SWELL

by Corwin Ericson

  This was a slow sure thought I’d had, and I’d barely noticed passing through the granite forearms of Bismuth’s breakwater. I dropped our speed and steered us slowly to Angie’s mooring. After I’d caught the float and tied us up, I went below and knocked on Angie’s cabin door.

  “Orange?”

  I said ayup as if I’d had to think about it, for the sake of comedy. I was actually starting to feel gloomy with our return to the full-scale ongoingness of island life.

  “Look at the phone,” Angie said from within her room.

  It was hanging by its leash from the doorknob. I picked it up; it stuck briefly to the doorknob—Odin’s Bodkin was magnetic. It was still heavy. It was a scale from a robotic dragon, a boreal gris-gris.

  “Don’t just stand there staring, open it!” she yelled.

  A new photo had replaced Snorri’s mug. It was Angie; it was all of Angie, washed out by the overbright strobe and weirdly foreshortened from holding the camera at arm’s length, and she was a sea nymph who could chase whales right out of my brain with a flutter of her eyelashes. I knocked again.

  “Come in,” she sang.

  Fin