Indifferent

I often don’t know what I am going to write when I begin, and I usually don’t continue writing about what I start with. It’s a sort of colloquial meandering, or wordsy mosey made of guts and tears and years, thoughts like little stones in a tumbler, looking for a shine, or in the mouth for spit, hit, hit again, then miss, blood and piss, skull is a bucket full of crabs and the noise they create, grating and scratching, pin sharp legs on steel makes that eager feel behind your jaw, there’s the top, claws up, and then you drop like a stone to the deck you now own, flip and scramble, sideways shamble, to the edge, and over, leaving only little wet marks, drying like ink, and fading away.

I really don’t like that sound. Crabs fumbling in a bucket. I can’t stand it, in fact. When I catch crabs I like to smash them in half and clean them right away, and I don’t care what anyone says about the flavour being better if you cook them with the guts in and clean them after. It’s not, but even if it was, it’s just not worth it for me to witness such futility. It makes me feel weird and gross, and the sound......ick.

Maybe I’m sensitive to sounds, some of them anyway. Some I can just sink into and become part of, like traffic, or death metal, or the wind, but other sounds are just downright unsettling, and they stick with you for, well, for a long time.

Have you ever seen a shark’s eyes? They’re weird in the way a goat’s eyes are, but goat’s are mammals, like us, just demonic. Shark’s eyes are unsettling and alien in a different way because they’re just for seeing, and because we don’t understand them, what we see is alien, and devoid of expression, so they’re extra spooky.

I was laying on top of a pile of several thousand sharks. They were little, and brown, and called Dogfish or Mud Sharks, but they’re still sharks with their shark eyes and shark skins, and that pee smell. I’d been up and working for 30 hours or so. I was the fourth man on the boat, and a rookie to long-lining if not to commercial fishing, so I cut bait for most of that time-occasionally puking for the first several hours-and most of the remaining 10 hours before we finished deck-loading the boat. Occasionally, though, I’d get a break by going down into the hold to throw live sharks into the corners so that we could fit as many of them down there as physics, or possibly geometry, would allow. I was very tired and sore, and the hold was so full that I had to lay right down on top of the dogfish in order to shove them into the side pens.

Now, sharks aren’t super lively when they’re out of the water and slowly dying, but they still thrash around, albeit slowly and awkwardly, and if something touches them, they’ll bite it if they can. Ranging in size from a bit bigger than my forearm to longer than my arm, their bites aren’t really a hazard to a guy in rain gear and gloves, no matter how sleepy he is, but my neck hurt from cutting bait and from laying on my belly on these fucking dogfish, and I was so exhausted that I put my forehead down on my forearm for a moment just to close my eyes and take a few pee flavoured breaths without moving.

But that sound. It’s a wet sound, sort of, and kind of slithery, but only if you pronounce it SLITH-ery, like if the SLITH-ery snakes were the size of river otters and you dumped a bunch of them into a big tub of sand and milk, maybe cream, but not mayonnaise, and just listened to it, it would probably sound like that, and then every so often one of them, the dogfish not the otter snakes, would open up it’s mouth really wide and sort of belch because they live on the bottom and now they’re in the air and the whatever in their guts expands, and it sounds as if someone was choking really hard, and sneezed, but slowly.

This writhing bed obviously wasn’t a good place to sleep, so I opened my eyes and was staring right into the eye of a dogfish, and it was staring right back at me. I don’t know if it could see me, but it was looking at me, and so were, as I looked around and saw in mounting horror, hundreds of others, and they were all sandymilksnakeotterSLITH-ering, and slowchokesneezebelching, and biting the air, and each other, and me, all while not breaking eye contact with me, at all.

So I left and went topside.

I had to cut more bait, and I had to throw more of them down on top of the others, and I was kinda tripping out about leaving them all down there to die like that, and 10 hours later when we headed back to the harbour, they were knee deep on the deck all the way up to the anchor winch, and it was hard to avoid eye contact.

I went out for two more trips until the regular deckhand was healed up.

That was the worst sound I ever heard except for goodbye.

Or indifferent silence.