He threw away his surf rod and began slogging toward the shallows, but the fifty pounds of water in his waders held him back, making him easy pickings for the churning fish. Before he had gained ten yards toward shore, he passed out and fell under the water. The blues shredded him from neck to waist, and then burrowed into the waders to rip off flesh down to his knees. The tidal rip pushed his remains into deeper water. His sealed tackle bag and shreds of his waders washed onto shore.
“Talk to me, Frank.”
His voice crackled on the ship-to-shore phone. “It’s weird. We’re painting big schools of fish, blues and stripers. The stripers took both jigs and fish bait, but we couldn’t get a blue hooked up. Not until we switched to Porky Pig. The blues hammered the meat baits. We’ve got forty of them at least, and need to get them back on shore before they go bad. Why pork?”
“Because it’s the closest to how we taste. Have you got a live well?”
“Yes.”
“Before you come back, put one or two blues into the well and try to keep them alive until I can get my hands on them.”
“It’s your money. Sure.”
Laura spent the next three days farming out data research, and dissecting and running tests on dead bluefish. Her live blues shunned baitfish, but bit each other trying to get at morsels of beef or pork. She scheduled a teleconference for the fourth day.
God help me, she thought, for what I’m about to recommend.
After clipping on a microphone, Laura began. “Please hold your questions until after I’ve briefed you. I gather from the data that the beach closures have almost eliminated incidents to swimmers, but that we’ve had two dozen cases of shore fishermen who’ve been attacked or gone missing. We need to notify the public that shore fishing is also prohibited..”
Laura continued. “We’ve examined the stomach contents from one hundred thirty-five blues and found flesh from seals, humans, and in two separate instances a dog and a sea gull. But no fish. The blues have apparently changed their feeding habits, something corroborated by the fifty percent decline in the observed seal population, and the discovery of seal remains washed up at over twenty sites.
“In short, we’ve become a prey species for the blues, a danger that needs to be, if not eliminated, reduced to a manageable risk.
“We’ve already agreed to use Long Island Sound as the initial focus because of its contained nature. What I’m going to propose is related to the sound and not the open waters along the Atlantic coast.
“I . . . I’m reluctant to recommend these emergency first steps, but the alternatives would leave the blues in control of the sound. In order to reopen the beaches we need to greatly reduce the number of bluefish. This could be done in two steps. First, commence sustained commercial fishing targeting the bluefish. Use trotlines with thousands of hooks baited with mammalian byproducts. That would largely spare the striped bass.
“Second, use shallow-water commercial netting for immature bluefish, the snappers. The immature fish seem to still be targeting smaller baitfish, which would realistically have to be removed with the snappers. This should greatly reduce the number of adult bluefish next year.
“The health of marine life in the sound will be changed greatly for the worse, and changed in ways we can’t foresee yet, but we would hopefully have regained the sound for recreational use. The costs would be borne by commercial fishermen, supplemented by the federal government and the contiguous states of New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island in some equitable way, perhaps calculated on shoreline miles.
“While this is going on we can make plans to attack the bluefish menace along open seafronts. It’s mid-June. If we begin immediately we may be able to get back into the sound in late August.”
Laura had barely stopped when verbal bedlam erupted, replaced ten seconds later with an eerie silence.
A voice spoke through the speaker system. “This is Fred Malone. I’ve temporarily shut down your outgoing sound. The one thing we can’t do is nothing. We can argue deficiencies and consequences while we proceed. If you have better first steps than what Dr. Charpentier has proposed, send me an email right now. We’ll take a day to winnow through suggestions and if there’s not a better one then we’re going to proceed with her plan. I will now accept your oral comments on why her proposals are impossible to implement.”
The eerie silence resumed. What Laura had proposed was environmentally brutal but relatively easy to perform. The teleconference concluded an hour later. Taiwanese and Chinese commercial fishing ships already illegally netting in the Atlantic were granted permission to operate in the sound to target bluefish. Over the next few weeks, thirty-seven tons of fish were taken out of the sound.
On July 19, fishing operations were expanded to include the entire Atlantic seaboard, and on August 13, Long Island Sound was declared open for swimming and water sports.
Larry Westcott was one of the first to call and congratulate Laura. “I still think what we did was ecologically dangerous, Laura, but I can’t argue with its results. Incidentally, you did a great job selling the gutting of the bluefish population on Good Morning Americans.”
“It was a bad choice, Larry, but we didn’t have any better ones. Are your Connecticut beachgoers getting back into the water?”
“Slowly. We’ve got a week of hot weather forecast and I expect to see many more folks in up to their necks.”
Laura hesitated. “I wonder if God knew what he was doing when he gave us dominion over the animals.”
The third day of hot weather brought thousands to the beaches and into the water. And something else as well. From the deeper pockets and trenches of the sound, tens of thousands of snakelike, four-foot-long shapes rose up, schooled, and swam toward the shallows. The spiny dogfish, deprived of their usual food, were on the move.
Helen McDonald was the first victim. The raspy snouts bumped into her thighs, sniffing out that the fourteen-year-old was mammalian. The teeth, more widely spaced than a bluefish’s, sank into her legs. The dogfish then spun and twisted until chunks were torn off her body. She dragged herself by her arms halfway onto the shore but died there as the dogfish slithered through inches of water to continue eating her legs. Four hundred attacks followed hers.
Laura was frozen out of the task force, not being a shark expert, and being held somehow responsible for the new attacks. As she watched the news she worried that the sharks, having released themselves from bottom feeding on dark nights, would find a way to proliferate and survive. They wouldn’t easily relinquish their place in the sun. She pondered the domino effect that occurred when mankind intervened in life and tried to control nature. It usually took years to discover the impact. Now, it seemed, nature was tired of waiting. Tired of hoping humans would recognize their errors and set things right. First the bluefish. Now the dogfish. She had no doubt the government was forming new task forces designed to destroy this next problem.
And after that, what will follow?
Ed Ahern resumed writing after forty-odd years in foreign intelligence and international sales. He’s had a hundred forty stories and poems published so far. His collected fairy and folk tales, The Witch Made Me Do It, was published by Gypsy Shadow Press. His novella The Witches’ Bane was published by World Castle Publishing, and his collected fantasy and horror stories, Capricious Visions, was published by Gnome on Pig Press. Ed’s currently working on a paranormal/thriller novel tentatively titled The Rule of Chaos. He works the other side of writing at Bewildering Stories, where he sits on the review board and manages a posse of five review editors.
Rusalka
by
Neil Davidson
Look at the girl: Her feet don’t quite touch the ground. Earlier in the day a road crew with jackhammers dug away the cement underneath her. They left only the ravaged and grassless dirt. The patch of earth looks naked and strange even in the green cityscape of Portland, where, usually, the gray and green of plants and civilization are neatly segregated. But still
stranger is that the girl is afloat, and that only one man sees her. As she hovers, water drips from her, slowly making muddy splotches on the ground. The rest of the city is dry, and a man in a dark gray suit gawks across the street. This is impossible, he thinks, but no one else notices.
Her head hangs back as though she had been knocked unconscious by some accident or, in a certain light, it could almost seem as if she were being held aloft by some hook caught in her mouth, but there is no indication of this other than her mouth being slightly agape.
A middle-aged woman with a bag of groceries in one arm and a tight grip on the hand of her child passes the man, bumping against him. He doesn’t notice.
The floating woman is young, and looks barely old enough to drive. Her features are soft, except for her nose, which, though rather sharp, has a jagged crook to it in the center of the bridge. Her red hair hangs heavy, clumped together in bunches like seaweed just pulled from the tide. She wears a black dress, so thin that it seems to melt from her tired, emaciated body.
The man approaches her, walking as in a trance, and she stirs for the first time. Her head rises up to gaze at him. Her eyes look as though they can’t decide whether to be green or blue, and still she drips onto the naked earth below. Under her sharply defined jawbone, a bruise stretches across the front of her neck. When she moves her head up, he can see the subtle shifting of free-floating cartilage where her larynx collapsed as she hung from the rafters of her home far from this city, but he doesn’t know this. He sees the shifting fragments of throat as only a strange trick of the light, giving rise to the vague sense that she might be able to turn her head in any direction, that she can always see him.
“Who are you?” he says slowly, not quite believing what he sees.
She rests a hand on his shoulder, and comes in to kiss his cheek.
“No,” he says, trying to step away. The suit underneath her hand soaks through. “Who—? I don’t know you.”
Her grip hardens on his shoulders, until he fears she could break his bones with her hands. Her kiss, however, is gentle, and he finds himself leaning into it though he could not explain why. Her miraculous appearance feels suddenly inevitable. How else could this day have happened? An angel has come to me, he thinks without question. A gift from God.
“You remind me of a man I knew back home,” she says. The words have only the slightest trace of a lilting accent, a gentle push given to each word that gives a rhythm just shy of normal. “I will have to come and see you again.” She kisses him once more, and stares at him, admiringly. “Yes. I’ll have to come back for you.”
He cowers, obediently, beneath her, coming up only to her breast despite her being a great deal shorter than he, and then, in an instant, she is gone. The ground between the two slabs of sidewalk is soaked and muddy. He steps out of the mud with a loud squelch and almost loses the shoe, but doesn’t notice. How bizarre a sight this must be for anyone standing witness among the daily May lunch rush.
The man, Matthew Bunin, returns home from a long day at the law firm. It is just after seven. The girl’s appearance earlier that afternoon, though, lies somehow dormant, clouding the back recesses of his mind. His wife, Lena, sits in the kitchen, holding a cup of coffee and already wearing the sea-foam green scrubs of the downtown hospital where she works the graveyard shift.
She looks incredible, one leg crossed over the other as though mimicking relaxation. Her posture hides a latent energy. She sits perched on the edge of the chair as if ready to throw the cup across the room and sprint in any direction. There’s something particularly beautiful about that starched cloth; something about her always seems more alive with the promise of an emergency. The green knows this, can sense it, and responds accordingly whenever she wears it. Other pastels lack the same vitality.
The light of the setting sun drapes the counter in a warm orange.
“Morning,” Lena says. “How did the day go?”
Matthew doesn’t answer. Instead he circles the room in a wobbling ellipsis, feeling there is something important he has forgotten. His eyes wander, but nothing here reminds him of the girl.
“Losing it already?” she says. “A little young for dementia, aren’t you?”
Matthew laughs. “Yeah. A bit.” But still the sense something is missing lingers—an empty place that should be filled at the table, a noise or smell he can’t quite place. Lena takes two plates out of the cupboard and serves herself amid a sudden cloud of steam from the pot on the stovetop. Matthew, no longer circling, examines a blank space on the wall below the cupboard and next to the switch for the garbage disposal.
“Seriously?” Each syllable is enunciated with crisp aggression. “Matthew, honey, can you sit with me before I have to go to work?” Her eyebrows rise, as though the answer should be obvious.
“Of course,” he says. “I didn’t realize it was so late.”
“Seven o’clock happens at the same time every night,” Lena says, but continues in a softer voice: “Sorry. It must have been a rough day at the office?”
He knows he should say something, but he sits there, staring into his plate of stir-fry as it loses heat. It really hadn’t been that bad. Just another day.
He is a divorce lawyer in the financial district of downtown Portland, but their firm also has corporate accounts. He rarely sees a client in something other than a three-piece because of this, despite not working directly for the companies. His caseload, though, has been piling up lately.
“All right. Good talk, Matt,” she says, putting her mug and empty plate in the sink. “I’m really glad we had such a meaningful connection tonight. It feels like it’s a turning point.” She gives a quick shake of her head and leaves. The front door slams a second later.
They’ve been married for just under seven years, and dated for several years before that. They met when he lived in the Bay Area as a law student. Mostly, he’s happy.
In the morning, he goes downstairs to make coffee. The hardwood floor is cold under his bare feet. He grinds the coffee beans, dumping them onto the filter paper, and pours the water in the coffeemaker, mindlessly lulled into the rhythm by muscle memory. He starts the machine and it begins to percolate with a happy gurgle, full-throated and hearty, like the sound of someone laughing despite their lungs being filled with liquid. A bizarre way to listen to the brewing coffee, to be sure, but it seems, in that moment, stranger that he had never heard it before, like there was something in the laughing burble that had always been waiting for him to discover it.
He pours, and takes a bitter sip. It had been years since he’d last gone without at least one cup, though he rarely enjoys the almost-ritual. The silence is what most appeals to him, but even this pleasure is born of loneliness. It’s the same delight one would get from pressing against a bruise.
At some point, Lena must have noticed his growing detachment and volunteered to work graveyard shifts, despite that they hadn’t needed the money in years. Matthew never mustered the courage to suggest she quit, though he anticipated she would once he got established at a good firm. Wasn’t that the way things went?
He wants to tell Lena that this wasn’t his idea. None of it: being a lawyer, their empty, clockwork life, even the modest home in a nice neighborhood. This is what they’re supposed to be happy with, and he can’t see why that isn’t enough for her. What more did most people get?
He refills the cup and walks outside. The cement under his bare feet bites softly into his soles. Their little house sits at the top of a hill near the edge of downtown Portland. He crests the summit only to be dwarfed by another, larger hill to the left. He picks his way to a bridge stretching over the I-5, just as he has every day since they moved into the house a year ago. The bridge railing is enshrouded by a chain-link fence, seven or eight feet high that curls back on itself to prevent jumpers from climbing over it. Every few feet there are signs advertising suicide hotlines. Matthew shivers, but doesn’t particularly mind the cold.
As far as the
eye can see, the world is gray. The clouds are hanging low over the city, but benign—content to only block out the sun, where on another day they would shower. The buildings, which seem so colorful up close, covered as they are in murals and the occasional bit of graffiti, are just steel and concrete from this distance. Pretty, sure, but with a sort of endearing dirtiness to them, as though they used to shine but calmed down once they came to Portland.
He walks back to his house and goes upstairs. The second story is nothing more than a master bedroom, neatly furnished, and a door by their bed that leads to a little uncovered ledge with an iron railing patterned after some kind of vine, rising to Matthew’s hip. The balcony, they called it, though it can barely fit Matthew and Lena at the same time. He walks to the balcony, and she is there below him.
“Kolya,” she says. The daze of the previous afternoon lifts, and he remembers. He can’t tell whether her feet are touching the ground. She laughs. “I knew I’d find you again, my little Nikolai. I made a promise, didn’t I?”
“The other day,” he says. “I saw—”
“Yes,” she says. “You saw me. Why don’t you come down? Come to me before Lena comes home. We have so little time.”
It doesn’t strike him as strange that she knows both Lena’s name and schedule. Of course she would. This angel sees the entirety of him with those blue eyes, so bright that they seem to glow in the morning sun. A slight wind rustles against her limp black dress, and she smiles at him.
Before he realizes what he is doing, he sprints downstairs, feet slamming with each step. The clamor echoes through their narrow halls. Along her back and shoulders are the thin, crisscrossed lines of white and red, scars alongside welts that seem as fresh as the day they were struck. Matthew fumbles with the latch to the sliding glass door, wishing he could caress the wounds from her back, and looks up as the door opens. She looks back boldly before breaking eye contact, suddenly demure, with an embarrassed laugh. It is the gesture of another era, and Matthew feels a century older.
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