Fiction by Dave V. Riser
The man on the radio says monsoons and flooding all through the week, but the West Coast is still on fire. I’m lying on the dock, ankle-deep in warm Florida saltwater—the Gulf side, not Atlantic, but I guess it doesn’t really matter. In less than forty years the whole island will be underwater. Maybe in less than a week.
I’m thinking about running away. I’ve tried before, but although there’s not a huge difference between northern Florida and Georgia, I still can’t make myself cross that line. When I left home, seventeen and freshly orphaned, I went south. I keep going south. Maybe one day I’ll walk right off the southernmost point.
I draw my foot up, dripping over the rotting wood. We’ve been camped at this alcove for almost a week now. There’s C’s boat, a little folding table set up, and a line hanging between the mangroves for clothes. When the storm comes in, later, we’ll have to pack everything away.
C left sometime after our—not so much an argument but—whatever last night and hasn’t been back since. I called the bar (haven’t seen him but there might be work for me later), and if he’s not back by noon, I’ll call the station. I’d rather not—I hate strangers. It took months to stop flinching around C, but, if he needs bail, or—
I’m not worried though. C’s older than me by—five, ten years, give or take. He knows his way around the Keys, knows every blind old fishmonger from here to Miami. He’s fine, he’s just—avoiding me, or fell asleep on one of the public beaches, or—
“Hey, man.”
I sit up, stomach churning, and turn to face the sun. C’s back, bright-eyed and steady. There’re two fat yellowtail strung up on his line, still gasping. My face goes hot, but C doesn’t seem to notice.
“Lazy morning?” he says.
“I thought you’d fallen in,” I say, trying to play it light, like I haven’t been panicking since he left.
“Nah. Thought I’d get an early start. Fry something to stave off your hangover.”
C’s beautiful. It’s the only word. Dark hair, dark eyes, deceptively soft mouth. Tall and broad, with callused hands that crack and bleed in the salt spray. Fisherman’s hands.
I am not beautiful, especially not as a boy. I used to be, maybe, but in a different way, like a rabbit is beautiful to a dog. It’s not why I transitioned, but I can’t isolate one from the other.
“You’re my hero,” I say. I want to make a joke about repaying him, but it’s too soon since last night. The memory is sour beer in my mouth.
C makes a sound that’s not quite a laugh. “They’re just fish. Catch them on a line, something you know a lot about.” C makes a lot of bad jokes about spiders. Sometimes he brings me the little ones in his hands, like I’ll want to keep them just because I’m named for them. I always wait for him to turn away before I let them go. “Let me teach you sometime.”
“I don’t fish.” I don’t trust the ocean like that, not the Gulf or the Atlantic or even the faraway Pacific. I used to think I could see ghosts in it. Every time I looked into the water, I thought I saw my mother staring back at me. Then I cut my hair and realized it had been me the whole time.
Shit like that, it’s everywhere if you look for it—like the broken railroad next to the highway. Back in the ’30s, the government sent a train full of World War I vets to work on the fancy new interstate highway, but when a hurricane came sweeping in, they couldn’t be bothered to evacuate them on time. Thousands died, but we still built coral pink houses, and in the ’70’s, Jimmy Buffett still crooned over Margaritaville. The shattered railroad still stands, though—an echo.
“I’m sure you could figure it out. Clean these for me?”
“Sure.” I’d teased him the first time he asked me to clean his catch, but he’d told me straight up, a little sad, that he couldn’t. I guess catching and killing aren’t the same to him.
C hands me the line and crosses to the half-sunken dock to get into the boat, presumably for oil and a pan. He’s careful not to touch me when he hands over the fish. Shame tastes like nothing else. I can’t stop myself from watching him walk away, the lines of his shoulders, the way his back shifts underneath his worn T-shirt, the tilt of his head as he disappears, like he’s straining to catch the sun until the last possible moment.
C’s mother was born in Cuba, ninety miles south of Key West, and got knocked up by some visiting American when she was nineteen, so C tells it. Twins. When he was six, she found a place for herself and her kids on a raft, and they drifted over. The Coast Guard caught them about half a mile offshore. C’s mom told her kids to swim for it—wet-foot/dry-foot policy was big back then. C made it to land. His brother didn’t.
I wonder if he blames his mother. I wonder if he blames himself. I know he has nightmares, but doesn’t everyone?
The yellowtail flop on the line, gills wide open and red, gasping for air. I give them quick deaths, without apology, without guilt. It’s a relief when the blood spills over the table and they stop writhing.
They’re just fish, even if they are beautiful, even if they do cry. I looked up why at the library once. Snappers don’t have tears the way we think of them—it’s just their eyes drying out in the heat. They can scream, though. Wish I hadn’t read about that.
Sometimes, on the really bad nights, I can still hear my mother screaming.
I scale the fish with the back of the blade and then gut the first one, dropping the guts into the fish bucket. Blood spatters on the limestone protruding from the dirt and the sand.
Limestone’s not real rock, you know. It’s crystallized fossil. More ghosts. The first people in the Keys, the Tequesta and the Calusa, were nearly wiped out after the Spanish landed. Pestilence, murder, colonialism, etc. Then came the Seminole Wars (a misnomer, as it was Andrew Jackson against the original inhabitants of his annexed country), and the limestone was soaked. Baptism.
When I go to gut the second snapper, I slip in the blood and cut my finger open. Blood’s tricky like that.
I must make a sound, because C is suddenly there, gently easing the knife out of my hand and pulling the other one toward him. I can feel my pulse in the cut. Every point of contact is its own sunburn, raw and blistered.
“I ruined the fish,” I say. It’s a lot of blood.
“It’s fine,” C says, and he puts my hand over the cut, forces me to squeeze it. “It’s not so bad. You’re okay.”
My head’s gone fuzzy and I can’t—think when he’s touching me.
“I ruined the fucking fish,” I say again, louder, and he won’t let go—
“The ocean’s full, little Spider,” he says, which isn’t right. The man on the radio talks about overfishing. It’s the end of the fucking world and I ruined the fucking—
“Spider,” he says and squeezes his hand over mine. My breath comes in short gasps. “Thom. It’s okay.”
“I think I need to leave,” I say before I can censor myself. The only thing I learned from my mother is that when you run away from someone, it’s a bad idea to tell them about it. They’ll try to keep you.
C nods, slow and measured.
“Sit down,” he says. “Let me fry you something.”
I cannot even imagine being hungry. I want to run and to rip myself into pieces and to sink to the bottom of the ocean, my flesh to feed the reef but—he asked.
I sit on the sand to watch him cook. Sometimes I think I might be half made of sand, with the way it clings to me, even in town. I wash my hair and out falls a whole new island—Spider Key.
My actual name is Thomis. Thomisidae. It’s the family name of the crab spider, though technically not the kind we have here (Gasteracantha cancriformis, which I only found out after I picked Thomisidae). I chose it because I’ve been afraid of spiders ever since one of my mom’s boyfriends left a jar of black widows in my bed. A gift, he’d said.
Here’s a nightmare for you: Through the wall of our trailer, I can hear a man yelling and my mother screaming. Glass shattering. Her voice is weird, too high, like an animal in a trap. Then it stops.
“Here,” C says, sitting next to me with the pan of charred snapper. My stomach does something complicated. There’s maybe a foot between us.
“I’m sorry,” I say. A sand gnat jumps onto my knee, and I flick it off.
“It’s okay,” he says again. He picks a bone out of the meat of the fish with two oil-slick fingers. I don’t see him look at me, but I can feel his eyes on my face. I comb a hand through my hair, pulling it over my eyes.
“Thomis,” he says.
“C,” I say. The alcove feels smaller. There’s rain on the horizon, a gray haze blending the sky and the ocean into one solid wall.
He’s asking without asking if I’m ready to talk. I hate how fucking transparent I’ve become. It’s been a little over a year now, with me sleeping on the boat more often than not, and I never told him, but he knows. He figured me out. I want to peel my fucking skin off.
I pick at the snapper.
“How’s your hand?” he says. So gentle.
Something under my ribs snaps clean in half, fishing line stretched too far. I’m sitting and then I’m on my feet. The snapper has fallen into the sand, and I don’t remember doing it, but there’s sand everywhere and I’m shaking, so it must have been me.
“Why?” My voice is too high, too shrill. Just like my mother’s. “It’s not your hand. It’s fine.”
C is carefully still. Light filters in through the mangroves, making his eyes look gold.
“If you’re still bleeding—”
“I’m not going to bleed out from a scratch,” I say, but I’m thinking about the blade now, and how much I wish—
“You have to take care of yourself, Thom,” C says, so quiet I barely hear him. “Here or somewhere else. You can’t run from that.”
If he wasn’t so calm, I’d never have stayed. He talks like he’s got the entire ocean inside of him, so steady, so constant you’d never know he’s just as batshit as I am, that he can see the blood in the limestone too. He has his nightmares. Sometimes we cling to each other, shaking with memory, when it’s too dark to see the other’s face. It’s not something boys are supposed to do, let alone men, but—
“I don’t want—to be—this—” I can’t finish. I’m choking on nothing.
“I know.” He’s careful to keep his hands where I can see them, to move slowly. The rain is almost on us now, fighting the sun for the light, the wind mussing C’s hair. His eyes are on me, just me. “But that’s all we’ve got.”
I wish it hurt more. I wish it didn’t work. It’s not fucking fair, to want him more after he’s told me he doesn’t want me. I shouldn’t want him at all.
We’d both been drunk. Men get drunk. He was always—affectionate. I thought it would be okay. I thought, maybe, he might want something. After all, he was always feeding me, letting me sleep on his boat, keeping me from tying the anchor around my neck and going for a dive.
“Thomis—” He moves slow, hands raised, like I’m a cornered raccoon. “It’s okay.”
“It’s not—” I’d just wanted to give him—something, something he might want, and he did, he kissed me back, okay. For one second my whole body was heat and his hands were in my hair and mine were in his and—it was wrong. I was wrong.
“Why the fuck are you so—” I can’t make myself finish it, a child’s question: Why are so nice to me? Why did you stop me?
“It’s okay. I’m not going anywhere—”
He is, though, he’s going to drown or die or leave without even once letting me under his skin, keeping me in debt forever, constantly, constantly owing—
“Do you miss your brother?” I ask between shaky inhales, because I need C to feel raw. I need us to be equal. “Do you see him when you—do you ever see him?”
C pauses. He looks down at our feet, the marks in the sand, slashes of wet and dark between us.
I could just leave. I could go anywhere, be anyone else. I’ve reinvented myself once already, and it didn’t kill me. I could—
Thunder rumbles across the ocean. The taste of salt is sharp in the air. “Yes,” he says, finally. “Every day. All the time.”
“I still see her,” I tell him.
“I know. It doesn’t go away.” His voice doesn’t break. He just sounds tired.
It starts raining—warm rain, tropical rain, the kind shitty country artists write songs about. It can still drown you. C picks up the pan and then the folding table. The ocean roils under the barrage of rain, ruining the reflection, but it doesn’t matter. I can feel her looking up at me from the darkness, her face swollen with water, her eyes empty. There are handprints at her throat.
Sometimes, I think they look like mine.
“Will you get the line?” C asks. “Your shirts will get ruined.”
“Okay,” I say, but the next crack of thunder swallows the words.
We collect our possessions, stowing them in the boat, then settle under the mangroves to wait the storm out, side by side and silent. The shore is the most dangerous place to be during a storm, but we don’t have anywhere else.
