Free The Glass Ocean by Lori Baker

Linus Starling, as he emerges from below deck for the first time in weeks, pale as a moth, as a mushroom, as the belly of a toad. Then, too, there is the monocle of John McIntyre, glinting ferociously in the light of that unrelenting sun, shooting sparks, divots of light.
    •   •   •
    For there are no ambiguities in the tropics. The sun shines mercilessly upon all; reveals all, mercilessly. It is a time of sharp contrasts, and sharp conflicts: of air and cloud and water against hull and sail, each battling the other, begrudging any progress; of pale skins turned painfully red, then gratefully brown; of stark, relentless blues and dense, dark, weighted shadows—for the shadows here, at the latitude 25 degrees north, possess the solidity, the authority, of objects. In a strange equatorial inversion, the occupants of the
Narcissus
find themselves rendered blind by an opulence of light, they fracture their vision on shadows each day as they pass from the burning brightness of outdoors into the ship’s unbearable, stifling, stinking darkness. Imagine them (as do I), traveling, dazzled and blinking, from shipside to workroom, workroom to shipside, laden with buckets full of that imperturbably smiling ocean, brimming with all she has yielded and will not miss, firm in pursuit of their science yet made fools of by sun and shade, stumbling against each other blindly, spilling water, tripping over coils of rope, staggering among the piglets that run wild upon the deck with the cook in hot pursuit, his cleaver’s flash as brilliant and as merciless as the sun.
    Merciless. Yes, that is the word. It is all brightly, gaily, grandly merciless.
    And my mother: the brightest, gayest, most merciless of all.
    •   •   •
    It’s her turn now.
    •   •   •
    Now, during the hot, brilliant days and warm, languid nights, my mother begins the series of concerts in her stateroom.
Like a little snail I shrink/Into my painted shell
, that is what she sings, beneath a midnight sky alight with stars, the entire Milky Way, or so it seems, whirling away above them into a space infinite, black, and dizzying, while the
Narcissus
plows its own Milky Way, equally luminous, in the dark, fetid ocean, a galaxy of living creatures that twirl and spark for an instant, then spiral away again into depthless obscurity.
    What a liar she is, my mother.
    Because she does not shrink, she blossoms. In the hothouse tropic atmosphere she darkens with the influence of the sun, and also lightens, golden hair falling softly over tanned brow, teeth like pearls against berry-dark lips, her blue eyes more luminous than ever. In the somnolence of those short nights, when all on board are drunk with the heat, when the ocean, slackened, and relaxed, as if the moon, turning away its face, has released all from its influence, my mother exudes an unmistakable life force all her own, a pull as powerful as the moon’s, and a perfume as intoxicating as any put forth by the orchids in Felix Girard’s collection.
    Wär’ ich so klein wie Schnecken,
indeed.
    They’re all there, at her concerts: the insufferable McIntyre, his mouth shut for once, Linus Starling, so pale and sinister, Hugh Blackstone, grudging but present, Harry Owen, calf eyed, my father, still in his suit that he will by no means shed, all there. The moon may have abandoned them, and the tides, but my mother holds them fast in her orbit on those still evenings, when their sighs, it seems, are the only breath upon the sails. A prefiguration in this of what is to come, but all in ignorance still, in their bliss, they are one and all in love with her: not just my father, but all. Though he most of all, sick with it, and sick with the hiding of it. He has been successful in this, the hiding, with everyone but her.
    He shrinks from what he loves. Attraction and repulsion. Fortunately he has hidden the things he really cares about, the things my too-perceptive mother must by no means