Written by Judas Salieri
The fishermen are heading back home through a bare coast of pale bones. The great remains of the mountain hake have collected here ever since lightning broke the cliffs in half.
They're running from the blue. They have spotted a great spiral in calm waters, a slow motion of silver. Fish following each other.
“Don't look,” the old to the young. Grandfathers carry the children and cover their eyes.
“Aren't the divers out today?”
“This morning.”
“Ah, this morning.”
Atan runs in the opposite direction. He climbs on the heads like nails of the mountain hake. Some have long necks, others five rows of teeth. The mad flute-men from the West are building great horns with the bones. They ask him,
“What goes on?”
“Nothing. Stay away from the water.”
“Why? There's no wind.”
“Do you want to die?”
Before, he would have been sure of Kefa already being dry by the fire. But Kefa has been hostile as of late, quiet and prone to illness, spending too long underwater, stretching his veins, drowning in dreams, gasping for air and vomiting water. His long hair rots in Atan’s hands when he tries to wash the algae off it. He shivers all day and all night while Atan spins around the fire, jumps the flames, leaps backwards above them to make him laugh. Miro laughs too.
Grind butterfly wings into dust and come up with nothing. Invisible colours. A trick of the light. The sky is bronze, the sea wine dark. If Miro grinded his own eyes into dust he'd come up with colours they haven't been before. The cusp of a cloud blazing purple, turning gray in the sudden absence of light. Water is see-through. It will never deceive you. Any miscalculation is one's own mistake.
“You fishermen never speak clearly,” the flute-men say. They know nothing. They're warrior brides. Atan shuts them up with a hiss.
“Have you been walking the waterline all day? Have you seen me walk out of the water before?”
“Just this once.”
In the water, reflecting the killer sun through the surface, the great commotion of fish is growing, bubbling, boiling. The flute-men forget their carving tools in their own hands, all gazing out at the sea.
Something like an instinct, but somehow foreign and more fleeting, freezes Atan like a stone before he can turn his head to follow their gaze. He has been granted mercy. The flute-men, all twelve of them, stand, dripping sand, and run one by one into the sea.
The air is thick, pure brine. Old salt from the corner of the world's eye. Eventually, he dares look at the shore. The fish and the men have almost vanished, are swimming into deeper waters. The blue hake has submerged.
He runs along the coast towards the diving grounds. He can't run faster than it can swim. Is Kefa home, dry by the fire, is it all over, have these long many days been only a passing nightmare? Is he breathing? Is he breathing air?
The wind is sweeping the cold shore and cutting knives out of the dark wet rock. Nothing of Kefa, but there's Miro sitting with his back turned to the sea, grinding feathers into nothing.
“Ero, ien,” Miro is sing-counting under his breath, “aro, iaro…”
“Is he still in the water?!”
“He’s gone looking for you.”
Air to breathe. As long as he's out of the water.
For some reason, Atan considers not telling Miro about the blue hake. Does he know? Has he heard? Miro's eyelashes, thick like veins, like arrows, like thighs, flick gray salt at him when he lifts his eyes from his failed colours.
“This isn't tight enough.” He points at the dry hake-skin cuirass around Atan’s chest, tiger stripes and tripes. Having made it, he feels it with his hands. He has dressed them both in things that he can touch without having to ask.
They're alone. Atan stands up straight, as tall as he is. But there's nothing, he realizes with an ocean of uncalled for hatred, not a drop of the desperate interest he likes to imagine in Miro's hands, if only to resent it. He has always been mocking him, after all. Every time he laughed.
Miro keeps touching him, not knowing the ruse is up.
“It's too loose around the waist. Come here.”
He pulls at the tripes to tighten it, pulls at Atan’s guts. He smacks Miro's disinterested hands away.
“Not now! You stay here until I come back.”
Miro laughs. No, all wrong. Fondness. He is innocent of everything. It has all been a nightmare.
“Ah, d’ako… You owe me for last night.”
“You only win because you cheat.”
“I don't need to cheat. You're not a good player.” Miro, unmoved, glances at the sea over his shoulder. He doesn't see anything interesting. Returns to his traitorous feathers. “Many birds. How strange.”
Atan looks at the sea. He sees the birds, and then he sees something shining through the tall wall of a cresting wave, a flash of distorted blue.
For a moment, he thinks he's seeing Kefa’s empty, poisoned body rolling towards the shore like a dead jellyfish. Impossible and possible. He runs. Miro calls after him. He's already treading water when he recognizes the gaze-like skirts of the blue hake.
The warriors can barely speak coherently. They all have green eyes, but it's a cold, unknown green that rhymes with other shores. They interrogate Kefa about their flute-whore-men with a hostile hiss in every sentence.
“Dalaso?” they ask, pointing over to the sea, not comprehending why Kefa refuses to look where they want to. “Salt? Sea? Am sea?”
“They went after the blue hake.” A sentence they don't understand. Kefa draws the long body of delirium on the sand, but they don't seem to recognize it. Instead, they laugh and nearly drag him away with them. His rotting hair melts in their grip like algae, and he runs away.
The warriors run after him. He spots the sleek silhouette of a bone fishing boat left behind on the shore. He pushes it into the current just in time. The swarming fish are drawing another dark reflective spiral under the surface. As soon as he looks away, he hears the warriors change course and head straight for the blue horizon.
He feels a rumble through the whalebone. He clenches his eyes shut just to hear the great constellation of fish following the blue hake pass under his boat like rustling birds and dive deep into nothingness.
No one who has seen it has resisted it. Even old great-grandmothers, even legless ex-divers jump into the water to chase after it. From those few who have caught it, it is known that it's fast and slippery, the colour of water. Not even really blue. The scorching eye of opportunity.
If a fisherman jumps into the water to chase after it, he will most certainly die. It's a clever fish. If he doesn't catch it very quickly, he will be too far from the surface to make it back alive.
But if he doesn't die, everyone will listen to him when boats sink. He will be crowned with courage and his power will outlive his strength. So when a fisherman jumps, the wasplike expectation that follows will be as wide-eyed rictus-white grinning as it is wailing. Half the world will weep for him, half cheer for him. Bad luck. But if not bad luck, then very good luck. Death. But if not death, then radiance.
Kefa is reaching the diving grounds when he sees Atan jump. The greatest terror.
He sails after him, trying to see without seeing. He throws the boat’s net in the water to catch Atan like a fish and drags him struggling out of the blue. Roaring, wide-eyed. He's not good with nets. His arms tremble. Atan slithers away with great violence and plunges back into the water.
A splash of salt. Miro climbs wetly onto the boat.
“What’s going on?!”
“Don't look.” Kefa closes Miro's eyes with his fingertips. “Stay here.”
He plunges into the water blindly. He doesn't need sight; he's used to the dark cornered marvels of the seafloor. Light through the eyelids. The disrupted sway of the waves now above him, a sparkling blanket of movement. Atan can't dive well enough to survive. His lungs are too stiff. He will drown. And Kefa isn't fast enough with his eyes shut, so he opens them.
He had only seen drawings.
The blue hake turns like lightning among its cloud of fish, left, right, down, right, down, left. It's just a rhythm, not unlike waves. Atan’s blunt silhouette, a raging exercise of muscle, scratches its skirts with bloody nails. The blue hake bleeds only water. The other fish are eating it alive.
Atan is too far from the surface already, and will undoubtedly drown, which doesn't matter to anyone anymore.
Kefa flies past him and kicks him in the face, breaks his nose and steals his air so he can't get to the blue hake first. All-divine. Radiance. Atan's blood tinting the entire sea and he doesn't turn around. The blue hake swims left, right, down, right, down left. Closer. Closer. Almost. Deeper. Forever.
He catches it. It's slippery; it slips away. A frustration sweet and passionate like lust, sharper, brighter, essential to happiness. Left, right, down, right, down, left. Blurring vision. Wasting strength. Too fast. Too much effort. The hot burning tension in the limbs, the hiccuping chest collapsing into itself. Catch it. Catch it forever. He forgets he has arms and lunges forward with his mouth open instead.
The hard body of the blue hake bleeds water into his mouth when he bites it. A struggle. Fate. Victory. He remembers his name.
He kicks like mad. No. Careful. Atan crashes against him like a ship and bites the cool flesh out of his mouth.
No. No. They fight over nothing, with their teeth. They fight over who dies the winner and who dies regardless. They scratch each other's faces. The blue hake twists between their iron-tight jaws until they rip it in half.
The fishermen refuse to sail after them. Miro alone has taken the bone boat to cast its orphan nets in the open blue, hoping for the mercy of unknown spirits. It is not good luck to cast orphan nets, much less in plain daylight. His eyes don't fill with tears. He moves through the world like a needle through healthy flesh, sinning in vain.
A gargantuan mass of silvery bodies, thousands upon thousands of fish, rise under the light frame of the bone boat and topple it. Miro falls into the water. The fish are fighting over the pieces of the blue hake. Kefa clings weakly to the upturned boat, shaking and coughing brine.
“No,” he stammers, pointing with his head. They drag Atan’s pale form to the shore. He's turned blue. His broken face is bleeding pink froth that is almost water. Miro breathes into his lungs. Nothing. Eyes half open. Again. They beat his chest like a drum. Water pours out of his cold throat. An empty shore and the three of them only, alone, forever.
Atan’s blood starts running red again. He coughs. He breathes. Tall immense clouds are opening above him. He reaches out for the clear sky and can't find it, grabs nothing but thin air.
FIN.