The Seas by Samantha Hunt Read Free Book Online Page A

you could,” he says.
    I edge up to him slowly. I don’t want to alarm him any further. I am surprised that someone as powerful as King Neptune could be hung up by something as shifting and dirty as a beach. “What happened?” I ask while trying to lift his back.
    “It’s embarrassing,” he says.
    “You don’t have to say if you don’t want to. You are the king of the ocean.” He is a tremendous creature, like a whale. So large I could be crushed if a wave rolled him onto me. I am getting quite wet in my efforts to assist the King.
    “No. It’s all right. I’ll tell you,” he says. “Broken heart.” King Neptune uses his arms to push toward the water. “There was a young girl,” he says. “Here, on the beach. I wanted to get closer to her. But as soon as I came in to the shallow water she stood up and ran away.”
    “I’m sorry. That’s sad.” I don’t really think it is that sad. I wonder what an old man was doing chasing a young girl but I don’t say anything. “Do you know my father?” I ask him.
    “What? A sailor?”
    “Yes.”
    “Sorry,” he says.
    “No. It’s not your fault.”
    King Neptune smiles like God. Like ninety-seven percent of the world’s water is in ocean. Like seventy-five percent of the world is covered with ocean. Like everything is his fault.
    “What about Jude? Do you know him? He’s down here a lot,” I say.
    “Yeah. I think so. He’s friends with that girl who has lost her mind? The one who thinks she’s a mermaid?”
    I stop helping King Neptune get back into the water. I stand back from him while he continues talking. “What I can’t figure out,” he says, “is why she’d want to be a mermaid. All mermaids do is swim around and kill sailors. It’s not a great job.”
    I stop helping him and when I start again I push hard. “I’m going to be a different kind of mermaid,” I tell the King.
    He turns and looks at me. His eyes are just as pale as mine. “You don’t get a choice,” he says. “There’s only one kind of mermaid,” he says and then, “Don’t forget that the ocean is full of everything except mercy.”
    I shove his back so that he’ll awkwardly be forced to bend at the hips. He is an old man and I am certain that he won’t have the flexibility in his bones, that it will hurt him. I push so hard that the vertebrae in his back cut me.
    Fuck King Neptune, I think, because growing up as a mermaid was a hard way to grow. When I was younger other children would not befriend me, but instead they would say loud enough for me to hear, “That house, that house is rotten in and out. That girl, that girl’s got bugs in her hair.” I’d fake to pick a bug from my scalp and eat it. Delicious. When I was younger I’d go down to the water and each wave would ask in a thug accent, “You want I should take care of those kids? You want I should tell your father?”
    But I’d let the children live. See, I have mercy.
    I push and push King Neptune and then I give up. And then I can see clearly. King Neptune isn’t, and underneath my cut hands is a rock shaped like a king, a rock deposited on this beach when the ice age flowed home, beaten, in retreat.

FOR REFERENCE
    The beach where the sea channel opens into the salt marsh is usually less crowded because the smell of sulfur can be strong when there is no wind. The mouth of the channel expands in a tongue so that it is uncrossable and children have drowned trying.
    Jude has brought three blankets, and at the edge of the dune he uses one and a few pieces of driftwood to make us a tent. Jude has forgiven me. He didn’t have much choice. Neither one of us really has any other friends.
    I fold my pants and sit cross-legged back down on the sand with a deep curve in my shoulders. I watch him unfurl the blanket. I am worn out by desire for him like a girl in some book.
    He removes his shirt but sits directly in front of me tucking his arms across his chest because of his weird scars there, scars that