Salt Water Tears

by Hopkins, Brian A

  “We’d all piled in the RV,” she said as he pushed her back on the bench. Her hands slid from the clay and fell beside the dead weight of her hips, but the pot was finished, had been finished from the moment her visitor had leaned in close and added to the mix. Despite her inattention, it spun without accident, perfectly formed. She knew this from the precise, balanced spin of the wheel. If it had been off-center, unbalanced, her ear would have picked up on that. Her ears were extraordinarily good.

  “The Grand Canyon. Our once-in-a-lifetime, big family adventure.”

  His weight settled on her. She could hear things working within him now, all the tiny springs and mechanisms of Death, ticking like clockwork. But it didn’t sound mechanical, did it? It sounded like insects. Chitinous. But wet. Like the scrabbling of crayfish in the bottom of a plastic bucket. It sounded as if his bones were joined with damp sponge, as if his muscles were knitting needles clicking together as they worked the wet tendons and ligaments in his body.

  “We never got there,” said Mary Aponte as the visitor did things she could neither see nor feel. The reek of him was just inches from her face. Moisture dripped into the limpid dead pools that were her eyes, stinging with alarming pain. For some time, her back was ground against the rough wood of the bench, while the potter’s wheel squeaked in synchronized cadence.

  When his weight left her, she thought he was going to leave her. She reached out to him, her hands, now sealed in dried clay, beseeching. “Take me to them,” she said, her voice breaking for the first time. “I want to see my daughter. I want to see Carrie Anne...” And she wept for the first time since the accident. There were no tears, for her tear ducts had long since wasted away, but tiny trickles of Death’s own tears ran from the corners of her eyes, tickling as they found her ears.

  Beside the wheel was a workbench. Among the tools there was an old knife she used to cut slabs of clay from the damp cache she kept in a bucket. She heard the rasp of the blade as he took it from the bench. Felt the pressure of the dull edge as it sawed at her abdomen. More water dripped on her face and into her mouth as he bent to his task. It tasted like tears. Salt water tears.

  There was pain then, but she didn’t mind. She felt the warmth of her life gushing out onto the bench, felt him pull things from her, warm reeking coils of her life that lay against her sides and puddled on her chest, soaking through her dress and trickling down the sides of her breasts and into her armpits. She felt him reach inside, seeking, cutting. She saw color for the first time in years, there on the black windowpane of her mind.

  The color was red.

  But then she heard her daughter’s laughter... even as that part of her from whence her daughter had been born was removed.

  • • •

  The shambling mock-man, hands encrusted to the elbows with dried blood, knelt before Poseidon and firmly planted the clay pot in the empty hands of the god. The pot was round and bulbous. Its neck was long and narrow and had been plugged with clay, now hardened. Its shape resembled the human uterus it contained, thick-walled and strong, rich in color, like fertile, heavily-mineralized soil, the clay striated with ribbons of marine color, mosaic’ed with bits of shell and scale, coral and bone.

  The creatures of the sea crowded the beach and the roiling surf, struggling for a view around the sagging legs of their hastily assembled martyr, he whose job it would be to face Poseidon’s wrath if the god was displeased. There was silence, as thunder rumbled in the distance, as the waves kissed the sand, as the audience held its collective breath.

  Poseidon’s eyes flickered, dimmed, and went out. It began to rain. The sand of the god’s face began to run in long tears of joy, bleeding down his arms and swirling over Mary Aponte’s clay pot.

  They took it as his blessing.

  The thing that had once been a man took the pot from Poseidon’s hands, which were rapidly dissolving in the sudden downpour. He cradled it against his chest, his sallow cheek pressed against its neck. The antennae of a small crustacean extended from his eye socket and lovingly stroked the coarse surface of the clay, a gesture envied by the entire assemblage. Something pierced the corpse’s abdomen from within, a long red claw that worried and tore at the hole until it was large enough to accept the pot. Sea creatures and pale pink brine spilled out, splashing and tumbling onto the sand, making room within. The pot was shoved through the gaping wound and tucked up deep inside.

  As the assembled tide of marine life made its way back into the surf, the corpse joined them, one hand clutching his swollen, pregnant belly, holding in the pot, protecting the stolen uterus, cradling the tiny life that was already growing within.

  • • •

  The cycle that was Fort Lauderdale continued. The raucous teenagers had their Spring Break, leaving behind their empty beer bottles, used condoms, and drug paraphernalia. Many sand sculptures were created and eventually dispersed by wind and rain, but none drew any attention from the marine life; Poseidon’s calling had been a singular event. Summer brought her tourists to the beaches in the wake of the college kids. For months the sea suffered the crowds, the litter, the stolen shells and the murder of the tiny animals that frequented the shoreline. In time these crowds thinned. The air took on the evening chill of fall, an inappreciable briskness at twilight. And eventually, as happens every cycle, the beaches were abandoned save for the occasional jogger or a person walking their dog.

  Through it all, Mary Aponte’s shop remained vacant. Declared a crime scene those first months of spring when real estate was at a premium, it wasn’t offered up for rent. By the time the police were done with it, it was already the subject of much discussion and rumor up and down the coast. In the height of summer, when someone could have been making a good living selling bathing suits or sea shells or damn near anything to the tourists, it sat empty, site of one of the most horrific crimes in Florida’s history. Winter found it empty still.

  There came a small boy to those windows one evening in January. Passers-by were shocked to see that the child—who didn’t appear to be more than a toddler really—was naked, his pearl-white skin exposed to the cold wind coming in off the beach. As the boy swiped at the dust on the windows and pressed his face to the glass, they saw that his fingers were webbed and the back of his hand was covered with thin, opalescent scales. A couple approached him, the man removing his coat and making as if to wrap the child up in it. The poor infant must be freezing! They couldn’t imagine who could have possibly abandoned such a small child. As the boy retreated, the couple noted that his back was malformed, his vertebrae protruding in a series of ichthyoidal ridges. His skin shimmered in the streetlights with the rainbow slick of oil on water, the faceted twinkling of scales. They thought it some rare skin disorder.

  “We won’t hurt you,” coaxed the woman, while the man spread his coat like a net.

  The boy showed them his teeth, row on row, gleaming white, folding out like the teeth of a shark. The couple was taken aback. As they hesitated, the boy shot between them and ran for the beach.

  “We can’t just leave him,” said the woman, horrified at the child’s deformities, but determined to be a model citizen nonetheless.

  The man gave chase.

  Just before the boy plunged into the sea, his path inexplicably littered with crabs and sea urchins, fairy shrimp and starfish and sand dollars, the man saw one final deformity. He stood there, breathing hard from the chase, the sea washing over the toes of his loafers. The waves were rough that day, curling and breaking in white turmoil, tossing spray into the wind. There was no sign of the boy, though the man could have sworn he heard laughter mingle with the cries of the gulls.

  His wife caught up with him. She grabbed him by the arm and shook him. “What are you doing? Where’s the boy? Why didn’t you go in after him?”

  The man shook his head, not knowing what to say.

  “What? What is it?” she demanded.

  “Just before he dove into the sea...” the man stammered.


  “What?” she repeated, her voice shrill.

  He placed his hands on either side of his neck and flapped them like the wings of a bird... or—

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No,” said the man, though he didn’t sound at all certain. “Gills. I saw them flap. I swear he had gills in the sides of his neck.”

  They stood there, knowing if they reported the incident they’d be labeled crazy, while crabs scuttled past their feet and back into the sea.

  Beneath the waves, Poseidon’s son rejoined his friends. They’d told him not to go, that there was nothing to see, but he had to be certain. It would be years yet before he was ready to venture out among his mother’s people again, years before he was ready to change the world.

  Wind and Sea and Time

  * * *

  Reykjavík’s docks glistened with salt spray in the pale wash of distant street lights, the boats reeking of fish and tar, creaking and slapping against the sluggish waves. Dawn was still an hour or more away. There was no moon. Only distant stars painted the turbulent North Atlantic, most of its surface shrouded in fog that stubbornly stood its ground against the wind sweeping down off the Icelandic steppes.

  Olí Jörmundur waited, knowing if he heard anything, anything at all, that it wouldn’t be much... the quiet crunch of gravel against the floorboards, the clink of a weapon, the hoarse breathing of men in the mist... and a moment later it would loom out of the fog: the head of a monstrous dragon or raptor.

  The wind pushed at his back, urging him to the very end of a pier.

  “Don’t go, Olí,” his sister had said, catching him as he went out the door.

  “I must,” he’d replied; then he’d squeezed her arm so tight she’d cried out. “Whatever you do, Tristan, don’t leave the house before dawn. Don’t follow me. Do you hear me?”

  “Do you think me a fool?”

  “I think you feel it every bit as much as I do. I think the wind whispers your name, too. I think you’ve shared my dreams.” He felt for her then, not just because she was his sister, but because she had been born a woman, and a woman’s place was, at best, to be remembered as Gudrid, wife to Thorfinn Karlsefni, was remembered: as a stalwart supporter of her husband, mother to his sons, vigorous and independent, yes, but not entitled to the glory and honor that was a man’s birthright. Not one to go a-viking.

  “Olí—”

  “Enough!” he’d told her harshly. “I go. Stay inside. These are men who would make short use of you.” And he’d shoved her back inside and pulled the door closed. The wind had quickly ushered him down the steep streets to the bay.

  Now he waited.

  Tristan didn’t understand how he could leave. With the wind at his back—wind that had carried his Scandinavian ancestors out from Norway centuries ago, soon as the first woolen sail had been invented—he couldn’t imagine standing here and not wanting to go. It sang in every fiber of his being. How it must have roared through the veins of those who’d stood beneath the fjords in Norway, with the waves crashing at their feet! The two, wind and sea, called to him now. He could hear them coming for him, could smell their sweat and the acrid crust of old brine in their beards and braids.

  The Norsemen were coming!

  The Viking ship loomed in the fog, its dragon-headed prow riding high above the water line. She was as narrow as a blade. She wriggled in the water like an eel, flexing at the bow with every wave, recoiling at the stern. Having seen the ships dug up at Skuldelev on display in the Viking Museum in Roskilde, Olí was familiar with her construction. She was made of overlapping oak planks, no thicker than a finger, bound with iron rivets. A modern yacht is stiff and will bang against the waves, but a Viking ship glides effortlessly through the waves because the energy of the waves is absorbed by her structure. She was silent and graceful and lean. She could do ten knots under her woolen sail—more with her crew at oars. With her shallow draft, she could invade any beach. And she was light enough to be hauled overland once her ballast of stone gravel was removed.

  Olí ripped away his shirt to reveal his tattoos, the unique symbols of his clan down one arm, the colorful mosaic of Sigurd slaying the dragon at Hindfell wrapped round the other. A fine mist of sweat and sea sparkled on his muscular young chest. He spread his arms in empty-fisted greeting as oars dipped to the dark surface of the bay and the ship slowed to a halt just a few feet from the pier.

  “Countrymen, I am Olí Jörmundur,” he called out in the old Germanic Norse he had studied. “I have dreamed of your coming. I have waited for you all my life!”

  The man who rose in the bow of the ship was built like a rock. His sheepskins were matted and stained. The shield on his left arm was scarred, its edges cleft by the bite of many a blade. The double-headed axe in his right fist was black with pitch, save the glimmering crescent of its honed edge. His eyes were cold and blue, unblinking. “You’ve come to negotiate danegeld, then?”

  Olí shook his head at the mention of protection money. “No kinsmen. I’ve come to go away with you.”

  The Norseman laughed. “Stand aside, boy.”

  “You’ve no need of hands then?” asked Olí, holding his ground.

  “We’ve need of men,” replied the Viking. “Look at your arms. You couldn’t swing this.” He gestured with the axe, and cords of muscle stood out on his forearm like writhing snakes.

  “I’m stronger than I look,” Olí protested.

  The Viking bared his teeth. “Strong enough to stand there and die, lad?”

  “But you can’t raid here. This is your homeland. You don’t understand what’s happening. Look around you. You’re home. But does this look like the Reykjavík you left? Yes, the landmarks are the same—you can’t help but recognize the bay—but is it your Reykjavík?”

  “Are you daft, boy? We can see it’s not Reykjavík. Only a fool would...” His words died as he actually got his first glimpse of the city through the lifting fog. The shield and the axe dropped at his side. His foot, which had rested on the railing of the vessel, slipped back into the boat. “By all the gods,” he muttered, “what sorcery is this?”

  “No sorcery,” said Olí. “You’ve been at sea a long time.”

  “Not this long we haven’t. As sure as I know my name to be Jørn Olesen, I know Reykjavík could not have come to this in my absence. I’ve sailed further than any man I know, broken bread with the Greenlanders at L’anse aux Meadows, fought skraelings in the New World, and lived to hear my own legends sung by the skalds at court, but this...” For a moment, Jørn Olesen was a beaten man, but then, a few seconds later, he drew himself up, took a firmer grip on his axe, and stepped back to the rail of the boat.

  “I’ll see the Godar at Thingvellir about this!”

  Olí shook his head sadly. The ancient democracy of 39 chiefs under which Iceland had ruled itself had died out a long time ago. “There is no Godar, Cousin. No Althing. Thingvellir is a barren breach in the steppes where men like me mourn what was... and long for an opportunity like this one. I’m as out of place as you will be here. There’s been no place for your kind for a thousand years. Set one foot on that pier and you’ll never be able to find your way back. You’ll be trapped here, in this evil time and place... and I assure you that it will kill you.

  “I tell you all this for nothing and ask only that you take me with you.”

  Jørn Olesen stared at the city as the rising sun peeled back the fog. Anxious, bearded faces crowded the railing behind him. In their eyes, Olí saw that they believed him. In their eyes, he saw fear. The end of all that they were lay before them.

  “You dreamed of our coming?” asked the Viking.

  “Yes. For years I’ve dreamed it. My sister says it’s my wishing that’s brought you here.”

  “And you want to become as we are?” Jørn Olesen slapped his shield with his axe. “You want to be a son of Thor?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you think you know us?”

  “I have studied you all m
y life.”

  The Viking threw back his head and roared with laughter. “You don’t know us at all, Jörmundur. If you did, you would know we don’t believe in good and evil. We believe in honor and valor, in a glorious death by combat that will show us the path to Valhalla.”

  And with that, Jørn Olesen made the leap from boat to pier.

  Wrinkles at Twilight

  * * *

  And the fox said to the little prince: men have forgotten this truth, but you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.

  –Antoine de Saint-Exupery,

  The Little Prince

  Though Darcy hated being so far from Einstein’s tank, she agreed to have sex with Bogart in the shark and coral reef exhibit. It was one of the few buildings Bogart hadn’t seen, and he’d said early on that he planned to fuck her in every building at Sea World.

  The exhibit’s underwater observation tunnel was a disgusting place, surrounded by water that had gone murky and thick, haunted with moldy shapes that had once been giant predators and magnificent rays but were now nothing more than indiscernible blurs drifting with the torpid currents. Darcy was thankful that the smell of the cadaverous soup didn’t reach them in the tube that bisected the reef. Still, she could imagine it rising fetid and hot above the exhibit, climbing San Antonio’s sweltering heat to clot like blood in the clouds of stench hanging over the city’s dead and dying.

  It was a disgusting place, but she was doing a more disgusting thing, spreading her legs for Bogart so that he’d keep bringing food for her and fresh fish for Einstein. Every week, Bogart’s semi would roll across the shattered tiles of the plaza and up to the gates. He’d sound the truck’s horn, and she’d come out and pretend she’d been longing for him, that she couldn’t wait to see him.

  “Were you worried about me?” he’d ask. She’d answer, honestly enough, that she’d been terrified he might not come back this time. What she feared, of course, was that he might not bring Einstein’s fish up from Corpus Christi. Without him, the dolphin would die.