by B. Mitchell Cator
She was gone. After sixteen years.
He’d caught red mullets that Tuesday morning and after he cleaned them, she put them on the grill. The delicate bones were piled on the plates. They were drinking a bottle of cabernet, half dozing side-by-side in their weathered chairs on the small balcony.
The heat was blistering, unseasonal, bleaching the sky of color. Cats and dogs lay prostrate on the cobblestone streets, stunned into submission, their legs splayed in unnatural positions.
A loud clattering roused them. A dappled grey horse, without a rider or cart, burst down the narrow street, veered to the left, skidded, and fell against a stone wall. A raw scream. The horse tried to raise itself, but could not; bone protruded from its front legs. It lifted its head to the sky, long yellow teeth jutting from curled lips. Its panicked high-pitched whinnies pierced the comatose day. Again and again the animal tried to get up, thrashed, and fell down on itself.
“Do something,” she yelled. “Put it out of its misery.”
“How?” he choked out, bile in his throat. “I don’t have a gun.”
She ran out of the house. He watched her approach the horse, her soft gentle words dropping to a low cooing sound. The horse calmed. She placed its head in her lap, laid her hand over its wild eye, put her mouth to its ear, and slit its throat. The body of the animal shuddered. She pressed her cheek to its neck. Its blood emptied into the street.
With her brown hair matted against her bloodied face, she rose slowly, her dress now crimson. Head down, she walked back into the house, and intentionally brushed past him.
“How? That’s how,” she said, and slumped in the corner of the living room, tears shining her cheeks. He stood stone-like, staring.
“Did someone use this to cut off your balls?” She waggled the knife at him. “What’s happened to you? Those boys in the market, the thief in the orchard: you hid, you ran. Now this.”
The knife she had used on the horse was his; it was given to him by his father when he was twelve, the year he started helping on the boat. At that time, the horn handle was pale, yellowed and striated. The blade was thick and blue-black. Now, the grip was smooth and dark and the blade had been honed silver.
He’d used the the same knife years earlier to defend her on a nearby island, close to the beach. They’d met in a bar. He noticed her standing in the midst of a throng of girls. Her blue eyes, the genetic gift of a visiting Englishman three generations earlier, set her apart from the rest. When the band started, her lithe body swayed as if the music were coming from within, marrow deep and impossible to resist.
Later that week, they’d walked hand-in-hand along a trail at the edge of town. Four men, from out of the trees, surrounded them, taunted them: slut, bastard. Knives were pulled. He replied with daring and ferocity. The four fled, but not before leaving a long gash on his left arm.
She came back to the mainland with him. And for all the years they were together she massaged ointments into his scar every night as if she were polishing a medal, one for bravery.
A few months after she left, he was fishing alone during a storm, on a day others had refused to leave port and his arm became tangled in the fishing nets. Pulled overboard and dragged toward the bottom, he frantically slashed at the thickly corded nets with the knife. Waves of pain shot through his chest, a vise crushing his sternum and spine. His heart thumped as though it might burst. Gasping. Gulping. Then sudden calm. There was no memory of getting to shore. Only that it was dusk as he lay there, shaking and shivering, his boat a hundred meters away. He relived those moments each time thunderheads darkened the sky.
The shadow in the water faded with dawn. A salty mist had coated his face, even his eyelids. Circling gulls brayed while they hung overhead. He settled against an overturned rowboat, and noticed a crab bravely working its way out of the water. It scuttled up the sand, only to be pulled back by the surf. Sidled up again, finally succeeding in outrunning the chasing waves. Then it paused, exhausted by its struggle, only to be scooped up by a swooping gull. The bird snatched it up and lurched awkwardly skyward.
He yanked himself up from the sand, and hurled his knife. Gull, crab, and knife plummeted to the rocks, creating a spray of shell fragments, and white feathers.
He hated the sea.
