Jon was surprised and a little embarrassed when Gwen caught the fish. The fishing tackle she'd found in the lifeboat supplies had seemed so absurd: absurd that anyone could catch a fish on such a simple rig; absurd that anyone would be lost at sea in a modern lifeboat would turn to fishing to survive; absurd that two of them in a lifeboat built for twenty-five would go through the rations quickly enough for a few mouthfuls of raw Atlantic herring to seem appetizing. But here Gwen was, her thin fingers working the line as it slid against the gunwale of the partially open lifeboat, determined to drag whatever was thrashing on the end of the line aboard.


They had been adrift for five days, maybe as long as a week. Their midsized cruise ship, The Merriweather, had gone down somewhere between North Carolina and Bermuda. At least Jon believed it had gone down: it had been late at night; they had been terribly drunk, screwing on one of the deck chairs. There had been an explosion--that much he remembered--a bright spear of petrol flame bursting out of the side of the ship and setting the sea ablaze. Every alarm imaginable had gone off even as the deck was smothered in roiling black smoke.

Jon and Gwen were already been on the foredeck when the explosion rocked the ship. They had sprinted for the lifeboat, Gwen in a bikini top and a loose wrap, Jon in khaki shorts with his genitals hanging out the fly. They climbed in, waited for others, waited for crewmembers. They heard screams. They heard another rumbling boom. In a terrified haze, Jon followed the six clearly illustrated steps to launching the boat. It fell into the sea with a jarring, molar-rattling BANG. He thought they were going to roll over, realized he was hanging onto a railing with one hand, stuffing himself back into his shorts with the other. The Merriweather thumped into the lifeboat, knocking it aside, the two hulls sliding against one another with a scream Gwen was trying to match with her own. Jon thought he felt another boom shake both vessels: The Merriweather, 100 passengers, 22 crew including entertainers, wait staff, and cleaning crew, was absolutely going down.

But maybe it hadn’t.

When the ship had cleared the side of the lifeboat, it had chugged steadily along, aflame, billowing smoke, but neither listing nor slowing, the lights of the bridge and upper decks burning stoically as the alarms blared and the three other lifeboats remained steadfastly secured to their moorings.

The sea was small but enough to keep Jon and Gwen off of their decidedly not seaworthy legs. They huddled together against the rail, terrified and desperately ill, watching the burning Merriweather, their only source of light in the dark night, steam away towards an invisible horizon.

Jon was passed out before the glow disappeared; Gwen watched it shrink to a tear-blurred speck that slid smoothly over the edge of the world and vanished.

She hadn’t been keeping track, not really, but it occurred to her that this was like her and Jon’s fifth date, and their first overnight trip together.

Days passed. Absurd days, Jon would have insisted. They were in the Atlantic, between North Carolina and Bermuda. He knew shit about the sea and less about shipping lanes, but this had to be some kind of high traffic area. They’d done all the lifeboat things: activated beacons, dropped dyes, fired flares, set up radar reflectors. Well, Gwen had done it all. Rescue, Jon was absolutely convinced, was only hours away. Such chores were a waste of time.

Five days or maybe a week along, they've not seen another boat. They'd not spied any land. They ate survival wafers and drank water that tasted like tin. Gwen set up the rain-catching equipment, even though there were no clouds. Then she’d started fishing,

Her fist fish was either a herring or a polk. Jon had seen something like them in the seafood case at the grocer; lifeless eyes watching him from a bed of ice. This one watched him as well even as Grew laid it out on the bench. She still wore the bikini top and had improvised a sarong out of a silver survival blanket. She was twenty-seven, blonde, broad-faced and fit as an Olympian. Jon was careful about his diet, and this lifeboat situation was the longest he’d skipped the gym in nearly a year, but he was painfully aware the difference in their BMI. Still, that might be a feature instead of a bug if they somehow went not-rescued for absurd weeks or impossible months.

“I’m not eating any more biscuits,” she said. “this is real protein. We’ll need our strength if this keeps up.”

It won’t keep up, Jon thought but did not say. He was tired of hearing himself say rescue was but hours off, but he still believed it.

Gwen worked as a sales associate for a major hotel chain, but she’d taken dozens of culinary courses while pursuing her Hotels and Hospitality major. She wasn’t afraid of cleaning or eating a raw fish, even though every fish she’d cleaned until this moment was long dead. That seemed easily achieved. She took the small fish, about the length of her hand and wrist, and thudded the head against the bench.

The lifeboat supplies had a steel folding knife. “Help me with this,” Gwen said as she put the fish down on the bench that ran around the hull of the boat.

“What, should I boil some rice?” Jon asked. “Maybe get some dry seaweed?” He stayed where he was, crouched in the covered part of the boat. He didn’t want raw fish. He didn’t want to watch Gwen kill and gut something either. He turned away but turned back when he heard a curious sound, like the jangle of car keys, dropped onto the floor of the boat.

That’s just what it was.

“They were in the fish,” Gwen said, holding up the set of keys. She’d dunked them in the ocean, so they were clean of blood and slime. “I think that’s a boat key,” she said, pointing to a larger one that Jon would have guessed went to an import. “I think that’s the boat key.”

“Why, because it has a Merriweather keychain?”

“The ship went down; it must have. The fish are eating the debris. We might find something that could help us.”

“Gwen, listen to yourself,” Jon said m straining to sound reasonable. Was sea madness a thing? And when did it set in? How many days adrift? 5 days? A week?

She didn’t want to argue. There was something about the chrome key, largest of the three on the ring, the other two clearly for doorways or lockers, that told her it was the ignition key for the ship they had fled. There was also a small aluminum ring on the larger coil, and her imagination, she saw that one attached to a long rubber sponge, to float if dropped in the water. It had been floating like that when the fish saw the flash of silver and ate it.

But she couldn't prove it and her suppositions weren’t what was important at that moment.

“We need more fish,” she said, and that seemed to settle the matter. It wasn’t like they had anything better to do anyway.

The next fish was larger. Gwen slit the belly open, and there was another clatter. Jon watched in confusion as a CD case fell out onto the deck. Gwen picked it up; brushed away the goo. “Heaven on Earth,” she said, “Belinda Carlisle.” She opened the case; the disc was inside. “1987,” she said. “This is older than I am.”

She handed it to Jon, who accepted it in stunned obedience. Hands now free, she began digging around in the fish. Jin watched the thing’s mouth, and eyes shift as she contorted the abdomen. It was like watching a puppet work. Her hand came out with a sealed deck of playing cards, bearing the logo of the Lumière Place Casino in Saint Louis.

“Shit I was hoping for a cell phone,” Gwen said as she handed the deck of cards to him.

“This is insane,” Jon said. Apart from their being far, far away from Saint Louis, thus making the discovery of the cards unlikely the point of incalculable, of what possible goo would a cell phone be? The lifeboat had a beacon, and he doubted there were any towers nearby. They were already doing all the wireless outreach that could be expected.

Gwen stood up straight and held that posture without effort. She had more or less acclimated to the rocking of the boat. “We need to catch more fish,” Gwen said with determination. The CD was forgotten as she began sorting through the supply box, emerging with 50 feet of nylon rope and a roll of waterproof tape. “Bigger fish,” she said as she took the folding knife, and, using the waterproof tape, shaped it into a hook slightly larger than a paperback book.

“This is insane,” Jon repeated. “If you catch a fish that big, it will pull you overboard.”

“No it won’t,” Gwen replied. The lifeboat had two cleats fixed to the bow. She tied the rope off on the port side, wrapped it a few times then ran it to starboard and did the same, making a long loop that she hoped would disperse the weight of any fish hooked on the knife. “I need bait,” she said aloud. She looked at the fish she’d just gutted, but intuition warned her off of that obvious choice. Everything she’d caught so far, she’d caught using a silver or flashing lure, and she superstitiously wanted to trust to that luck. Besides, she wanted to eat that fish.

She took the Belinda Carlisle CD, taped it to the improvised fish hook.

“Gwen, don’t,” Jon said, almost pleading. She looked out at the water. The sun was setting, beautifully. She remembered how on their second night, he’d gotten amorous, still seeing this as a minor change of plan in their romantic getaway. She’d rebuffed him, then, and realized that while they’d been two people literally in the same boat, they were having distinctly different castaway experiences.

She set the hook and disc down. “Want to play some cards?” she asked.

He did. And they passed a pleasant evening, with a meal of raw fish and survival wafers. They even used the last of their glow sticks to keep the game going after the lingering sunset finally expired.

They always slept close to share warmth, but this time there was more to it than that.

Gwen was up before first light, preparing the hook and line. Jon said nothing.

The next fish weighed hundreds of pounds. It fought with terrible strength against the knife in its jaw, pulling the lifeboat through the water in starts and jerks. It seemed impossible that the nylon cord would hold, and Jon was frightened that Gwen would lose a finger or even a hand as she worked the line.

She was smart, however, and her hands were swift as she waited for slack in the cord as the great fish turned about and then with lightning speed she bound the cord around the cleat, shortening the line and bringing the fish nearer to the boat.

After two hours, the cord was less than ten feet long, and the fish frequently broke the surface alongside the lifeboat. Jon was terrified of the size of it, the strength of it, the puzzlement and fear he could see in the thing’s colossal eye as it rolled and splashed alongside. He was watching the eye when Gwen took a collapsible aluminum oar and jabbed the end of it into the fish's brain.

The thing died messily, kept fighting for long minutes.

Jon at first refused to help bring it aboard. But when she saw that she wasn’t going to give up, even though the fish likely outweighed her by a hundred pounds, he relented. They had their fingers in the monstrous fish’s gills. Jon thought the thing’s head would come right off, but they got it aboard. It took a long time, and it was exhausting. They were covered with blood and slime.

Gwen reached her arm deep within the fish’s torn and bloodied jaw and, after much struggle, withdrew the knife. The ball of tape that held it in a hook shape kept her from opening it. She plucked uselessly at the tape, exhausted, overwhelmed by what she had achieved. “I need a knife,’ she said weakly and laughed.

The sun was almost up. The light was still strange; it had been ten days, or maybe two weeks, and Jon had seen the sun come up over the Atlantic almost every one of those days, but he was still amazed by the strange way the new day shone off of the water and waves. He turned away from it and watched Gwen turn the hook in her hand and prepare to gut the dead fish. It would befoul the lifeboat, but there was no stopping her, he knew. And besides, there was nothing else to do.

The knife went in, and gore gushed out. The fish was filled with oddities, which they would examine and catalog in time: several mismatched china plates. A pair of gardening shears, the blades still wrapped in plastic. Three shotgun shells.

But something was moving in the entrails as well. Fitfully, without strength but undeniably alive.

Gwen picked the red-smeared thing up.

It was an infant. Eyes closed, hands grasping weakly.

“Oh my god,” she said, and looked at Jon, her eyes wide.

Jon stepped forward. It wasn’t breathing. Without thinking, he slid a finger into the time mouth and cleared the airway. The child—a boy—began wailing. Again, weakly.

“What do we do now?” Gwen asked.



The End