Page 143 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

off the boat, four years after Cassandra disappeared from the pool. Hector was found

huddled, mud-smeared, in the root cave of a mangrove. They remembered the wounded

bellows of the once powerful man, now under constant suspicion after the vanishing of

his wife. They recalled the barks and whistles of an exhausted larynx. In his belt had

been a knife and a diving bag full of abalone. Tucked amid the plump shell flesh,

provenance unclear and hence occasion for instant rumor, was a rosary. A tiny crucifix

was haloed with pink pearls still nesting in the moist flesh folds, ancient sand corns that

had grown more and more luminous with each passing moon tide.

The Coast Guard officers extracted Hector from the root labyrinth, and he had been

silent, drifting. They brought him to his home, where his teenage daughter sat beneath

the kitchen table, clasping the wooden leg, a tableau of pity and grief.

Not knowing what else to do, they left them there, father and daughter, with the father’s

hunting bag. For the next week, till the stink became too much, the bag of mollusk flesh

oozed fluids onto the kitchen table, sticky and drippy. From what the officers could figure

out when they visited later to check on their charges, father and daughter just spent their

days looking upon the miraculous rosary and the pearls, marveling at the drying liquids

transforming colors into flesh.

The dolphins played in the dying light. Their beaks broke the surface of the still water,

their dorsal fins lancing through golden evening streams. Their numbers fluctuated with

the seasons, predation, the patterns of migration. Whale lovers joined, and floated away,

new babies were born. Today, a creature of green-blue whiteness glided among them,

and breached in the weeds.

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