The Seas Read Online Free

Elephant Island on a far smaller boat than the boat he’d arrived on. The picture is tattered but I like it because the explorer was so brave. He left his marooned crew behind where their ship had been frozen solid, stuck in the pack ice. In a small launch he went for a rescue. He sailed into a cove on South Georgia Island in the Antarctic where he ate some albatross meat after not having eaten meat in a long time. He crossed a highly crevassed and dangerous glacier with brass screws taken from his launch fixed to the soles of his shoes so he’d not slip on the ice. Though he still did slip. In thirty-six hours he covered only forty miles. After the first hour or two his brain began to repeat words in the same patterned battering his boat had suffered. Oddly, he felt that the words did not grow out of him but came from some exterior source. The words were, “The girl who sold seashells will someday rot in hell. The girl who sold seashells will someday rot in hell.” The words repeated and repeated until their stresses were highly over-accentuated and he could not stop and in fact found himself marching across the crevassed tundra in time to the pounding of the words.
    I like the picture because it is the same with me only the words are, “He loves me not. He loves me not. He loves me not.” I don’t mean God or my father. I mean Jude the sailor, the mortal that I love.

LETTING GO OF RED
    Jude came home from the war in Iraq a year and a half after the president had declared the war was over. He wasn’t even supposed to be there at all. He’d already served three years and seven months of his term, but when the war started he decided to stay on for a bit. He needed the money. He doesn’t own a fishing boat and so he didn’t have much choice as there is almost no other way for men to make money here.
    When he finally got home we took a walk out on the small part of the bay that freezes every year. Since I was older than when he had left and had been pining for him the entire time he was gone, writing him love letters every single week, I thought that the purpose of the walk would be that he was finally planning on collapsing on the ground before me, planning to bring his lips to my winter boots and make out with them, writhing with love. This however turned out not to be the purpose of the walk. Jude was war-torn. He was distracted and I found that I had to make eye contact with him before I started talking or else he might not realize that I was speaking to him. Since he got home he’d been drinking a lot and taking some pills that an Army social worker had gotten for him when he was still enlisted. I was a bit frustrated as he’d been gone a year and a half and there were lots of things I wanted to tell him and this made it hard to. “Jude.” Wait for eye contact. He looks. Continue talking. “When you were gone the bay didn’t freeze and they said it was because of global warming but I don’t think so. I think it was because I’d come down here looking across the ocean to see where you went. I kept the ocean warm by just loving you. Can you imagine what—” A bird flew overhead and Jude turned his attention away. I lost him.
    “I want to move to Mexico,” he said. “Or Canada. I don’t care which one.”
    “Why? You didn’t kill anybody, right?”
    A fisherman had cut a circular hole in the ice and we stood on either side. Jude reached down through the hole. He didn’t answer. “I went to the Middle East on board a supply ship that was carrying some Bradley fighting vehicles and some other shit. There were these holding stations in the bottom of the ship that were five stories below the surface of the ocean and so there was a strange pressure on your brain down there.”
    “Like the bends?” I asked.
    “No. Like the pressure of a ship full of supplies and soldiers who are off to war and are too scared to speak and so start screaming at the ocean after days out at sea. Down in the hold, the