The Seas by Samantha Hunt Read Free Book Online

ugly man, and as the evening passes I begin to see how he enjoys humiliating me. He spends the entire evening talking about a girlfriend he once had from California. When I say, “Oh, the Pacific,” he looks at me crossways. “You’re a real nut job. Has anyone ever told you that?” I don’t like this man. His thick lips make me feel sick inside, but I have a plan so I go though with it and later that night the man Neil says, “I like a lot of talk while we’re doing it.” I think of all the unleashed dogs on the streets. Their conversations in howl. “So that’s what a nineteen-year-old feels like,” he says, and I try to imagine the dark words he’ll use to describe this to the sailors he works with, to Jude.
    Still later, the ceiling in his bedroom.
    The hair on the man’s back.
    Jude is very mad about the man. He says he doesn’t want to see me.
    I say I am having trouble seeing him too. “I have to go to the eye doctor again,” I tell him, but he has already hung up the phone.
    A number of weeks pass. I don’t see Jude. I work a few days at the sardine factory and a few days as a chambermaid. I spend one day watching the square patch of sunlight that enters the bathroom window as it travels all the way across the room. I am in misery. Without Jude I have nothing to do. Finally the eye doctor returns.
    At his office a small albino boy waits in the front room. He doesn’t read a magazine so I assume his pink eyes are blind and I stare at him with no regard for manners. Eventually he says, “I can see you, you jerk.”
    “Sorry,” I tell him, but the boy won’t talk to me.
    The doctor calls me in. He asks me, “What do you see?” with his hand over one of my eyes.
    “Jude.”
    “Now the other?”
    “Jude.”
    “I see. Not much change. Well, at least it’s slow-moving.” I think of the patch of sunlight. “We’ll keep an eye on it,” he says
    I drive to Jude’s but I don’t go inside. Instead I look at myself in the rearview mirror, looking for whatever it is that deforms me to unlovable—slime or freckles or a tail. I stare and stare. I ruminate, as my mother would say, to the point of destruction, thinking so hard that it feels like drilling. Indeed, I’ve often imagined performing a dissection on myself so that I could better understand what’s going on inside me, but I am too scared to go through with it. Instead I stare in the rearview. Eventually after so much staring I say, “I can see you, you jerk.”
    I park and walk down to the water. I walk along the shore a long, good distance. There are no people on the beach this far from town. I walk even farther, over the rocks, so I can be all alone and away from my bad decisions. I think of the man Neil and find it impossible to believe that I let him inside of me. I think of Jude and worry that all the mermaid stories are true, that if he won’t love me, either he’ll have to die or else I will. I think of my father and I stop walking. I take all three of them, the hairy man, Jude, and my father, I ball them up and toss them over my shoulder. I keep walking away from them and, for a minute, I even run along the shore feeling light and lifted. I put one hand on my hip and one hand on the back of my head like a pin-up girl from a 1950s calendar. I swish my hips. Woo woo. Very sexy. After some deliberations I decide to leap. Ready, I prepare myself, start to run and launch into the air. It feels wonderful but halfway through the leap I get scared. I see something squirming up ahead and immediately long to be back on the sand. I abort my leap. I fall back to the ground. There is a creature flapping like a fish without air only it is far larger than any fish. I run to find out what the thing is, and as I approach I can see that it really is not a fish. It is King Neptune on the shore. He is hurt. He is squirming, trying to get back into the ocean. I am scared but I ask him, “King, do you want me to throw you back?”
    “Oh, dear. If