Free The Seas by Samantha Hunt

that I think I will use them to write a note for Jude that says m’aidez, mayday.
    I drive over to Jude’s house that afternoon once the boat he is working on has come in. I want to show him my letter bruises. I want Jude to touch the bruises as if they were Braille letters, as if he has to use his fingertips to read the words on my hips and back.
    It doesn’t work out that way exactly. He lets me in but I become too shy to mention the bruises when I see him.
    The curtains of his living room are drawn closed, a sliver of sunlight sneaks in and illuminates all the particles floating in the air of Jude’s house. I sit down in the light and so does Jude. He tells me a few stories about things like a type of fish caught in schools and used in the fabrication of ladies’ makeup. He tells me about an idea he has for an opera where all the gods of all the religions of the world battle it out in song. He tells me about a fisherman he knows who loves the ocean so much that he had a tidal wave tattooed on his back. But Jude almost never tells me about the war, even if I ask, so I fear it won’t ever go away, it won’t ever get washed out to sea. Jude pours himself a glass of brown whiskey. Finally my shyness dissolves. “Look,” I say and lift just the back of my T-shirt.
    “Fuck,” he says. “What the hell happened?”
    “I fell,” I say.
    And then he does touch me just as I had imagined, very lightly with his fingertips. He reads the weird words on my back. He stares and reads and finishes another drink. And when he is done reading he says, “That’s scary.” The words look dark and bruised.
    “It’s even scarier than you think,” I say. “There was a man in the attic. That’s why I fell.”
    “A man?” he asks. “What man?”
    I do not answer. Jude is touching my back. Jude does not know that I am a mermaid.
    He thinks the words are a warning, that something frightening or dangerous is lurking nearby. To him it is probably the U.S. Government wanting him to reenlist, to me, I don’t tell him, it is my father.
    “Let’s get out of here,” he says and stands looking down at me. “This town,” he says, “Let’s go.” He walks away to find the keys to his truck. “Really,” he yells from the kitchen. The truck’s engine turns over and I run outside. Finally, I think. I don’t even bother to close the door to his house.
    I am happy to leave town, to take a drive. I feel weightless and free, even if we don’t go too far. But ten miles outside of town on the road an eighteen-wheeler carrying liquid oxygen has jackknifed, then toppled, then cracked open on the road in front of us. As the liquid hits the warmer air it evaporates in a cloud of thick steam. The idea of liquid oxygen makes me so thirsty, as though water or even the bottle of whiskey Jude brought along for the drive will never do after having sampled liquid air. The spill is evaporating and a police officer waves Jude’s truck into the steam of it. There is a dip in the temperature. I roll down the window because the police officer is a boy I know from grade school. I ask him, “Is love like oxygen?” It is a song I thought he would have remembered. I thought he would have remembered me too, but he doesn’t seem to understand and asks me, “Are you with the Union?” he speaks above my head, addressing the question to Jude.
    “No.”
    “Well then I suggest you and your vehicle turn around and head back to town. We have got a highly flammable situation here.”
    Jude says to me, “I see how it is. We can’t leave town.”
    “This highway is going to be closed for hours. I suggest you head back to town,” the policeman says very slowly.
    Once I was pulled over by another police officer. The only thing I could think to tell him after he gave me a ticket was that he must have been born in the Sucksville County Hospital. The problem I have with authority isn’t because I’m particularly wild, but the idea of supervision. I know the