The Seas Read Online Free Page B

has never kissed me despite his kissing most girls who live here, this far north. Jude thinks he is too old for me. I think I could cut a strip of flesh from his upper arm and eat it.
    “You smell like 3-in-One,” he tells me.
    I think that is a compliment until I realize he means the appliance oil. I think on it a bit longer and open my neck up, 3-in-one. He holds me. He hollows me. He hells me.
    He doesn’t talk about the women he goes out with and when I ask him he says, “But that’s got nothing to do with you and me.” That’s not the way I see it, and so eventually Jude gets drunk and then I ask him and then he tells me everything not just about the women but everything. “We did it in the basement of the ironworks,” he’ll say or “You know her husband doesn’t care what she does at night,” or, “Those cuts on my ribs are because I am trying to open gills before the flood comes.” So he doesn’t really have any secrets and he doesn’t really have any gills because where he cut himself scarred up with thick, white, foamy tissue and nobody could breathe through that.
    Twice since he’s been back I have seen Jude walking with women who I know are his girlfriends. Once I saw Jude and a woman waiting outside the SeaScrubbers Laundromat. It was cold out but the woman and Jude stood outside. The woman was standing behind Jude and using her fingers like a comb through his hair. I watched for as long as I could until I began to imagine that she was yanking his hair out in clumps and dropping it on the sidewalk that was already filthy with dryer lint. I was so mad. I realized that if she actually did yank out Jude’s hair it would make me happy so I walked away. The second time I saw him with another woman, it was a different woman. I remember this one because Jude was sitting with her in the Reach Road Restaurant and they were sitting on the same side of a booth. The other bench was just empty, like they didn’t care what other people thought.
    When I see him walking with women that I don’t know I feel how I am not a part of this town. I feel as though I were floating in the surf and saw him on dry land with another woman but when I swim to shore I realize too late that I don’t have legs but a big tail and then I am beached and suffocating and the people who live in town are poking me with a stick wondering, “What the hell is she?” I can’t breathe. When I see Jude with women that I don’t know I feel like my eyes are suffocating me. As though what I see is choking me. Jude’s girlfriends hurt me. They take my breath away and leave a mark like the bright blue residue on my eyes after flash photography. In the moment that I stop breathing the picture of whatever burned me becomes trapped. I’ll see a blue afterimage and it looks like Jude in a cheap bar with a woman cheaper than me.
    I asked an opthalmologist for help. He comes to town once a month like the full moon. He is part of a traveling medical clinic paid for by the state for poor people. I thought that because of this he was probably stretched too thin. I worried he wouldn’t grasp the subtleties of my problem. When I called to make the appointment a tired nurse inquired, “Well, what seems to be the problem?” So I told her I was in love so badly that it was affecting my vision.
    “Are you wasting my time?” she asked.
    “No, Miss.” I realized too late that I should have said Ma’am instead of Miss.
    “Well the doctor’s got an opening next Tuesday. Come then.”
    On Tuesday there is a selection of old magazines in the state’s waiting room. Some are catalogs, some are for horse owners or women or amateur photographers or doctors and medical students. I take one of these with me into Examination Room B. After five minutes or so the doctor enters. He switches on a very narrow piercing light for looking into eyes with. He asks, “Well, what seems to be the problem?” So I tell him.
    “I am in love and it is affecting my