Monterey Bay by Lindsay Hatton Read Free Book Online Page A

the sound coming at her through a fortress of tendon and flesh and bone. Put it in a bucket, put it in your hand, squeeze it, and make it soft. He knew her name, but she didn’t know his. And the fact that thisinequity barely troubled her was the first indication of something she hadn’t even expected to consider: that failure, as she had always understood it, might be something else entirely.
    Then, a duet of sounds that made her jump. Footsteps climbing the exterior stairs, a voice calling her name.
    She jerked away from the biologist’s body. He vaulted off the bed.
    â€œYou’ll want to freshen up?” he asked, dressing himself with remarkable speed. Her clothes still lay in a pile next to the pillow.
    â€œPlease.”
    â€œI’ll tell him you’re in the bathroom.”
    He nodded vigorously, glanced over to where the jug and the sketchbook lay upended on the floor, and left the room.
    When he was gone, she rose from the mattress, the pain in her head snarling instantly back to life. She didn’t feel strong enough yet to put on her clothes, so she staggered to the bathroom naked. In the bathroom, it was very difficult to stand, so she gripped the edge of the sink and looked into its basin, the color of which seemed to be the same color as the throbbing between her eyes: a mottled white that wanted very much to be clean but wasn’t. She could hear voices from the front room, the words obscured. There was fluid running down her thighs and she needed to wipe it away, but she was afraid to let go of the sink. So she tightened her grip and stared into the mirror. The wound looked precisely the way it felt, like something out of acomic strip: deep, diagonal, a battlefield gash running all the way from her hairline to the bridge of her nose, the broken skin sealed shut with thick and uneven stitches, a patch of lurid blackish purple marking the place where her forehead had hit the rocks.
    â€œMargot!” her father called.
    She bit her cheek and looked down.
    â€œMargot!”
    â€œOne moment!”
    She looked up again. And even more affirming and more cartoonish than her wound, somehow, was the rest of what she saw in the mirror: her face and body, yes, but also the bathtub behind her. Like the sink, the tub was stained and chipped and dirty white, but instead of being empty, it was filled with the pus-colored bodies of nearly a hundred tiny crabs, their small forms scampering over and under one another, clawing at the walls as if trying to escape a catastrophe only they could predict or understand.

4
1998
    WHEN SHE ARRIVES AT THE AQUARIUM—FOR REAL this time,not in the prior night’s dream—she receives his first message. A mass beaching of Humboldt squid on the same spot where, as a girl, she once read the morning paper.
    It’s upsetting on many levels, but mostly because it’s a distraction. For weeks now, she’s tried to whittle down her focus to a single point: to the release of the
Mola mola
, or ocean sunfish, a longtime aquarium resident that has grown far too big for both its tank and a conventional sort of extraction. She’s sketched out some plans, she’s consulted with her aquarists, but decisions like this are far easier discussed than made, so she rises from her desk in her office in the administrative wing, puts her work aside, and goes to the window. The first body—nearly four feet long and red as blood—has already rolled up with the surf, tentacles and mouth arms twisted like intestines. The second oneappears moments later, bigger than the first, mostly white with some purple around the eyes, which are the size of bocce balls and just as blind looking. When the third body materializes, she knows it’s only a matter of time. The institute scientists will show up, a jogger on the bike trail will get nosy, the tourists will descend and congratulate themselves on their discovery, so she postpones the task at hand. She