Fiona’s Reviews > The Seal Wife > Status Update

Deprived of oxygen, the fish are sluggish; they slide into the mud bank in slimy, shining heaps, gills wide, eyes staring. A few slap convulsively against one another as they wait to be decapitated. The saddest noise, Bigelow thinks, like clumsy, drunken applause. It’s his job to hatchet off their heads. Another guy takes off the fins and tails; someone else pulls out the guts. Then the last in line packs the meat

Water squelches up around Bigelow’s boots as he walks outside. In a few days, each foot-shaped puddle will teem with mosquito larvae, tiny black fish-shaped things. The summer he arrived he collected some from a ditch, held the glass of swarming water to the light and peered through a magnifier. Like commas or tadpoles or sperm. Except they don’t so much swim as fold and unfold themselves in a furious series of

Stalking his new, invisible quarry, Bigelow realises that he’s been dead for the past year. Dead every since the Aleut disappeared; and while the idea frightens him—surely his essence doesn’t reside with a woman, to be borne off at her whim—it’s hard to regret the way he feels now that he has another focus for his longing. It’s only a matter of time before he finds her in the town,

Even if he felt like making the effort, there’s nothing in walking distance that might pass for a Christmas tree. In the past year, Anchorage has consumed all the forest around itself, milled or hammered or incinerated every useable branch within miles, leaving stumps, like fields of gravestones in the weird blue twilight of noon.

August. The air is filled with migrating birds, some so high they look like handfuls of pepper tossed into the wind, others low enough that their cries deafen him. Geese fly at the top floor’s big windows, mistaking reflected sky for the real thing. Those that are only stunned fall to the ground, where they lie on their sides paddling their webbed feet with helpless convulsive jerks. Once upright, they flap and

When sled dogs aren’t working they’re staked, and Bigelow has grown accustomed to the sight of chains disappearing into the dens the dogs dig in the snow. But, invisible as the animals are when he walks through town, they fill the night with their wailing, like hideous hymns to the devil—once they begin, stars wink out and the bright moon sinks in the sky. Fingers in his ears, wool watch cap, earmuffs, parka

Bulletins. Warnings. Advisories. The Weather Bureau was once a division of the Army Signal Corps and speaks the language of alarm. Famous for its mercilessly swift transfers, for personnel orders effective within forty-eight hours, the bureau gave Bigelow just that long to book his passage and pack what he owned—no time to worry about where he was going until he was standing on the deck of the Siren