Storytime: A Bent Hook.

January 15th, 2014

Sometimes, I get folks that come to ask me a question. And it’s always the same question, and it’s always in the same way – timid, half-moused, delivered with a flinch and another dozen unsaid questions held behind it: “lady (hah!) Benthook, how do you fish so well?” Is it a secret? Is it a trick? Is it some rite you dance by moonlight, is it a chant that brings the fat ones up from below, is it a tallow you rub into your lines?
And each time I give them the long slow smile just far enough to make them start to twitch, and then I say, “why sir (or lady), I just remember the words my mother gave me to fish by,” as pretty and pious as a churchman. And it’s funny to see their faces light up like they do, or cloud over in disappointment (what’s she hiding behind that, huh?), because mama’s words were wise enough, but they weren’t any sort of magic.
“Listen, my oldest spawnlings,” old mama Benthook had whispered to me, hands busy with the lines and craggy head bent low to her knots. “The sea is for the failures. Every sorry thing with the wrong number of legs or eyes or heads sinks to the bottom of its big black heart and squirms there, hiding.” She pointed one long, scaly finger at us. “All you got to do to pull them out is be better than them. And no daughter of mine is a failure.”
Yes, mama’s words were wise enough.
Pity she weren’t always right.

“Get up, you.”
Grelly moaned at the bottom of her bed. I repeated myself, this time with my foot. Grelly arose. Simple story, same story every damned morning. Every one.
“Unnhh. Wurr. Whurr we goin’?”
“Fishing, Grelly. It’s a big moon, and that’s the ocean’s time. Get your mug and wipe the crud out of your eyes, it’s time.”
Grumbling and groaning followed, and before too long (it was always too long) we were pushing off the quay, hearing the same old waves smack against the same old wood and drinking the same old oily soup from the same old stone mugs. As the sun rose it would find us out in the shoals, first setting lines for the baitfish, then setting baitfish for the bigmouths, then (if we felt up to it) setting bigmouths for the razorjaws. And if we hooked one, I’d be the one to fight it, because when the stakes got high Grelly’s knees got weak and her palms got sweaty.
I heaved at my paddle and set to work, waiting a breath every four strokes to let my sister correct our course with her own lazy pulls. Simple story, same story every damned morning.
But not tomorrow.

On the nine hundredth stroke I stopped and sighed deep, tasted the air in all of my lungs. Yes, it was good here. The salt was flecked with that light oily scent that was the breath of fish, and lots of them. All packed together, side-to-side, with not an inch to spare. A mass of mouths all dying for a chance to stretch themselves and get some bites in.
I shook my head three times, stretched my arms, and started dumping my bait overboard.
“Cordill? What are you doing?”
I tipped the last of the four bait buckets overboard, humming a bit of an old song mama had taught me. It asked for fast jumps at the bobber and a strong pull in your arms.
“Cordill? We aren’t gonna have any left for later if you don-”
I reached out and grasped Grelly firmly by the nape, then heaved her overboard into the bait, face-first. She surfaced wasting her breath on swearing, and the more fool her because I had the paddle in my grip by then and a single whack drew blood and drove her back under.
Even with their brain banging against their skull, nothing outswims a Benthook, even Grelly. But mix that blood with the bait, and all those hungry mouths lurking all around you… well. I only needed the paddle three more times before she sank and didn’t come up again.
It was a quicker trip home that night, and with a bigger catch than usual in the canoe’s belly. A big old razorjaw, a matron, and with a belly ripe full of roe. Mama must’ve approved. I ate it raw, filled my mug and gullet with boiled oil from its liver, and threw my sister’s half-cracked cup into the midden with the first smile I’d owned proper in years.

I woke up early, heated up a morning soup with a rightful, uncompromising dose of salt, and paddled out farther offshore. Came back with a catch that nearly sank the canoe, spent the evening cooking, gutting, and carving, took the extra money left from the bigmouth cuts into town and bought a sack of red salt. Went to sleep early after filling in my sister’s bed with fresh dirt and a stone cap and drifted away as easily as if it were baiting a hook.
It was a good day. It was a new sort of day. It was the way all the days would be from now on, unless I decided to make them better yet. Maybe I’d even go hunting for a husband, now that the house had room…

Winter’s tail-end dripped away, along with the last of the morning mists. Now it was time for rain and sleet and fierce suns in dim skies, with waves that got angry and fast. Spring came with the big catches, but only if you had the teeth to bite into them and not let go.
Lightning struck the boat three times, an angry razorjaw nearly breached on me, and squalls broke out a half-minute from shining sunbeams every other day. Came back with the biggest hauls, week in, week out, and didn’t founder so much as once.
Maybe I’d get three husbands, and a cook. Maybe I’d get a warehouse. Maybe I’d hire out some hands to fish for me, like uncle did with mama, before the taste for the strong-sugar ate his teeth and wits right out of his skull. Not going to happen with me. Maybe uncle was a fool, but this daughter of Benthook wasn’t. The best vices were the safest vices, and those weren’t.
Then two months into spring I woke up, looked out the window, and saw a cherry-red sun rising into a sky already turning bluer than mama’s eyeballs. There was a hint of last night’s thunderheads slipping away over the far horizon on the back of a breeze that tugged heartstrings. A faint ghost of a big moon, a sea-moon, hung in the back of heaven.
It was a beautiful day. It was a perfect day. And it shouldn’t have been. We’d not even seen the face of summer yet, there should still be storms every week with daylong breaks for fog and dark. It got to me so bad I stopped by the churchstone before I left, to scrape a few prayers into the dirt at its base for the first time since mama died.
It would be fine. Just a gift for your hard work, that’s all. You’ve worked through the worst and come out shining bright as a fistful of diamonds, this is a chance to see what you can do with the best, that’s all. That’s all.

Went out farther than ever before. Didn’t even have to try to do it, the water was like a happy puppy under the bow, pulling me out and farther. Found myself taking breaks every fourth, like the bad old days – hah! There was no slacking here. Even the waves worked.
I stowed my paddle above a shoal so thick that the surface foamed. Tails and flukes broke water, now and then a little baitfish breached in the hurry of its attempt to avoid a happy bigmouth – usually failed.
The sky was empty. The wind was singing. My stomach was a nest of vipers.
I shook myself, stretched, and sighed in the air, felt the strong touch of the fish, then vomited into the bait bucket. I tried to breath, took in the smell again, and nearly choked as fresh heaves grabbed my gullet.
Fish, yes, there it was, there it was, but there was something else, something rancid and thicker than tar and familiar, something underneath…
Soft splinters reached my ears, and I looked downwards just in time to see the seams around the canoe’s keel double in width.
I stared. One hand groped for a bait-bucket as they doubled again. Then they tripled, then the water surged over my head.
All that water above me, but none around me – the fish were packed thick, like darting flies on a midden and three times as vicious. Baitfish tried to take shelter in my nostrils, bigmouths tasted at my fingers, and my claws did me as much good as spitting into a swell – blood flowed, but for no purpose.
I could feel a shriek brewing somewhere in my belly, and swallowed it. No failure. The canoe had split, but it would not have sunk. Up! Up! Swim, tear, pull up! No panic, feel the tug of the air in your lungs tell you the way! Up!
Light and dryness reached my fingertips even as more mouths worried at my heels, then my eyes slid above the glassiness and saw the shreds of the canoe’s starboard frame floating a reach away.
And stones-say, thank it all, the paddle was still there. I hauled out and clutched it with the love of a mother, gave myself a half-minute to curse and bless, then started the long, slow process of fighting back against that lovely breeze that had brought me here.

Night came in before I’d guessed, and it brought teeth under the big moon. Traces of bait, vomit and blood clung to the timbers of the canoe like fleas, and with them came an audience of hopeful scavengers, and with them came their predators, and with THEM came the razorjaws, slim and elegant little men and the heavyset bulk of the women, on the lookout for whatever strange beast had gone and torn itself to bits to float at the surface. Nosy animals, with nothing to satisfy curiosity with but teeth. I paddled, I swatted, and at morning who knew how much progress I’d made in miles but I’d lost yards of my raft to jagged, greedy teeth.
It was still beautiful out there, as I strained against half a paddle. A perfect sun in a perfect sky, beating down on me and cooking through my scales. Nothing to drink but salt water, with my mug at the bottom of the ocean. Nothing to eat but the gore that clung to the paddle’s handle, where a small razorjaw’s skull had proved softer than I expected. Nothing to see but flat blue, flat blue against a featureless sky without even the wind to guide me.
The wood creaked.

I didn’t turn, only breathed. And I didn’t inhale, because I knew what I’d smell; it was pooling all around me, as thick as the water that lapped at my kneeling legs as the raft settled deeper under the fresh weight. It was rotten brine and fish guts, mixed up and spread over a faint, familiar scent.
“Get off.” I’d said that. I didn’t want to, but I’d said it, and the voice was too cracked to even be mine. Someone was pretending to be me. “Go away.”
No noise at all, which made no sense. She could never shut up when it mattered. Was she going to make me say it? Could she speak, or was all the world down there as cold and quiet as a razorjaw’s smile? “Go away!”
A soft sigh at my side. Something dripped onto my shoulder.

Oh mama. You were right and you were wrong, all at once. The sea is for failures, but they do better there than we, hidden down there where we can’t see their secrets. And no daughter of yours stays a failure for long.
Get off, Grelly!

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