Before the Flood
Of the few houses left standing alongside the salt-stained wharf, the Sanderses’ is by far the largest. Two and a half stories of weathered gray stone, it looms unchallenged beneath the stormy spiral of the sky, as constant a fixture as the watery sun licking the horizon every morning. Moreso, even: on the days when the sleet and bluster cast the whole little village in ash gray, the Sanders place still stands. The townsfolk say that it’s been there for a good hundred years, since the war with Britain. And, season after season after season, this shows no signs of changing.
World’s end’s come and gone, Lucy’s grandmother told her last summer. She was decaying already, at that point, but they kept her as well-fed as they could, and swaddled her up in unwashed bed sheets. The same ones lined her coffin the next week. Best we can do is please the people who still got money. Don’t you ever stop working for those Sanders folks, Lu. They’re the best deal you’re ever gonna get.
Lucy has worked for the Sanderses for as long as she could walk. They don’t invite her to stay for dinner anymore, and her pay has gotten slimmer, but her grandmother was right. She won’t ever get a better deal.
It’s late springtime now; the clouds are spottier, and the fish more abundant. Yet her father draws charts with lines plunging downwards, rubs his temples, explains to her that this axis is the time passing, and this axis is the amount of food swimming around out there, and don’t you see how it’s declining?
“What’s ‘declining?’” Lucy asks. The end of his fountain pen taps, taps, taps at the sharp slant of the line.
“Declining means, uh, it means going down. The amount of fish, it’s going down. And it’ll keep going down ’til there’s not one left. Not one single fish out there in the ocean.”
His words echo in her head the next morning as she traipses to the Sanders place, her feet dragging in the wet sand. It stormed last night–“a proper tempest,” Lucy’s mother called it, with the waves thrashing and their house’s wooden frame rattling like bones between teeth. Even with the sun scarcely up, there are a few neighbors out and about, struggling to repair broken doors and blown-out windows. They don’t notice the little blue-lipped girl bundled in her big brother’s coat, stumbling along the shoreline. Everyone is busy, busy, busy.
The Sanders house has a gray door with an octopus-shaped brass knocker. Lucy has to use both hands to lift it, and when it bangs into the worn wood, it lets out a noise like thunder. She only has to do it once before Mrs. Sanders is there, done up in her apron with the cherry pattern.
“Bit early today, mm, Lucy? Don has a big old netful for you. How about some hot cocoa for the cold?”
The table in the Sanderses’ kitchen is big enough for four, but Lucy is content to sit there alone. Her legs are too short to reach the ground, so she keeps them tucked beneath her as she sips her cocoa. It’s too sweet–the Sanders family likes everything too sweet–but it’s hot, and it brings some feeling back into her lips.
“What a gale last night, mm?” Mrs. Sanders is managing to make herself look very busy, but without actually doing anything. Bustle, Lucy thinks. Mrs. Sanders is bustling. Turning the sink on and off, wiping down the clean surface of the stove, adjusting the window blinds. Lucy knows why: Mrs. Sanders doesn’t trust her alone in the kitchen, unlike the shed where she works. Too many silver and pewter dishes, and Lucy has too many big pockets stitched into her overalls.
“Did the storm scare you? My boys were frightened out of their minds–though don’t you tell them I said that, or they’ll get all embarrassed.”
“I won’t tell them,” Lucy says. The storm didn’t scare her. She spends too much time fearing the sea to spare anything to the sky.
“Well, all right, sweetie. Just as soon as you’re done here, we’ll get you to work in the shed. It’s so thoughtful of you to come early, so convenient, considering how much we’ve got….”
She isn’t early, though. She comes at the same time every day.
An afternoon later, with her fingers caught up in rubbery cold tentacles, Lucy is thinking of another word, one to go along with bustle: medley. It’s a musical term, she’s fairly sure, but somehow a suitable one. Mr. Sanders’s haul for the day is a chalky, muted rainbow, raw sea corpses of all shapes and sizes for her to sort. And, somehow, it feels like a medley.
She slaps aside the squid’s thick bluish body and moves to the next-biggest catch, a tongue-pink young octopus that looks like it’s been dead since long before the net hauled it in. Her fingers, even with their nails bitten to the quick, are too calloused to be bothered by the briny water as she flips the octopus over. There, where the bases of its many legs cluster around the swollen cavern of its mouth: black rot, fraying the edges of its skin, drifting into the rest of the wide metal pan. She tosses the octopus aside. She doesn’t need to look at the discard bucket to know that the dead creature explodes on contact; the fruity splumsh is evidence enough.
The shed is thick with the familiar odor that comes with the daily sorting, a smell that Lucy has come to associate with pale flesh and chilliness. The warmth of the hot cocoa is long forgotten, and the wind whistles between the slats of the shed. It’s a wonder that the rickety little thing withstood the storm, especially when the same couldn’t be said for some people’s whole houses. If the shed had blown down, would the Sanderses let her work inside the house? Mrs. Sanders keeps a woven basket of potpourri on the sitting room table, just a dozen yards away from where Lucy stands now. It’s big and full of autumn-harvest colors: pinecones and blush petals and cinnamon sticks, those strange treasures that one never glimpses on the seashore. Lucy’s tin pan is different: though myriad in hue, these creatures are all washed with the gray of the rainy beach, as pale as the dead things that they are. The net, still bulging with unsorted seafood, has begun to trail a clearish sheen over the concrete floor.
Sometimes, Lucy wonders whether people leak the same way as fish after they die, and whether human pupils would also go all pink and swollen if they were cooked. Mr. Sanders always says that the eyes are his favorite part of the fish. He pops them out with the handle of a spoon and chews, chews, chews.
Of course, that’s after the cooking. Once Lucy finishes sorting the pan, Mrs. Sanders will throw it all into a pot and boil it until the dead things’ colors come back, twice as vivid as they ever were in their first life. She’ll salt-and-lemon it, fork it over hot cooked rice, and serve it in the pinewood dining room, in full view of the potpourri arrangement. Her sons will hoard the octopus legs, their favorite part, and her husband will relish the little pinkened eyeballs.
If it’s a prolific day, Mrs. Sanders will scrape an extra helping of seafood-and-rice into a tin box, and hand it to Lucy along with her bag of earnings, with a warm reminder to share the goodies amongst her family. Lucy will smile and thank her, and then run halfway home, stopping under the big gray bridge. There, with her heart still skipping from the jog, she will crouch in the driest spot she can find, away from the gulls and the fishermen, and she will shovel it into her mouth by the fingerful: squid, shark, clam, cuttlefish, the color of mango and sky, dripping with juice and rice and lemon. Her stomach always aches by the end, but in the best of ways, full almost to bursting. Then she will rinse the tin box in the chilly shallows and pack it full of sea glass, a present for her mother, an excuse for her tardiness in getting back from work.
But those days are rare, rare as sunlight, and rarer still by the season. Lucy’s sure that Mr. Sanders isn’t to blame–he seems as fine a fisherman as ever. There’s something else wrong: more and more of this black rot, more things that have been floating white-bellied for days at least, more hard trappings of plastic and gutting wire that have done Lucy’s job for her.
Today, with the octopus in pieces, there’s little chance of Lucy being handed that warm tin box. The tray is already only two-thirds full, and a slop of young salmon starts falling apart even as she tests them between her fingers, pinky-blacky guts falling loose like wet thread.
As she scoops up the fish, Lucy hesitates. Their whitened eyes ask her why.
Mrs. Sanders wouldn’t know the difference, she explains with a stare of her own, jostling their slimy bodies between her fingers. All she knows is that the bin’s bad and the tray’s good. That’s all she’s ever needed to know, since she’s got me.
Lucy’s stomach rumbles. She could dump the salmon into the tray and present it to Mrs. Sanders with a smile. And then it would be enough that she would get her portion, and Mrs. Sanders would tell her to share with her family, and she would nod and grin, and then eat it under the bridge like always, her skinny wrists trembling and her whole mouth aching with saliva.
After all, who knows how many more storms will come? If her grandmother was right and the end of the world’s gone, then what’s left except hot, well-salted food?
It would make the Sanderses terribly ill, this rotten catch. But Lucy’s stomach is harder than theirs, surely. And what if they do get sick? What if the black rot finds a home in their stomachs? If the Sanders family dies, who will sort them? Who will cut the bad parts from the good?
What if Lucy is less strong than she thinks, and the same happens to her?
The door to the shed creaks open and Mrs. Sanders’s voice rings out, as sweet as the special tinned pears she keeps stocked above her sink.
“How’s it going in there, Lucy? ’Bout ready? It’s getting dark; your mama’ll be wondering after you.”
“About ready,” Lucy says.
“No rush, sweetie. You just let me know. One of the boys can walk you home if you need it.”
She can hear the gulls shouting, and then the door shuts again. As final as the lid of her grandmother’s coffin, or the cap on her father’s pen when he finished sketching out yet another declining diagram.
Lucy wonders, for a shivering moment, whether dead people will one day be dredged up from the earth in nets, as well. Whether the good will be sorted from the bad. Whether creatures taller than the sky will boil them and serve them with rice and savor their tender eyeballs.
And what if they aren’t? What if this cycle of catch and cook and work and eat is all that there is? Where will she go when Mr. Sanders’s net starts coming in empty?
In the cupped palms of her sweaty hands, the fish are growing too warm. They stare at her. They stare and stare and stare.