Bosephus baited the lure with the dead man’s toe adrift in the bowl of their skiff, then, with a weak throw, cast his line out into the mist. The reel whirred as the black toe whipped through the veil of mist and out of sight, where it plunked into the sea.
The dead man’s body, recumbent against the pointed front of the skiff, lurched as the boat rocked, knocking away the thin fingers of mist crawling up its side.
Bosephus held his breath as the bloated corpse sunk into the boat and splashed at his feet. As he righted it, he saw the rotting green skin of the dead angler’s face. Its extremities—his extremities—however, appeared charred and flaky. Black blisters and pink apertures, miniscule as termite holes, climbed up his forearms. The same marks spotted his calves, before, submerged in the trespassing water, they sloughed away like the wax of a burning candle.
Swaths of pale-yellow skin from the angler’s hands and feet scudded through the skiff like eels and brushed up against Bosephus’s ankles. He bailed them, and as much water as he could, out with the empty bait pail.
Bosephus did not know the dead angler. He knew his name, but to know someone’s name alone is to not know them at all. Names lie and they mislead. They carry with them ideas, personalities, habits, all their own, disconnected from the individual who bears them.
To call it—him—Josiah was worse than calling him ‘the dead angler.’ The dead have no use for names, and even then, had his companion been alive, Bosephus’s own name would be worthless to him; would be better replaced by the designation mute. For so often, in the eyes of others, people are not individuals. Instead, they exist as their simplest reduction. A person is only an individual when it is suitable for another, convenient. Otherwise, they are best left an implement, a tool used or ignored at the discretion of others. A mute logger. A dead angler.
Though Stillgate is a small isle, ever since the beginning of the rite of anglers, its inhabitants have kept to themselves. The men fish in pairs only when necessary and the women convene only to run the rite’s lottery. Stillgate’s children alone know each other by name.
The dead-stick rod laid slack against the gunwale, unmoving.
Shouts from the shore reached through the mist, though Bosephus could not make out the individual words.
Bosephus imagined the villagers of Stillgate standing along the coast. The men in their waders, knee-high in the surf, their wives and children along the bank above them in bright-coloured slickers. All waiting on Bosephus, the remaining of the chosen anglers.
For the inhabitants of the coastal village Stillgate, those who bunk in cabins on high stilts above the sea, depend on the anglers. Come the end of the season of spawning, when the water chills and the days grow short, when the sea deprives the village of its only sustenance, the rite of anglers begins.
The rite began long ago, as all great rituals do, in response to suffering. When the seabirds still circled the sky. When the season of ice and deprivation first arrived in Stillgate. When the sea hardened to hematite and forced the villager’s hungry faces back at them. Without fish, months of snow and hunger passed. The bearded men and pale faced women ate what little vegetables the island permitted them to grow. They survived off Golden beets and red algae, which they cooked into Stillgate pudding: a viscous brown stew, which tasted of dirt and ocean air. At first, the children, spoiled on mackerel and cod, fussed, and refused to eat it, but eventually, as the season grew worse, they ate as much as they could.
Many of Stillgate’s inhabitants, the old, the lame, those who ventured onto the ice, succumbed to the frost. Come the season of thawing, the population decreased to a mite of what it once was. Those remaining, mothers to chill-deathed children, sons of starved fathers, and neighbours to ill-fated fishermen, would not allow the season to ravage Stillgate again.
To gird themselves against the coming of the next season, Stillgate’s men robbed the sea of fish night and day, taking more than they could eat and more than their wives could preserve.
For a time, with their nets and bellies full, the villagers forgot their hardships. The children danced on the sand to the fishermen’s tunes and swam under sun and moon alike beside their father’s boats.
While they sang, the men paddled their skiffs, dangled their legs from the pier, ever angling, for the masses of fish did not stop. The women spent their days like philosophers, picnicking on the bank, their symposiums oft about the virtues of the isle, or how far the rippled sea stretched, sometimes about what lay beyond the white shoulders of mountains too far for a row.
The children, when not at play, sat attentively, listening to the great sages and orators, as one listens to her own mother. For all Stillgate’s learned women mothered all its children like their own.
Everyone knew one another. No door laid shut to any. Nobody stole. Nobody possessed more than anyone else. Children alone committed crime, and only once, for they knew not what they did. Once their mothers sat them down along the banks by the sea and explained the hurt they caused, they never transgressed again.
Indeed, for a time Stillgate laid tranquil, as the sea licked its shores, and the sun lit its sky. But come the end of the season of spawning, mists billowed up and crawled along the water’s edge. A foreboding wind blew through all Stillgate. Putrid, it smelt not of salt nor of sea, but of rust and dead wood.
Faced with the foul wind and the clinging mist, joy left the men’s songs, and the women abandoned the grassy banks, and instead, held conference indoors. Quiet overcame the village. The crash of the tide and the hiss of the wind replaced laughter and song.
Only the children remained by the shore. Bronze-skinned, they stood in the sand and dared each other to wade out into the mist, past where they could see.
Some of the girls and a few of the boys ventured up to where the mist thickened into a solid wall, allowing the fog to swallow them up till, from the shore, they appeared but a distant splash. The ones who did returned thrashing the water, short of breath, their hearts thumping in their chests. For, there was something in the water, a dark shape drifting through the mist.
To the first who waded into the mist, an auburn-haired girl of thirteen named Shirley, it was the arms of drowned soldiers, with their pikes raised high above the water, cutting through the fog.
Those who entered the water next could not say what they saw, a movement, a slight ripple in the water followed by a coil of sea-foam.
The last child to wade into the mist, a skinny boy with a torn lip named Jonas, journeyed further than the rest. Not because he was braver, for he shivered before his toes ever touched the water. No, he knew fear, yet he waded far beyond the rest of them, curiosity pushing him further adrift, until the water rose past his jaw, forcing him to swim. He held his breath as he pierced the mist.
The other children beckoned to him. They called through the mist, and asked what he saw, but received no reply.
Hours passed. The sound of Jonas’s paddling had long faded. Though the children discussed it, and goaded one another, none braved the water in search of him.
As the fog crept up the bank and advanced towards the village, many search boats sailed through the crest of the mist, but each day, the skiffs chopped through foggier waters. It became impossible to see, and the anglers, in all their sailing, found no trace of the boy.
Jonas never returned.
A Sorrow, denser than the fog, returned to Stillgate. Death, not the peaceful ebb which the elders experienced in their old age, but the burning, lung crushing, death of drowning, was nonexistent in Stillgate. For it to happen to a child of the village was unthinkable. The grief was too great for many, and just as the sea hardens from the harshness of the season of ice, so did the hearts of Stillgate when faced with the cruelty of Jonas’s death.
Blame rankled. The mist cast everyone with the same disguise, one of a stranger. Parents held tight to their children. No longer were they the village’s, but their own. Protection required a careful eye, not many negligent blind ones.
Forbidden from the sea, the children stayed indoors, under the watchful gaze of their birth mothers. With their chins on the windowsills, the children gazed out into the haze. The sea chortled at them, mocking their imprisonment.
Soon enough, a castle of fog surrounded the entire isle, and forced the anglers to dock their skiffs, for the walls of fog stood so thick, it became too easy to go adrift and lose the direction of the isle. Instead, they fished from the pier, casting lines into the tenebrous sky, and reeling back unbitten lures.
Until one day, as the anglers reeled in their lures and took up their pails, a trilling voice, low and sharp, slipped out the sea:
A polluted sky and an empty sea, the voice bellowed. My portents you did not heed.
The whole sea beneath the anglers quaked. It tossed and spat gouts of foamy water upon them.
I offer you who pillage the sea, a simple bargain. One of your spawns, so you may hunt mine.
The black water bubbled and frothed. An aura of white foam surrounded the docks as they shook and split under the angler’s feet.
You have taken your fill. Now, I shall take mine.
#
“Josiah.”
This was the name the women called over the storm and sea during the dockside lottery, as they pointed at an old man with a sparse, white beard.
A relentless pelting of sea spray peeled from the dark water and whipped the villagers’ faces, drenching them blind. The violent squall inundated the dock as if a God upended the sky and the villagers cowered at the volley of its lateral rainstorm.
“You are chosen. Please step into the skiff,” said a woman with black hair, matted against her forehead from sea spray.
When the old man did not move, two broad-shouldered men, their faces obscured by mist, approached him.
“Get away from me!” the old man shouted.
He cursed the isle and the surrounding sea, and shoved away the two men who accosted him.
“Murderers!” he screamed, slapping away the pale hands which seized him. “This is not right. It cannot be I. Commence the lottery again. Begin again! This whole process must be redone!”
“Where was this protest last rite, when you stood among the unchosen?” said the voice who called the lottery, a woman masked by the mist. “Others make sacrifices for you, but you will not make sacrifices for them?”
“My life has been nothing but an unrewarded sacrifice.” Josiah looked around at the sallow faces of the villagers, curled with mist. “You would send an elder to death for your false God? I built this very pier! Your houses sit high above the waves on stilts I built, yet you would send me into the death mist? None of you have courage enough to step forward against this cabal of wretched women, or take an old man’s place?”
Bosephus stood among the crowd. He stared at his feet, for he could not meet the old man’s gaze.
“You are chosen. No one can replace you. You have seen more lotteries then most. You know this,” said the lottery caller.
“There must be someone else. You must take someone else.” Josiah fell to his knees. Tugging on the hem of the woman’s dress, he said, “I cannot step into that skiff knowing I will never set foot on the shore again. I laboured my whole life for Stillgate, I must be buried in its sands.”
The two men in slick black waders lifted Josiah from the pier. He bit their hands and they released him. Josiah fell back, and smashed his head on the pier. The two men stood over him, then kicked him in the ribs.
The calling of the lottery continued.
“Bosephus,” the woman called over Josiah’s whimpering.
Bosephus’s heart raced at the sound of his own name. He stood, silent, and watched Josiah writhe along the pier, unable to look away. Thoughts of escape rushed through his mind, but his fate lay before him. He witnessed what had happened to Josiah, the same fate which befell his own father on that day, years ago, when the islanders ignored Bosephus’s own pleas. When, held back by the lottery caller, his screams dissolved like the seabirds of yore through the mist, scraping his voice raw as their echoing calls, never to return.
“I said, Bosephus.” the woman pulled her dark hair from over her squinted eyes.
Bosephus stepped forward, his eyes set on the crumpled old man as the two anglers threw him into the skiff.
“Have you any protest to these rites?” she asked, spitting out the salty spray which leapt from the sea and into her crooked mouth.
When he said nothing, she continued, “A true son of Stillgate. Join Josiah in the skiff. All you require rests inside it.”
#
Bosephus sculled the skiff into the mist. Josiah laid, wheezing, his arms hung over its side.
On the pier, shrouded by the dense fog, Josiah had appeared much younger. But up close, mere feet away, Bosephus saw all the wrinkles in his face and the way his spine hooked and buckled him over. At his age, the beating on the dock would kill him before the rites ever began.
Bosephus stopped sculling and looked over his shoulder.
He saw nothing through the mist.
#
Bosephus could not say when Josiah died. Every time he thought him dead, prodding him from his end of the skiff with his boot, a moan crawled out from between his cracked lips.
In this intermediate period, when Josiah was both alive and dead, both Josiah and the dead angler, Bosephus heard a voice, low and pained:
Why not take your chances? Cast yourself over the gunwale?
When he turned towards the front of the skiff, he expected to see Josiah’s face. Instead Bosephus saw the bloodied side of his head, laid limp over the gunwale; the same position it occupied when they left the pier.
It was only once Bosephus ate the last of the worms in the bait pail, and began using it to bail out the skiff, that he noticed the green flesh of Josiah’s feet, struck through with veins, and knew, despite the continued voices, he was dead.
#
Atop the thwart, Bosephus felt the toss of the sea. No sunlight filtered through the hanging walls of mist. He no longer knew the direction of the shore. The inside of his stomach felt barbed.
Icy gusts of wind lifted the thin white hairs on the dead angler’s head, and revealed all the black and purple veins zigzagging up his scalp.
The reel at Bosephus’s side whirred.
He reached out and grabbed hold of the rod’s handle as the blank crooked down towards the water. The line twanged as more of the wire unwound, and the drag of the rod grew heavier. Bosephus gripped the rod tighter and braced his legs against the ribs of the skiff.
The line went taught. It nearly fell from Bosephus’s grasp.
He cranked the reel and pulled back on the line with what little strength he had left. Beneath him the skiff rocked and he struggled to keep it from capsizing.
Something heaved hard on the line and pulled the rod from Bosephus’s hands. The skiff yawed. The violent jolt dragged Bosephus and the dead angler overboard.
Bosephus struggled out from underneath the overturned skiff and pushed his head above the water. Taking in quick, panicked breaths, he saw the body of the dead angler, half-eaten by a wall of mist.
Though he lunged for it, Bosephus could not keep the corpse from drifting through the mist and out of sight.
Waves lapped at Bosephus’s neck, and kicked up water into his eyes and mouth. As water invaded his ears, he heard nothing but the muted crashing of the sea.
He treaded water, and craned his head around at the encroaching mists and the overturned, wandering skiff.
Which direction was Stillgate? Was he supposed to go towards or away from it?
His head bobbed. Water stung his eyes. He titled his head, but could not drain the water from his ears.
Bosephus swam in the opposite direction of the angler’s corpse. Whether he moved towards or away from Stillgate, he could not know.
Through the mist he swam, as if through the thick smoke of a great pyre. For hours, nothing but the haze and the black-green sea. Then, as his legs dragged him down and his arms gave out, a mountainous shape peeked through the miasma.
The fog dispersed as Bosephus approached. What he at first took for a mist draped alp, was in fact a sunken God.
Tall as towers, the bone-white spines of its back surged above the sea’s black rim, below which laid the vast, snaking corpse of a colossal sea serpent. Chains of dirty emerald scales, the size of shields, patterned its coil. Nothing but its massive, tapered head breached the surface.
Bosephus grabbed onto its jaw and lifted himself into the cavern of its mouth. He collapsed atop its cribriform tongue.
Somewhere beyond the mist laid the isle Stillgate, too far for return.
About the Author
Kyle Kevan Constantin is a writer of short fiction. His work has appeared in The Foundationalist and Spectrum.
