Psychopomp Magazine Winter 2016 | Page 8

skin of her scalp, lets the chilly air quicken the blood in her veins.

I smell bacon, precooking in the galley for breakfast the next morning. One of the line chefs is par-poaching eggs, then sliding them into a tray of cold water. They’ll be reheated in the morning, served with gravlax and bright yellow hollandaise spooned from a plastic tub. He’s lazy and the day was long, and he’s overfilled the shallow tray. A yolk threatens to overflow as I rock gently, back and forth.

The blue-haired lady feeds another note into the slot machine while her fingers tap at the flashing plastic buttons, pure muscle memory. Her gin and tonic is free and weak, and when the room lurches to starboard it falls to the ground. There’s a scraping sound, pitched so high that it flirts with the upper limits of the audible, fading in and out of hearing. The already dim lights flicker out, and the screen goes black. In it she sees the reflection of the aurora as if it were the ghost of her husband. Then the power kicks back in, and she continues tapping buttons.

I’m stopped, impaled on a crumbling underwater outcrop. My engines haven’t cut out, and they’re urging me forward, opening me up, letting more of the ocean inside me. Pieces of zinc pop off the sheet metal as it curls back and then fall into the abyss below like sparse summer rain. Char and haddock come into me with the water, and the diesel is driven to the top of my ruptured tanks. It feels like a transfusion, like life flowing into me.

There are playing cards and broken glasses scattered across the floor of the Captain’s suite. He’s the first to his feet, red-faced and screaming at his guests to stay calm, stay calm, everybody stay calm. They’re well dressed, piled on the floor, and less scared of shipwreck than of the raging Captain. He runs from the room and into a sailor with a close-trimmed beard and no jacket, who slaps him hard. He’s grateful for the pain, it gives his panic space to subside. Together they set about unstrapping lifeboats.

At my bottom there’s an engineer tending bilge pumps, which are sputtering,

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