Catch
Each morning, after breakfast, he walked to the sea. She stayed behind, in bed, reeking of fish and distant waves, and a great forgetting. She lay in the dark, as under deep water.
He didn’t go out to sea anymore. His boat was now manned by the youngest son of his brother. In exchange he got wine, bread and olives, sometimes milk and once a week a small, fresh wheel of goat cheese.
He walked to the shoreline, where the gulls and the wind, the rain and the surf, the sun and the clouds awaited him. Shells cracked beneath his feet. Pieces of driftwood lay there, salt and rotten, like twisted dragons. Seaweed and dead fish floated on the dirty white of dying waves. Ships sailed out, became smaller, disappeared and came back again with the evening, with the catch of the day.
When the pale red of the evening fell on the coast like a glowing net, when the fires burned and the wine was passed along, when the stories were told - when the surf and the murmur of seagulls made the Earth as small as a clenched womb, then he stood like a fever silhouette, between the silence and the evening, on land but of the sea: desperate but safe, like the mast of a beached ship, without sails, without purpose. In the midst of stars he stood tall, cold as the fall of night - and then he walked back home again, where the shutters were always kept closed and where she awaited his disgust, where she awaited his desires.
Many years earlier, when his beard had just started to grow, he had sailed out with the others, in the early morning. That day, the mist had reached to the horizon and the sea had lain still as a sleeping bride. That day, the seagulls had been silent and the sail of his boat had drooped, tired with salt. The smell of pitch and seaweed had hung lazily over the water. Everything had been silent; forgotten, removed from time.
The net had broken through the surface of sea and air, filled with whispered possibilities. Heavy and groaning it was raised again, mere moments later. Full of her, the mermaid.
If water could have taken a solid form, an aspect, then she’d been it. Her green hair and her big, grey eyes: those were the first things he had noticed. She had reeked of the sea, of sex, of all the desires of all the fishing boats that left the harbour in the morning, unsure of their return, uncertain of the evening. Her breasts had been like the soft slope of stars on a winter night, inaccessibly beautiful; yet tangible like the breath of early frost on bedroom windows.
She was beautiful; wonderful and waiting, like an altar, an offering. She was beautiful; haunting and marvellous, like silence, like death. He took her out of the net. He took her in his arms. He took her home and didn’t go out to sea again.
Each morning, he left home and walked the beach for hours. He watched the ships sail out of the harbour, getting smaller, disappearing. He watched the seagulls, screeching through the air. He smelled the sea, alive and rotting. He followed the woven patterns of low tide and high tide.
Then, when the campfires spread out along the flood line, like fallen stars, then he went home again - where she lay waiting: his catch. It was a dance of anger and desire. She, so still and so white; soft as the throat of a shell; impenetrable as salt, as thirst; reeking of all that dies beneath the waves - but beautiful as all the waiting, as a cloud of stars, as the still of night.
She lay in bed. Whenever he left the house, whenever he returned from the beach, from the first day he’d brought her home: she was always in bed, as if awaiting his desire, his thirst.
Mermaids are the passion of the final seconds, of the fire that dies and kills. A mermaid is cold and closed, with the smooth skin of a fish - and scales instead of a woman’s swollen, glistening lips, that can open and welcome and enfold a lover.
She did not know this welcome, nor this opening up - but her grey eyes still brought on his lust. Her lips and her breasts were soft and full. Her nipples were like prayer, tasting of salt and churches, of strange Gods and all forgetting.
The mermaid was silent. She was caught. She was catch. She was desire, perfect and waiting. Her breasts were now his. His mouth brushed her nipples. His hands explored her body, touched her lips and stroked her long, green hair.
Her neck was naked: patient. He could bite her, kiss her. He could beg and demand. She waited. She lay stil, without reaction, without questions. His anger, his desire, his words and desperate seed: she endured all - like the sea will carry the fragile keels of ships. She was pliable: waiting and still, but she did not have the words for his passion; she had no answer to his fire, his anger and his grief.
She ate raw fish and drank sea water. She lay in bed and waited. The ships sailed out and in the evening the fires burned along the coast. The fishermen told their stories, while their women waited for them at home. These women were a whisper in the night; their arms, their bosoms warm: a welcome.
The man was now a silence, a shadow. He avoided the others and they avoided him. He fed the mermaid bits of fish. Her full and reeking, warm and waiting mouth opened and closed like a claw. Her teeth were like sharp glass.
She opened her mouth also to him. His hands then gripped her long, green hair, while her deep, grey eyes remained unchanging: empty, without questions. He came in awful silence. Her tongue found the last drops of salty fluid; disgust was now his tongue, his only language. Each night, before he fell asleep - his hungry flesh against her scales, his hands on her breasts - he whispered his despair, his lust into the long, green hair. His catch, his silent cage.
Each morning saw the dying of another day. Each night she ruled his passion, and his disgust.