fat patrons vacationing with their spouses and spoiled children. The man had never seen them, but sometimes found their bodies washed up in the shallows and heard them all howling and romping out somewhere in the darkness.
He went back up to his old schooner where he ate his catch and sat drinking what was left of his wine. And then he wept, thinking of the wooden boy. Thinking of his wife. The man was an expert carpenter and could carve up a beachside, lighthouse and all, if he had the timber. But he didn’t. All he had was the woodwork of the home. The boy he carved up beautiful and simple in the wood, the boy that was now lost somewhere in the stinking dark. He wept thinking of his wife and the empty room painted blue and white in wait of the child she never had. It started with a miscarriage and then, when she passed, he thought he’d die of something else. But instead he was swallowed up and sat rotting in the beast.
Many years of his life had slipped into the shadows of his mind where something sat crouched and waiting and unseen. He kept the remaining memories huddled around him. Some were warm, some were very cold, but he sat holding all that he had.
And the beast, so large and old. Born with a hot instinct to devour. To hold deep within. And there in the lightless light, the man searched until he found the wooden boy. He felt the carving’s nose and eyes and smile. The stiff plump cheeks and lips. And he thought of all the rainy days and sunflowers the boy would never feel. This wooden thing that he had made. This nothing he had made him into. The nothing deepening. Then the man wanted to burn up the carving. Burn the woodwork up into smoke and ash inside the sea beast, to burn everything that it held. But he couldn’t.
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