by Weston Ochse
"Ah, well...that's nice to."
"In fact," she said, and reached into her back pocket. "If Rosie's ever in trouble or you notice something odd about her behavior, it'd probably be best to call me directly instead of whatever number my bosses gave you."
With that, Gloria asked Phil if he had a pen. He said he didn't and she pointed to the side of his head: "A pencil would be okay, too."
Phil removed the pencil from behind his ear, somewhere he'd been keeping one for close to two decades. He gave her an awkward 'silly me' chuckle and she wrote her cell number on the paper backing of a promotional Ocean World sticker.
"What do you mean by 'something odd about her behavior'?" Phil asked, suddenly concerned that he was missing something crucial as he watched the shark. Was it possible for Rosie to die if he was not paying close enough attention to her?
Gloria smiled and stood on her tip toes to get quiet enough that Phil's staff couldn't hear. It was a nice gesture but their closeness probably looked worse than anything she was going to say.
"It was just an excuse to pass you my number, dummy," she whispered in his ear.
***
This week, the second of Rosie's three week residency, Phil had been staying at work later and later.
There wasn't much going on at home. The movers were there during the day. Most nights Phil would come home and be surprised to find Mary had made a claim on another piece of furniture. The living room no longer had any couches or chairs and the only thing left in the kitchen was the water bubbler that she'd always hated ("It makes our home look like an office breakroom!").
So he'd find reasons to be the last one out of the warehouse's door at night. To fill time he'd respond to emails that at any other point in his career he would have let languish in his inbox. Many of them were requests for work that read like fan letters, written by independent filmmakers who were making movies on consumer camcorders in Tacoma.
Sorry, Jimmy, and good luck with your film, but VCX currently has its schedule filled through the next three years. Keep fighting the good fight! —Phil Court
When even the tertiary-ily productive tasks were done for the day, Phil would walk from his suspended-crow's nest of an office down to the warehouse floor. Once there, he would spend an hour or so watching Rosie swim circles in her tank.
The path she took through the water—he'd tracked it as exactly five circles clockwise and then five counter clockwise—hadn't changed, but there was something about her demeanor that struck Phil as sluggish.
It could have been that he was reaching for a reason not to go home, but what else was he going to do with his time? He scoured his office for spare change and used the company vending machine to buy a selection of snacks.
Apparently Cheetos held no appeal for Rosie. The cheese puffs weren't able to reach the bottom of the tank until the cornstarch dissolved and made a portion of Rosie's water cloudy.
He considered tossing a few peanut M&Ms over the lip of the tank, but he guessed there was no way Rosie would be interested in chocolate. Especially chocolate with a candy shell blocking it from (what Wikipedia purported to be) her acute sense of smell. And chocolate was poisonous to dogs. What would it do to a great hammerhead shark?
Phil could have sworn that the vending guy used to stock the machine with beef jerky, that would have been a much better fit for Rosie's carnivorous palate. But alas...it must not have sold well among the staff.
"Sorry girl, that's all I've got," he said into the blue. In the quiet of the empty warehouse he could hear the water sloshing against the side of the tank, occasionally Rosie would get high enough in one of her circles that her dorsal fin would crest over the waterline.
Rosie didn't respond to his voice in any way, but she did keep one eye on him, as she did for every lap.
He wondered how she saw the world. There was the barest sliver of white on the outside of her black, black eyes. And with her eyes so far from each other, one on each side of her oblong face, it was amazing she could see anything in front of her to eat it.
He'd like to see the world like that, sometime.
Split in two. That's how he imagined it, a different world for each side of her face.
Taking the Ocean World sticker out of his back pocket, Phil noticed Gloria's pencil marks were beginning to fade. Another day in his pocket and they'd be completely illegible.
It was just an excuse to pass you my number, dummy.
He punched the number into his cell but just to save it into his contacts.
He didn't call Gloria, not that night.
***
"Isn't she beautiful?" Gloria said, the earnestness in her voice almost too pure not to be the result of the two bottles of wine they'd shared at the restaurant.
She was beautiful. They both were. Although their beauty was nothing alike. Gloria was young and happy, the kind of beauty that Phil mentally associated with summer. Gloria was sunshine cutting through the jeweled amber of a glass of unsweetened ice tea.
Rosie, though. Rosie's beauty was strong and sleek. Although she was grey with a white belly, she reminded him of a sable horse in full gallop, running at night. In captivity, hers was the beauty of a melancholy poem. She was blue from the reflected light of her tank but also the other kind of blue. The blue of sadness.
Phil didn't say anything like that, though. Nothing as faux poetic. He just said: "She sure is."
It was hard to tell if he was slurring or not. He certainly wouldn't have been able to drive them back from the restaurant. So they left his car and her van parked and had taken an Uber home.
At least he thought he had requested the Uber take them home, but he must have mistakenly put in the address for the VCX warehouse, because that's where their driver, a Ukrainian named Fedir, had dropped them off. And he hadn't seemed happy about it either.
"Here? You sure?" Fedir asked, rolling down his window to look around the empty industrial park.
"Yup. Here's good," Gloria said. "I've got to make sure that this guy's hammerhead is healthy." She hooked a thumb at Phil and they both laughed hysterically at the double-entendre. The driver did not.
They'd poured themselves out of the back doors of the Uber, found each other for support once the driver pulled away, and made their way into the warehouse with considerably less difficulty than Phil had some mornings when he was stone sober.
"So beautiful," Phil said, coming up behind Gloria and snaking his hands around her waist. He immediately regretted initiating contact this way. She'd brushed his hand a few times during dinner and they'd shared a chaste, friendly hug outside the restaurant, but hugging her from behind felt far too intimate, it was the way you saw teenagers spoon while waiting in line for the movies.
Gloria didn't seem to pull away, but she did stiffen against his touch.
"Not where she can watch us," she said. It was hard to tell if she was kidding.
Phil sniffed her neck, then turned to look at the warehouse. He walked away, leaving Gloria with both hands pressed against Rosie's tank. Her young face was splashed with blue.
When they'd come in, he'd only hit one switch for the warehouse's rows of overhead lights. The single switched caused a third of the high-up florescent bulbs to ignite.
It was good mood lighting but the gloom didn't do much to help him choose a worktable where he and Gloria could bed down.
Did he clear off the table with the foam rubber shark attack victim or the one with the animatronic chickens VCX was making for a fast food commercial?
"I just can't get over it," Gloria said, still fixated on the shark, not at the sexual encounter Phil was hoping was in the near future.
While she had her attention elsewhere he palmed the Cialis he'd stashed in his jacket pocket. What had seemed like wishful thinking earlier in the night may have just turned into a life saver.
"Can't get over what?" Phil asked, beginning to move the wire skeletons of the chickens off the table but keeping the layer of downy feathers that had b
een spread atop the workstation.
"How good Rosie has been to us. When we've been nothing but shitty to her."
Okay. That came out odder than most drunk talk Phil was used to hearing.
"How so?" he asked, satisfied with how the table had been cleared and moving back to where Gloria was watching the shark.
"We catch her, we put her in a cage that's a million times smaller than what she needs. And still, she survives. She not only survives, she..."
Her words trailed off and Phil began to look around for a bucket. She's going to puke. It had become apparent that this night would not end the way he wanted.
Gloria didn't puke. Instead she began to make a high, keening noise through clenched teeth.
Phil laughed, at first thinking the noise was some kind of Ocean World inside joke, a dolphin call that trainers used.
But then, with both hands planted firmly against the synthetic glass of the tank, Gloria reeled her head back and smashed her nose into the side of Rosie's enclosure.
"What are you doing?" Phil yelled, still a few drunken steps away from being able to stop her from lowering her face into the unbreakable Plexiglas a second time.
There was a crack that coincided with the second impact and Gloria began to speak again.
"I just want her to know!" She yelled into the side of the tank. As she spoke Phil could see dark spittle hit the side of the tank. Backlit black against the blue, he could see that there were flecks of broken teeth mixed in with the blood.
"I want to be a part of her!"
Phil tried grabbing Gloria's arms and pressing them flat against her side, but she fought, elbowing him in the stomach and knocking the wind from his lungs. How did she get so strong? Was this a seizure?
Had Gloria been hiding some kind of mental illness from him? Well, not hiding, that wasn't something you probably got into on the first date.
Free from his grip, Gloria dove down to the nearest work table and came back with something metallic, it was hard to see in the darkness.
"Stop it!" Phil said to her, but he could see from the look in her eyes that she was somewhere beyond his words.
She doubled back to where he was crouched and he could see her face more clearly.
Her nose, which moments ago had been perfectly symmetrical, was now favoring the left side, split at the end in a mess of blood. Her front teeth were gone.
She smiled a broken smile and he put his hands up. In that moment he was sure she was going to attack him with what he could see now were fabric sheers, large scissors that the artists used to cut the excess latex or "flash" off of molds.
But she ignored Phil. She was returning to the tank to get access to the ladder.
Her feet were two rungs up before Phil realized he had to stop her, that whatever psychotic break she'd had involved offering herself up to Rosie. Like a native-girl virgin being pitched into a volcano.
"No," he screamed out, reaching the base of the ladder at the same time Gloria was reaching the top. She had her hands over the tank, pinky and ring finger of her right hand wedged between the blades of the fabric sheers.
"Take of me," she said, her voice a whisper but perfectly clear in the dark of the warehouse.
With no better plan, Phil grabbed both sides of the ladder and pulled the whole thing away from the tank. The idea was to send Gloria over his head and onto the feathered worktable, where she would land safely and he could hopefully disarm her before she could do any more damage to herself.
But Phil had seen too many Buster Keaton movies. That shit never works in real life.
Gloria missed the table by a good four feet, missed it with everything except for her head.
Her head caught the corner of the workspace with a wet smack and sent a cloud of feathers flying into the air.
"Gloria?" Phil asked into the darkness. There was no response. The only sounds in his ears were the rush of his own blood and the gentle slosh of the water in Rosie's tank.
Pushing the ladder off of himself, he turned onto his belly and looked up. Gloria had managed to kick off one shoe, a tasteful but not too dressy pump, and her knees were splayed in an unladylike fashion.
She'd managed to sever both fingers before he could stop her, but that was the least of her problems. Her neck could have been used as a t-square, it was so nearly at a right angle.
"Jesus," Phil said, even though he wasn't religious.
***
It had seemed like such a good idea once he'd committed to the decision to start.
It was his only option, really, since they'd both left their cars downtown and he wasn't going to call Fedir back to see if his new Ukrainian friend would help him dispose of a body.
Cutting Gloria apart hadn't been difficult. No, it was disturbingly easy once he found the right tool for the job (the electric Sawzall the artists used to cut fiberglass), but it made such a mess.
Such a mess that he'd be unable to clean up in time. The first of his employees would be arriving to work in a matter of hours. He doubted he had enough time or up-to-date contact information to call and tell them they had a day off.
But they'd come looking for him anyway. Surely Gloria told someone where she was going? And he'd gone too far now to tell the truth about how it was an accident.
Take of me.
He'd searched, but he couldn't find the fingers anywhere. She must have cut them off over the tank and Rosie had taken care of them.
It's what she wanted, anyway. She made that pretty clear.
It was insane, but Phil returned the ladder to its upright position, grabbed a length of Gloria's forearm, and climbed to look over the edge, stopping at the second to last rung.
His fingers were thick with blood and it had begun to cool and go sticky already, in the thirty or forty minutes since Gloria's death.
From this vantage, Rosie was a black shadow in the pool.
She didn't act any different as the droplets of blood fell from Phil's hand onto the surface of the carefully-monitored salt water.
Rosie's swimming did not deviate from her normal circles, but Phil did catch a flash of white at the edge of one of her eyes.
I know you're watching, girl, he thought and let the piece of flesh and bone drop into the water.
Nothing. It were as if he'd dropped in a Cheeto. Rosie didn't touch the half-foot square of Gloria meat, not even a test bite. She barely seemed to notice the cloud of blood that got into her path.
As the arm sank, it bumped Rosie on the nose, but the shark just glided onward.
"It's too cold." Phil said, not thinking but knowing.
Having their workshop located in California was an absolute must, that's where the industry is, but it also meant that their rent and air conditioning bills were astronomical. Phil could try turning the air down, but he'd only manage to leave more physical evidence in the process. Forget fingerprints: he was practically dripping with Gloria's bodily fluids.
Standing at the top of the tank, he watched Rosie swim, spotting the slight movement of her eyes and understanding that she was watching him as well.
Somehow he'd gotten to the top step of the ladder, the one that had "No Standing" pressed into the plastic.
He looked back down at the VCX warehouse, at all the pretend atrocities he'd helped create. And the one real one.
"I'm warm," he said to himself and to Rosie.
Phil Court understood what those black eyes were asking and he jumped in.
The Appetite of Old Simba
Dyer Wilk
They sailed the acid sea from San Francisco to Maro Reef, a garbage-stench wind blowing across their bow.
Aaron stood on deck, letting it all soak in as he watched the men work the nets and listened to the sounds of the water. It had been like this for nearly two weeks now, living as a bystander in a world he didn’t belong to, standing aside as men sweated and cursed and told jokes he only half-understood, understanding that he would have to pick the right moment to ask questions.
>
The article was half-finished, or maybe it was complete shit and he’d scrap most of it. He couldn’t be sure yet. He’d started it nearly six months ago, writing on other ships like this one, crewed by more men who sweated and cursed and told jokes he only half-understood, captained by Americans and Canadians and Japanese, all with the same leathery years-in-the-sun complexion and a propensity for silence.
Later was Captain Markovic’s favorite word. It explained things quickly without actually explaining them, implying that after days of asking questions Aaron would still have to wait for an interview, one that would be brief at best. The agreement had been very specific: Aaron could stay aboard and write about whatever he wanted as long as it didn’t interfere with the fishing, and the fishing always came first.
He hadn’t actually seen many fish though. In two weeks, the nets had caught mostly trash, which the men angrily tossed over the side. Aaron recognized much of it. Sneakers and toothbrushes and ancient cellphone cases, plastic bags and soda bottles. Every corner of the Pacific was filled with it, innumerable pieces of man-made crap swimming on currents that had once held marine life.
“We’ve had worse years than this,” one of the men told him a week after he boarded. “Once went a whole year without catching anything. Not even jellies.”
The hauls on the other ships hadn’t been much different. He’d seen islands of garbage caught in the swirling gyre, some larger than the ships themselves, serving host to gray-backed terns and sea lions. The men told stories of seeing trash islands the size of aircraft carriers, dotted with makeshift houses that sheltered small communities of sun-crazed squatters, content to go wherever the sea took them, drinking water purified by solar-powered stills and shooting albatross from the sky with crossbows to cook in fires fueled by driftwood. Aaron was skeptical of course. He’d heard his share of tall tales. But then, it was tall tales that had brought him here in the first place.
It had been accepted long ago that the seas were mostly dead and devoid of fish. But it was the other things, the things not easily explained, that made men like him leave dry land. It was the stories of the odd and unbelievable shapes beneath the waves, lying in wait for unsuspecting ships to pass.