This is the spell: when you pull your line up over the side of your double-ender to find a particularly old cod—one long in the barbels—stop and cut open its stomach, spilling the contents in your boat’s bottom. If the old-thing has been swallowing stones to anchor it to the bottom, a storm isn’t far off. Make for a port straight away.
The storm hasn’t blown in yet, there isn’t even any wind to ripple the surface of this cove, and before father sent us off he’d figured the cod had it wrong.
“It was no storm, though they couldn’t know better,’ he said. “This is what they felt rising. They were right to hunker, and you’ll do the same until this blows over.”
Our shoulders are touching and we keep our hand at our sides. Before the quiet is broken by their distant horses, a pop sounds as a bass rises to swallow a moth from the surface. The fish is large and slow but his presence changes the feel of the water around us. When something, fleeing the interloper, makes small darts at the crooks between my bare toes, I, the youngest, duck beneath the surface before it moves on to my sisters. I know that they are taking our mother’s death hardest and might react rashly and swallow it whole.
Our sister slips under with a ripple that tickles the few dark hairs above our lips and we lean a little toward one another into the empty space she’s left behind.
I blow all my air out my nose and rest my chin on the pebbly bottom, mouth open wide. The fish, I can taste now that it is a tiny red hake ventured too far from shelter, takes me up on my offer and swims in. I stand back up, press my sisters apart a little, and bend my knees so my nose and eyes are back in the air. The hake circles a few times and taps my teeth with its long feeler-fins. I lift my tongue for it to settle beneath like it would under the loose flesh of a scallop’s stomach.
A second spell: sing to scallops when you shuck them—something loud and fast. It is difficult for them to hear through the air, and they will open up to listen,
Mike Petrik | 29