Free Red Sea by Diane Tullson

it was perfectly normal and acceptable. I don’t think anyone even noticed, and if they did, Ty wouldn’t have cared. In the tiny stall, I wondered if I’d ever get the knees of my jeans clean and if people would be able to tell from my jeans what I’d done.
    Duncan says, or said, that what doesn’t kill you makes you strong.
    I reach for the bucket again.

NINE
    T HE ONSET OF NIGHT MAKES me anxious. I’m not afraid of the dark, but it’s unnerving, not being able to see. I’ll find myself constantly reaching for a light switch. Since mid-afternoon, Mom has been making noises in her sleep, little moans that have increased in volume. She’s woken a few times, and I was able to give her a little water. I had to change her quilt. When I unwrapped her to check her leg wounds, I found that she’d peed herself. I managed to get a pair of shorts on her and improvised a diaper with sanitary pads. This should test how much these things really hold. Mom’s gunshot wounds look about the same exceptnow there’s more weeping fluid. I washed the wounds and covered them with clean dressings. Then with fresh water I washed her, head to toe, and brushed the snarls out of her hair. Afterward I turned her in her berth and wrapped a dry quilt around her. She cried out when I turned her and woke long enough to drink some. She feels a little warm, but I might be imagining that.
    I washed the soiled quilt in a bucket of seawater. It was bloody and could have used a proper hot wash and laundry soap cleaning, but that’s a luxury for port. We’ve spent entire days in port doing laundry. I wrung out the quilt, then rinsed it in a bit of fresh water so that it would dry soft, and hung it over the boom to dry. The air probably did as much to freshen the quilt as the washing.
    I don’t feel like eating anything, but I open a pouch of tuna. It’s strange what the pirates took, like the canned corned beef, the stuff with a cow head on the label. I can’t stand it, none of us liked it, that’s why we still had several tins of it in the locker. Mom bought a crate of it in Australia because she said all sailors eat canned corned beef. The pirates took every last one, loading it into a pillowcase like it was Halloween. And the sardines in mustard sauce, they’re welcome to those. A lot of the labels have come off the cans, either from floating in bilge water or sometimes Mom takes off the labels if she’s afraid there might be cockroach eggs under them. Then she writes the contents on the lid of the can. I eat the tuna straight from the package, then drink the milk I had opened earlier. The milk is warm so I plug my nose and chug it; I won’t have to taste it.
    With darkness settling into the corners of the boat, I make a final check of my mother—her moaning has subsided—and the boat. Out in the cockpit, I see the headsail tugging on the sheet, just fretting with it, nothing to get excited about. I make sure the sheet is cleated, check that the boom is secured so that it doesn’t crash back and forth in the night, then I take in the quilt and stretch it out in the main cabin to finish drying. For a small moment I entertain the notion of sleeping in the cockpit so I can better hear any freighters that might plow over us in the night, but with no way to get out of a freighter’s path, I think I’d rather die in my sleep. I head back down into the boat and as a precaution or out of habit, I don’t know which, I close the companionway hatch and slide closed the lock bolt.
    Boats are easy enough to get into. Once, in Djibouti, I got back to the boat to find Mom and Duncan had gone out, locking up the boat behind them. I didn’t carry a key, but I just crawled in through a small open window in the bathroom. Head. That’s what a bathroom on a boat is called. That’s using your head. Hilarious. On passage, the only thing that would come through the