Free The Glass Ocean by Lori Baker Page B

with foam, and falls, writhing madly, onto the deck. From among the coils there resonates a fierce, hollow, chopping sound, like the fall of a mallet on a block.
    Small things scatter everywhere, shrimps, fishes, snails, angry squids, crabs clinging desperately to knots of bladder as the net twists and thrashes, contorts into a hundred wild figures, writing an alphabet from a dream.
    Oh, how my mother enjoys it! She shrieks with laughter, she is filled with delight. And she is the brave one, she the delicate, the golden haired, she with the shawl cascading like foam from around her shoulders bends forward, while Harry Owen and Leo Dell’oro draw back. Bends forward, and reaches down her hand.
    Don’t.
    This is Hugh Blackstone. His cool, severe observing eye has taken them in and judged them incompetent to cope.
    Fetch the oar.
    They, though, are paralyzed as at their feet the net turns upon itself in a last violent peristalsis, then disgorges: a great green eel, four or five feet long, jaws snapping, this is the sound they heard, the hollow chop of a mallet on a block.
    Fetch the oar.
    Still nobody can move but then at last my father does. He runs off up the deck, a glimmering, small figure, they see him struggle with the tarp on the smallboat, trying to lift it up to get at the oars. The eel, though, is quicker; it turns over once, a single sinuous contortion, slides over the side, falls back, there is hardly a splash, it is gone.
    In the silence that follows, Harry Owen begins to pick sadly at the remains of his net.
    My dear Dr. Owen, was it not magnificent?
    My mother is still laughing, flashing her brilliant feathers in the starlight.
    Blackstone turns the yellow glare of his bird-eye upon her.
    That, madam, could easily have removed your hand
.
    Then there is that cold, unpleasant smile. It is admirable, is it not, the cold severity of this Hugh Blackstone? I wonder is he imagining my mother’s hand in the eel’s jaws, and smiling at that? Those pale white fingers, the delicate, pink pearlescent nails. Otherwise, at what does he smile? It doesn’t matter, I suppose. My mother has her hand; and in a moment Hugh Blackstone will be back on the bridge, consulting his sextant as if nothing has happened.
    Now at last my father returns exultant with the oar. But my mother, spanked, seeks immediately to spank in turn.
    Mr. Dell’oro
, she cries,
it appears you are an oar short!
    The air comes out of him at that, humiliated he slackens visibly, the oar held triumphantly upright makes a quick descent toward the deck and in that same moment something else happens, there is a kind of shift, a beat skipped, it is as if the air has gone out of everything, yes, that is it exactly, the air goes out of everything, not just him but everything, in the sails, too, the breeze has died completely, all the bellying white folds fall slack, something somewhere breathing has died, and its breath will not resume.
    Hugh Blackstone, on the bridge, utters a soft oath.
    My mother, as if conscious of what she has done, runs away then, my father and Harry Owen stand helpless watching the curl of her shawl glimmering in the dark, lessening and lessening like the crest of a wave that breaks and slips back into the sea. In a few minutes they will hear a few notes of the spinet, rising from down below.
    •   •   •
    But they’re done now. They’re finished. They’ve entered the Trough of Leo’s Despair. A trough that will be deepened, almost before they really realize they’re in it, by a shout from the mainmast the next morning:
    Land, Captain! To the south, sir!
    There it is, after all those weeks, the sought-after object, land: purple, wavering slightly, miragelike, insubstantial as smoke, seeming, like smoke, to float just above the water, rather than to rest upon or arise from it.
    But they are becalmed. Stuck, in the Trough of Leo’s Despair.
    •   •   •
    Best not make too much of this, nobody’s mood controls the