Red Sky at Morning

Carey stared at me from the corner of the room, chiding me for reading (The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde, which I never finished). I ignored her while she paged through my parents’ coffee table magazines: Nantucket Yacht and an untouched Parenting. She slammed them shut, stood up and glared at me.

“What’s the point?” she sputtered, exasperated and wild-eyed, watercolor sunburn splotches down her legs from a haphazard sunscreen application the day before. I looked up from my book. In her left hand, she held a plastic beach toy: a forlorn purple profile of a fish. It was a sad, bloated shape that ballooned and bulged a misshapen tumor tail, its lips puckered in expectation like the punks at our last middle school dance. It looked frozen in shock, with a final one-eyed look of powerless recognition of fate: Caesar’s final gaze as Brutus dealt the hardest blow.

“Come on, Hen!” She shook my arm. Carey was strong: a skin-and-bone arm wrestling champion. “Hen”, short for Henry, simultaneously belittling and endearing, which she loved. She was older by a month and taller by two inches, information volunteered unprompted (“cross my heart it’s closer to two-and-a-half inches”) with enough vigor for both of us. Once, while eating our split ham and cheese on the beach, I pointed out a drip of mayonnaise on her chin. She replied that she intended it to be there and refused to wipe it off for the rest of the meal.

I smirked. “Fine.” Book closed. “What are we doing?” But we did the same thing every day. Summer vacation. Too young to do much of anything, too old to sit at home.

She clapped me over the head with the fish. “Follow me.” She spun on her bare feet and walked out with face-forward determination, knowing I’d run to catch up before she walked halfway down the street.

* * *

The beach was our kingdom. More accurately, Carey’s kingdom and she was king, not queen. With seaweed crown and driftwood staff she carried herself with an awkward, spasmodic regality, shouting orders and castigating her subjects: banishing pearl-less oysters, relegating king crab to court jester.

It was hard to distinguish most days from others. Sunshine, honeysuckle and turquoise sea glass; convincing my mother to pack lunch for two (one sandwich, a party-size bag of chips, a carton of OJ, two fun-size Twix bars), bruises that seemingly appeared from nowhere, round rocks we tried to skip but that often plopped in refusal, the smell of sunscreen and sweat.

We sat atop the steep sand throne and looked down below, across the stretch of beach and water. It was early in the season, a cool day in early June. I don’t think I would have jumped in even if my bones could stand it.

Carey paced the peak of the dune, surveying her dominion as if it were a hundred feet below. I made sad fish imprints in the sand with the toy; mute and purple with that cyclops eye wide, unable to warn you about the sea monster behind your back, impossible to change its hopeless view of things.

“Henry,” she commanded, inflection rising on the last syllable in a proper British accent. Wind swept the paint-splattered patches of seagrass along the dune. I looked up from my petrified fish platoon to see the staff lifted high above her head. I winced and held up my hand in defense. How had I offended the king today? And it was only 10am?

A moment. She rested the driftwood on the crown of my head and said, “Sir Henry, for courage so pure and deeds so bold. Knight of my Kingdom.” I smirked and grabbed the staff, throwing it aside (“Treason, Sir Henry! Treason!”) and jumped on her. She fumbled for footing, my arms wrangled around her neck and feet around her waist (“Guards!”). I seized her crown in hasty revolt and placed it askew on my head. She careened to the edge, left leg tangled up in right; we fell in slow motion (did my lips graze her cheek?) and thumped on impact, plunging down the hill.

We barrel-rolled, tangled, swirled images of sea and sand bled into one another. Blue sand, white ocean, red sky.

I landed with a muffled thud, the right side of my face glued to the beach. Lifting my head, I sputtered laughter, sand-spit spewing from my mouth. My right rib panged, and I looked down to see a viscous trickle of sand-blood flowing down my abdomen. I winced.

Carey lay limp beside me. I prodded her. “Carey.” Lifeless. I observed her. “Not funny, Carey.” I threw half-broken sea shells at her back. Nothing. Repeating, louder, “Carey.” And I wanted her name to be longer, to have a fuller sound, as though perhaps a third syllable would be the one to wake her.

The ocean continued to splash sea and salt, low waves crashing in a white noise that accentuated the silence on the beach.

I shifted to look back to the towering dune. Lifting my legs from my seated inspection, I stepped back, climbing the dune backwards to face toward Carey’s contorted form. At the top, I retrieved the plastic fish, my imprinted fortune-telling fish legion staring at me: “We tried to tell you.”

Back at the shoreline, bedsheet of white foam erasing my footsteps, I flung the fish into the water and watched the piece of floating purple plastic wash out to sea. A fish that couldn’t swim, only drift, climbing the crest of a wave in a dead man’s float.

I walked home alone. An unnaturally wide smile shined from the toddler on this month’s Parenting on the doorstep.

And then gray bedroom, blue fog sleep. Numbness: something and nothing, my entire body like a fallen-asleep foot.

Written by: Gregory Duffy

Photo by: Daniel Charles Ross

Fishing Lessons

I went to live with Uncle Gil the summer before I turned seventeen. Ma and Dad had parted ways and then split for points somewhere east and west. Like God shoving apart sin, they had to get as far away from each other as possible. Nana ended up with me in the immediate fall-out, but she was moving into the local home for the elderly come September. So I was inducted into the world of fishing on a rickety boat in the Gulf covered in fish scales and fish guts and reeking to high heaven.

Gil was short for Virgil, and he wasn’t actually my uncle. I had lost track of how we were related—or even if we were. Nana’s version of our family tree snarled together like the yarn she sorted, running knotted strands through fingers spotted by time. I had half a mind to tell her that I was almost seventeen and didn’t need any looking after, but we were already at the bus station. Then she sent me off with a peck on the cheek and a squeeze that surrounded me with the lingering scent of dead roses and baby powder before the bus pulled away.

Gil was somewhere between my parents and Nana in age, with hair that might have been white or just bleached by the sun. It hung well past his shoulders, but when he pulled it back with an elastic band, the gesture was always masculine—unlike the smooth sweep-and-gather the girls in my high school had mastered. Even with a ponytail that would cause most women a pang of envy, no one could call Gil feminine. Maybe it was an aggressive act of self-defense against his name—which Nana said he thought was “a sissy name.” I later learned that while Nana paraphrased a lot of the things Uncle Gil said, she could never quite master the flair of his swears. They were downright Shakespearean sometimes. I’d never heard “fuck” used as every part of speech with such ease.

He was standing with his arms crossed and his feet spread wide when the bus pulled up, like he was on his boat instead of the parking lot and the asphalt was rolling beneath him. He didn’t shake my hand or try to take my beat-up duffel bag as we walked to the truck. I was tempted to hold my arm up next to his. His skin was the deep red-brown of dried blood after decades spent outside. Tattoos crawled up the back of his neck and covered his arms from shoulders to wrists. His worn yellow tank bore what looked like a naked woman wrestling a many-tentacled creature, but sun and salt had faded it to almost nothing.

“Know anything about boats, Cale?” he asked after half an hour of silence as we rode in his truck. We drove with the windows down. The air tasted like the inside of a grill—salt and hot metal.

“No.”

“Fish?” The skin around his eyes and mouth were webbed with white in the places where the sunlight didn’t reach when he squinted against the sun and spray.

I shook my head, unsure if he was asking if I fished or if I knew anything about them. Either way, the answer was no. The rest of the ride passed in silence. I’d come to consider myself something of an expert on silences. That’s how Dad and Ma fell apart—their silences started out as a few minutes at the dinner table and stretched into weeks of dead air. Silence could sometimes say more than shouting. Our whole house rang with it.

When we reached Gil’s ramshackle beach house, he showed me the spare room that would be mine. I was surprised to see a frame and a box spring rather than just a mattress huddled on the floor. There were even a few hangers in the closet. I dumped my duffle on the bed but didn’t have time to look around much. Gil told me to put on my swim trunks if I’d brought them. We were going out as soon as we’d had a bite to eat. I didn’t question filling my stomach with the cheeseburger I ordered from the roadside stand before setting sail, licking the rivulets of grease and pickle juice off the backs of my hands.

Gil’s boat was small and more than a little worn. I could barely make out the painted name peeling off the back – Jezebel – and wondered if I’d ever get the courage to ask about it. Gil jerked his head at me and gave terse instructions as we unmoored the boat from the dock and then backed it out of the marina. The water was steely gray, tinged by the muddy backwash from the Mississippi. As we motored farther out it turned a darker blue-gray and the sun turned the wave tops chrome. Gil told me what we’d be catching and how to use the gill nets, one brown hand on the steering wheel and the other tracing arcs in the air to match his descriptions. I thought about the sunscreen I’d forgotten to apply and wondered how many sunburns it took to turn my skin into the same rusty cowhide that encased Gil’s ropy muscles.

When we dumped the first catch of silver-sided fish into the boat, they cascaded around our ankles, fins twitching and big liquid eyes flat and staring. I wondered if they knew in their tiny brains that it was all over. If they felt fear or pain. If they felt torn from the ocean, their essence. When the day was done and we headed back towards shore, my hands were burning from hauling nets and my cheeks were sore from squinting against the sun. Gil hadn’t said more than a few hundred words all day but as the salt spray lashed our faces and the sun bronzed the waves behind us, it felt like the beginning of a hundred conversations.

Written by: Hannah Sears
Photograph by: Blake Bronstad