annashay 
by Kate Horsley
WHEN THE SHOUTS START, Solveig is certain Lukas has gone overboard. Yesterday, he was drinking from dawn and split his palm with a gutting knife. She wonders if he’s more likely to kill himself off or take someone else down. Her father always said there was nothing more dangerous than a drunk on a fishing boat, and nothing more common.
Shouting is followed by the thud of something heavy and wet hitting the deck. Blood fattens the air, turning it greasy and sickening. If Lukas is hurt, the others can manage it. She doesn’t want to see. But then the boat lists in a big wave and Solveig skates the deck with the rest of the crew like curling stones reaching goal. Gloved hands grip the sides until the swell subsides. The crew forms a tight circle. In the space between their deck-booted feet lies the net, dark-webbed round something pale.
‘Found her,’ Lukas says, voice rising in triumph. Unhurt and strikingly sober, he kneels by the net. ‘I know she’s a small one,’ he says, ungloving his hurt hand to brush seaweed from flesh.
His bare thumb tenderly parts long hair to reveal what seem to be tiers of ruby feathers fanning the delicate throat. Solveig kneels, somehow unable to help herself taking an interest. More than an interest—a fascination—in the way freckled skin skimming ribs is slashed red as sockeye salmon. She has gills. Gills that are ravenous for air. Flesh silvery with oil and striped at shoulder and hip like a mackerel’s. Under dirty blonde hair that’s matted with kelp and studded with barnacles, bruised eyelids flicker.
‘Come on man,’ grunts the captain, Gunnar, crossing his arms, ‘she’s not small, she’s tiny. Looks like fry. We should throw her back. Bad luck to keep a small one.’
‘Doesn’t smell too fresh.’ Olav kicks the net and hoicks a glob of phlegm which yo-yos from his nether lip before landing in the fish’s hair.
The woman’s hair.
Solveig can’t breathe. Out here in the Arctic gulf, they’ve discovered a new species and no one is even surprised.
‘Sure, she’s a little thing, but I don’t mind that.’ Lukas grins up at his crewmates, except for Solveig, who’s eye he’s never met since she came aboard. ‘I mean look—’ His hand cups her breast.
The netted thing bucks and gasps. Gold eyes open, round and furious, pupils black points. Lukas’s hand shudders and his body seizes as if he’s grabbed hold of an electric eel. The crew feels the creature’s current prick the arm of each in turn, threading them around their catch like a circuit, then spilling them to the deck.
Solveig is sure Gunnar will have his way and throw the thing back. But she finds herself swinging the net with the rest and hoisting it into an empty cooler as if it was ninety pounds of chum salmon.
Lukas, his jaw set, tosses in buckets of seawater. Solveig expects the girl to float, but she sinks to the bottom of the cooler, curled in on herself like a conch. Chains of silver bubbles anchor her gills to the surface. Fronds of dull gold hair drift up to caress them.
‘She’s treasure,’ thinks Solveig, pulling off her thick orange gloves to stroke a tendril of the long hair ever so gently. ‘I want her.’ Before she can fathom where the strange thought comes from, Lukas slams down the cooler lid, narrowly missing Solveig’s fingers.
‘Hands off,’ he snaps. ‘This one’s mine.’
*
That night, they’re becalmed, the sea so smooth, it feels like the morning after a storm. Solveig, who sleeps soundly through tempests, thrashes in her sheets, one thought circling her head over and over: the girl in the cooler—her stretch of scaled thigh, her froth of hair.
It surprised Solveig how easily she landed the trawler job. If she hadn’t been desperate, she’d have suspected Lukas and Gunnar—the two that hired her—of being drug runners. On this, their first return trip from the Gulf of Alaska, she’d come to believe they really were fishermen. Now the girl from the sea is onboard with them and Solveig is the only one surprised by her existence; her crackle of power. If Solveig could sleep, she’d dream the girl and wake up tasting her.
Back in Tromsø, she and Father sailed their cutter into the North waters and Father taught her to line and net, to gut and dress cod, halibut, wolf fish. He explained he was showing her how to fish because if times got thin, the sea would save her, ‘Just as long as you never drink, Solveig.’
‘I promise,’ she told him, and it was a simple oath to keep, since heroin was her drug of choice.
The cold, the isolation, of this trawler were supposed to get her clean like no rehab could, rubbing away the stains of that dingy squat in Sitka, erasing her past life cell by cell, the marrow-deep cold anaesthetising her better than a morphine hit. Now her skin itches and her back’s slick again, like the days starving for a taste; that Olso flop-house, the needle making her whole. Yes, one touch of the girl would give her peace enough to sleep.
She stares at the wire mesh base of Lukas’s bunk, hanging over her like a curse. From the first day, she hated his careless way with a knife, the reek of hooch on his breath. Now her hatred fuses—a magma fissure, a swollen boil.
The way he slammed the lid on her. ‘She’s mine,’ he said.
She could have gutted him.
*
On deck, Solveig opens the cooler lid. The girl swims in tight circles. Each time she reaches one end of the cooler, her slender legs tense and she pushes herself off again, shuttling back and forth like a trapped eel, the moonlight gilding her.
‘I love you,’ says Solveig.
‘Touch me, then,’ says the creature, rolling onto her back
And Solveig does, dipping her arm into the freezing water, mesmerised by the way the girl’s fingers weave between hers, tattoo-needling their electron flow, soft as a kiss this time; one that builds, flooding Solveig’s aching body with dopamine, better than any hit.
Solveig can’t let go or even break eye contact. Memories silt inside her, each grain a vivid film of swimming, sleeping, being hauled in over and over. She feels the noose of a net, the slice of a knife, the sickening sway of trawler after trawler, the knowing laughter of each crew. Underneath silver skin, the girl is full of metal barbs and harpoon shrapnel like some ancient whale. The head-trip is spliced with flashes of one face in particular: Lukas has caught the girl before, trapping her weeks sometimes.
Often as not, he’s persuaded a captain to lash the girl to the boom so her screams make shoals of salmon leap into the boat. They sail home rich.
It’s what he always wants.
Well, one of the things.
Then he throws the girl back for a little while. But lately her freedom feels worse than the cooler, just biding her time until she’s caught.
*
The thing is, Solveig’s father taught her so much before he died at their flat in Tromsø that was as spare as a hair shirt. It was as if he knew how her habit would gobble the best of her, only leaving this husk, this need.
Those freezing trips into the North waters.
The lectures.
The silences.
The tasks.
They were gutting knives.
A boundary fence.
For this.
*
One step follows the next all too easily: lowering the cooler into the inflatable, setting a fire in the galley, rowing away. When the trawler blows, Solveig and the girl are still close enough to be sunburned by the blast.
Debris pelts the water around them and Solveig feels a shiver pass from the girl to her. Lukas won’t be coming now.
Solveig smiles and raises the oars. Four hours to Sitka in a dinghy like this. If she stays still, she’ll freeze.
Surely one more touch can’t hurt, though?
She lays the oars down and lifts the lid of the cooler, wrapping a stray tendril of hair around her finger.
The needle-sting is instant.
Vein fire.
Ice kiss.
Everything.
Nothing.
A question.
Bubbling up in a silver chain from red slits of gills. ‘Why am I trapped still? You said you would free me.’
Solveig strokes the girl’s mackerel-striped flank, more alive, calm, clear-headed than she’s ever been. ‘And I will, in a little while,’ she says. ‘I promise.’
oOo
Kate Horsley’s first novel, The Monster’s Wife, was shortlisted for the Scottish First Book of the Year Award. A subsequent novel, The American Girl, was published by William Morrow. Both books have been optioned for film. Her short stories have appeared in a number of anthologies and magazines, such as Strix, Storyglossia, Momaya, Needle, & Cake, and placed in competitions including Bath, Bournemouth, Bridport, Frogmore, and Oxford Flash Fiction. She is the editor of Inkfish Magazine.
