3. Little Fish, Bigger Fish — Chapter 4
I am serializing my collection Stories from The Last Basin currently available on Amazon. The stories are best read in the order of Table Contents:
Little Fish, Bigger Fish
by John Anthony, 2021
Chapter 4
On this mild August evening David’s friend Sam Ramirez had told David he was going to try his luck at some night-fishing from the pier, so David, always willing to spend as much time next to his Pacific muse as possible, decided to drop by before meeting up with Luna and attempting to sort out what was going on. Sam was pretty much part of the group, but he didn’t go to the beach and waste his days; he worked at his family’s bakery. David used a quarter to ride the Carlyle Ave. bus down to 4th St. and Colorado Blvd. and then walked the rest of the way on his trip to the tip of the pier. The sun was just setting over the Santa Monica mountains, in the west above Point Dume, the nub of land at the end of the bay which is actually south of the bay’s most northern shores. It was still disorienting for David, who grew up with the simple notion that the Pacific Ocean was due west, but his actual watery horizon was south-southwest. He crossed under the historic arched neon sign grandiloquently announcing:
* YACHT HARBOR *
SPORTFISHING * BOATING
Cafes
And then over the bump in the pier caused by the McClure Tunnel and an exit ramp from Highway 1 that placed cars onto Ocean Ave. and eventually found himself on a long stretch of pier that had only sand below. Directly beneath there was a warren of ancient boat lockers, now long gone but still in use then, built between the pilings that were buried deep in the sand. There was no concrete bicycle path cleanly tunneling underneath and brightly lit at night, either. Back then it was just pilings and darkness and tales of a rough trade that would arise as darkness fell. David had no inclination to confirm the common belief, but he assumed there was some truth buried in the stories.
The streetlamps flickered on, outlining the extent of the pier and separating it from the darkening ocean. Shop lights and neon signs stood out more, bringing a bit of color to the sunburnt buildings. It was not enough light to keep the tourists there and David watched them scoop up their children and hurry them to the car park. Night was reserved for the hardcore pier-fishers and the few souls who had nowhere else to be.
He reached the end of the pier and looked for Sam. With the exception of spotlights beamed at the water kissing the tip of the pier, the ocean had turned black. You could hear the waves crashing against the breakwater but couldn’t see them. A scattering of gulls perched on the available railing or edges of rooflines waiting to steal someone’s bait the moment they got a chance. Sam was sitting in his lucky spot, leaning back in his aluminum-framed beach chair laced with faded and frayed polyester straps, tackle box at his feet, plastic catch pail, a smaller cardboard bucket with some suffocating anchovies looking fatally lethargic and two poles with lines in the water. David glanced into Sam’s empty catch pail.
“No luck?” he asked.
“Hell no, brother. Haven’t even felt a tug. Thanks for stopping by, David.”
“Anybody else getting action?” David leaned against the rail, looking into the darkness.
“Couple of mackerel is all. Have some fun today?”
“The usual shit. The waves were great in the morning then mushy and blown out in the afternoon. Just sat on the beach until I got tired of the wind and sand.” David paused, then, “Something is going on with Luna. We had this thing.”
“Thing? You know la luna brings out loco.”
“Funny. Maybe.”
“You’re talking to a wise Chicano.”
“I feel a little crazy. We just seemed to connect like we never have before.”
“That, I have no doubt, David.”
“I got stung in the eye.”
“I see that. Looks like pink eye.”
“It isn’t. Jellyfish or something. Luna dragged me into the water and tried to rinse my eye. Made it worse. Next thing I know we were in the canal — I mean channel — and Luna was wrapped around me.”
“Wrapped around you? That would have put me in a mental ward. Whadja do?”
“Told her to hang on and surfed her into shore. What do you think I did?”
“I might have let it play out a little longer. But dude, you’re a hero. That’ll probably mess you up bad someday.”
“Don’t screw with me.”
“I’m not! But you’re like that. You can’t see it because you’re you. Not everyone is like that. ¿Verdad?”
“No es verdad. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“God’s way, I guess,” Sam said. “Just like it’s His way I’m catching for shit tonight.”
“Maybe yellowtail are pushing up from Mexico and scaring off the bonito?”
“I don’t know, man. I got here when the party boat emptied. Didn’t see any yellowtail. Someone hauled out a three- or four-foot shark. Looked like a thresher.”
“That’s cool. Probably sell it in Little Tokyo.”
“You think?”
“I don’t know. I’ve heard.”
“Your eye looks like shit. You sure it’s not pink eye?”
“Can you just drop it? I told you it was probably a jellyfish sting. The jellyfish were getting the Vegematic treatment today. The beach was littered with bite-sized chunks of them. This morning’s surf was killer.”
“So you said.”
“¿Entiendes ahora?” David said.
“Yeah I get it, but ese, don’t try,” Sam laughed. “Your Spanish sucks!”
“El tuyo,” David tried, which made Sam laugh again.
“You need to study harder, my friend,” Sam said and started reeling in one of his lines.
“Screw studying. I just show up.” David stared at the line Sam was reeling.
“Just show up? I don’t have that luxury.”
“You know what I mean. It’s always been that way. I like to read. Always have. Have you read The Old Man and the Sea?”
“No. Should I?”
“Maybe. You might find it relevant.”
“Relevant?”
“You might relate to it.” David said, trying a different tack.
“Okay, now I hear you. Like I can relate, dude!” and they both laughed, because that was not the way Sam spoke. Sam had continued to slowly reel in the line and the swivel which held the bait line finally broke the liminal margin between water and air revealing an empty hook tangled around the mainline followed by a two-ounce lead weight.
“Shit.” Sam said, looking into his bait bucket. “Another one gone.” He hooked one of the last two anchovies he had through the fish’s upper palette and out through what might be considered its nose and cast the rig back in, as far as he could.
“Will you do me a favor, David?”
“Sure.” David answered. Sam dug a couple of dollars out of his pocket. “Will you go buy me another bucket of bait?” David took the money out of Sam’s hand.
“No problem. Be back in a minute.”
David trudged off into the dark passageway which guided him back onto the main, narrower, now darker stretch of the pier. In less than three hundred feet he reached the bait shop, which was just that: Aside from a few bits of tackle and line — their packaging bleached by the sun — it was mostly a couple of large, aerated tanks, manned by a disinterested character of questionable aspiration. “What can I do you for?” he asked David.
“Half scoop. Live ones please.”
“You’re about twelve hours late from when this batch was fresh, so life ain’t long for any of ’em, your highness. If you find any floaters, feel free to give them CPR before you hook’em and hurl’em.”
“Funny,” David said, “You should be in show biz.”
“I’m a bait boy, nothing more. I know my place,” the bait boy said as he dipped a two-quart paper bucket into the tank to fill it with sea water, set it down, then dipped a small net which emerged with green-backed, silver-bellied anchovies flopping around. He dumped them into the waiting bucket then drained some of the water back into the tank to make it more manageable. “Here you go, your highness. I even gave you an extra one to take home to have mounted as a trophy. That’s two bucks, cash only.” David looked in the bucket and all the fish seemed fairly lively. Not a lot of oxygen in there, though. He handed the bait boy the bills Sam had given him. “Thanks. Guess I’ll be seeing you on Johnny Carson soon,” David said.
“I wouldn’t bet your life on it, but I wouldn’t bet your life on anything around here,” he said loudly as David was walking away back into the gathering darkness. He stared at the anchovies in the bucket. This morning they had the protection of numbers, now they sat, rather swam, on death row. With this thought weighing heavy on his mind, David almost walked directly into a hulking, bearded, wild haired man who was standing in his path. David, jolted from his reverie, stopped short and apologetically said, “I’m sorry, my bad,” while simultaneously taking in the full breath, width, height, and sartorial style of this profound impediment to his path back to Sam. The man was huge in all directions, perhaps even afflicted with gigantism, David thought. That in itself would have been startling, but his attire suggested a certain eccentricity, one David was familiar with: The outcast who had sought refuge with the Haight-caste but was denied sanctuary, the Summer of Love arrivals who were never offered love because they just didn’t fit into the inclusive community which had its own exclusive and rigid bylaws. Slowly they left San Francisco, traveling up and down Highway 1, professing the doctrinal scripture of the movement but fueled by drugs and a lingering subliminal anger that they had been conned. The giant looked as though he had just emerged from the water below. He had draped strands of kelp around him, the bladders and leaves decorating his massive chest like garlands awarded a victorious warrior. He wore a short, flower-print, Polynesian sarong, which to David seemed particularly appropriate. On his feet were well-worn truck-tire-soled huarache sandals, his gnarled and scarred toes protruding out of the ragged leather braid. All in all, David thought, another burned out drifter who showed no sign of acknowledging his proffered apology, so he changed course to walk around him. Faster than David imagined was possible, a hand with outstretched fingers as wide as a basketball reached out and encircled his neck. He found himself struggling for breath as he was lifted to face-level with the giant, which was the first time he noticed another fashion accessory: The giant wore a black patch over his left eye.
“Gimme the fish,” the giant said. David, who was very much committed to dropping the bucket of anchovies at this point so that he might use both arms in a symbolic fight, gladly held the bucket out. The giant took the bucket and raised it to his lips, then sucked the seawater and anchovies down in one enormous gulp, or at least this was what David perceived, as he also felt himself entering a twilight world, not too different from the moments before one falls asleep. Empathetically, he thought about the anchovies suffocating in their oxygen-deficient bucket of water, forgetting they were now facing a very different issue. The giant dropped the now empty bucket to the paved walkway and burped, then spit into his hand a small octopus, an H. maculosa to be exact, an intelligent and delicate and terrifying creature of the southwestern Pacific and Indian Oceans’ shallows comporting itself in a very small package, now rolled up smaller than a tennis ball in a giant’s palm that could hide a bowling ball, the giant gently held it over David’s arm, which was flailing a bit.
“Hold stiller,” the giant said, “We’re going to the horsey races.” David couldn’t help but obey and the little octopus, covered in beautiful blue rings the diameter of golf balls, grasped his forearm with the marble-sized suckers of its purposefully reaching tentacles. Teamwork, David thought as he felt the gentlest nip from its beak then almost immediately realized the effect of the neurotoxin start its curare-akin work. The giant snatched back the octopus just as David’s arms went limp and he lost the feeling in his legs. So, it’s all just sport thought hazy-headed David as the giant popped the re-balled octopus back into his cavernous maw and swallowed. Then with clear intent, he squeezed David’s throat a bit harder causing David to lose his few remaining strands of consciousness.
* * * * *
David’s lungs were burning. He was at least twenty feet below the surface’s edge that separated him from his next breath and it felt like he had no chance to reach it before he unwillingly blew out what was left in his lungs and took that final deep breath of sea water, a water so thick it felt as though he was trying to swim through molasses. Then he realized he was actually swimming through warmed molasses which caused a second epiphany: What he thought was what he experienced. It was an idea worth testing. Simply breathe. He did and his lungs filled with fresh air, so he opened his eyes but he wasn’t sure that he was actually awake. Instead of walking back to Sam with a bucket of bait fish, he was inside the assuredly closed hippodrome draped over a rising and falling carousel horse. The only lights came from the carousel itself and as they spun, the shadows on the interior walls also rose and fell, but with more velocity and variance. David moved his head to look away, as he began to feel the onset of motion sickness, and now could see the calliope at the center of the carousel. Unsurprised, he noted that the blue ringed octopus had somehow grown in stature and reach, and with agile tentacles was working the keys, pedals, valves, and pumps, playing a rather intricate arrangement of the prog rock band Yes’ Roundabout. David didn’t even pause to question what he saw or heard because something else caught his attention. The giant stood next to him, standing behind a stationary sleigh being pulled by two gilded, garish, carved, wooden seahorses and from where he stood, being too large to sit in the sleigh, he held the reins of the tandem team. The giant seemed oblivious to the futility of driving a team of wooden seahorses pulling a stationary sleigh and he worked the harnesses as though it took all his strength to control the direction and speed. He glanced at David and smiled when he saw that he had awakened.
“Sit up, little god!” he yelled over the calliope’s pipingly loud music.
“Huh?” David said.
“Quiet the music!” the giant commanded, and the octopus, with a bit of unexpected flair, smoothly returned to the tonic, and then played a sub-dominant to dominant arpeggio followed by a turn-around back to the tonic for a snappy yet graceful dénouement. It tucked its tentacles beneath its cephalic half and waited without expression.
“Now sit up, little god,” the giant said. David obeyed rather clumsily as his wooden ride went up and down and around..
(Excerpted from: The Physics of Surfing, Dude!; First Edition, 1967, with permission) The most basic wave found in nature is called a sine wave (like in trigonometry; bummer, right?). It’s a smooth, periodic oscillation of identical amplitude, that, when graphed, describes a circle; the circle crossing the X axis at 90 degrees and 270 degrees at a distance apart that describes the diameter, double the diameter describes the wavelength. The height, measured on the Y axis at 0 or 360 degrees is the wave’s crest, the depth, measured on the Y axis at 180 degrees at the wave’s lowest point is the trough, and their combined absolute distance is the amplitude. Grab a compass, protractor, and some graph paper and draw some sine waves, dude. You’ll discover that crest-to-crest and trough-to-trough are also equal to the wavelength, which I guess is why nature is rad!
David came to terms with his painted pony by realizing he was experiencing a series of sinusoidal waves, or in his vernacular, wind waves. There was nothing he could do about the rotation, so he was forced to look at the giant as it kept him from getting sick. “What the fuck is going on?” he asked, and then, “Will this take long? because I kind of have a date tonight.”
“Little god, my Lord has sired scores of Nereids. Perhaps he has requested your presence as you plan to mate with one of his sea nymphs.”
“Right. Well that’s unlikely . . . the mating part. No siring is in the cards. Are you from San Francisco?”
“San Francisco?”
“Yeah. City on the bay with a famous bridge? Haight-Ashbury? Lots of people dressed like you? No? Any of that mean anything to you? How about LSD, acid?”
“Acid?”
“I feel like I’ve been dosed, so yes, acid.”
“It burns like the volcanic eruptions of my Lord’s anger. They rise from the ocean’s floor.”
“Okay. Not that kind of acid. Forget it. I’m tripping and none of this is real.”
“Real is what?”
David was formulating an answer when his personal reality began to shift towards the slightly more obscure. A dense fog had started to fill the interior of the building, a sea-fog that grazed the definition of mist; as damp as mist, but as opaque as a cumulus cloud. The lights of the carousel seemed to burn brighter but refracted and reflected in such a way as to make visibility worse. “Now what?” he asked the giant.
“Now quiet,” the giant replied through the gloom. “My Lord approaches.”
On cue, an orb of light appeared on the carousel platform approaching them, or perhaps David and the giant were approaching the orb. It may have simply grown from small to large then to very large and David found himself inside the space of light where he could see clearly. The circumference of this orb grew until it transformed into a dome encompassing the carousel, but nothing more. The dome wasn’t empty; it contained a large, golden throne and from behind it appeared the figure of a man, old but muscular, with long gray hair and beard, clad in a blue sheet of satin-like sheen, cinched with a belt woven of golden yarn with an abalone-handled dagger clinched within it for effect. His feet were bare. In one hand he clutched a silver trident. He stopped in front of the throne but didn’t sit. Instead, he stared at David. David felt it was past the time for insolence, so he backtracked in order to hit a perfectly insolent note.
“Dude! Nice entrance with the fog machine and light show. Are you the big guy’s guru or something?”
“No little god. Is that how I appear?” he responded in a baritone with exceptional harmonic timbre.
“Actually, with the trident and all, you look like Po…” David began, but he was cut off.
“When in my domain, you shall call me Lord.”
“Okay, Lord. I’ll play. Help me out with this, though, because I’ve always wondered, why the trident?” In a motion too fast for David to comprehend, the Lord arched back and let loose the spear. The speed was so quick that David couldn’t follow its path, but he heard it strike. He looked to where it was aimed and saw that the trident had impaled the octopus, the outer tines piercing both silver dollar-sized eyes, and the central tine surely penetrating its brain, if that was where its brain was located. It sat in the calliope operator’s chair, as still as a pool of seawater locked in a reef abandoned by the ebb tide.
“Dude!” David yelled.
“Lord,” the giant corrected.
“Lord, why?” David acknowledged and asked.
“Salutary negation, little god,” the Lord said. “As it is said, a particular action is worth many useless words.”
“I don’t say that, but maybe somebody does,” David said.
“Perhaps.”
“Did you have to kill it? I was growing fond of the creature even though I think it dosed me.”
“I fear your kind has lost its interpretive ability. Tell me not that you have become entirely literal and lost allusion, allegory, simile, symbolism, metaphor, and evocation all the essential essences upon which I am I?”
“Maybe figuratively?”
“What? More insolence?” the Lord asked.
“No, Lord. I’m trying to relate to you. Cool, right?” There was no answer, so David continued, but shifted his approach. “We still possess those things, I’m kind of sure I think, but we’re just misaligned. Your allusion is lost on me. What would I know about what you’re alluding to? So figuratively, we’ve lost the ability to understand, but literally, maybe not. We just need to get our wheels aligned.”
“Wheels aligned?”
“It’s a metaphor, one you don’t understand.”
“Insolence!” said the Lord.
“No, no. I barely understand it. We’re still trying to relate, right? Explain to me the symbolism in killing the octopus.” This seemed to calm the Lord who mumbled to himself, “Και τι κάνω.”*
(* “Kai ti káno” or, in the words of Protagoras, “And what am I doing?” but spoken despairingly.)
“I have always been and always will be, Lord of Seas. I created the octopus for reasons that I will make apparent. The octopus is very smart. It has to be because it has eight independent arms, among other things you bipedals couldn’t imagine. At the time, the creation of the octopus caused quite a stir. On the one hand, the gods of the human creatures agreed that they were quite tasty, but they were concerned that they would become the dominant species if given enough time to learn and pass on their knowledge. I always thought of myself as a team player, so I agreed to limit their lifespan to two cycles of the sun, or years I suppose. This creature, just one of the multitudes of beloved creatures I cultivate, had reached its end. Now do you understand what the trident is for?”
“Yeah. Sure. Not efficient though, is it? ”
“I slowed things down for you. Octopus stew tonight!” And with that, two very attractive young women appeared, wearing white satin in a similar fashion to the Lord’s ensemble. One took the trident and returned it to the Lord, and the other took the octopus — David presumed to a kitchen somewhere. “My granddaughters,” the Lord said in partial explanation. “I apologize. I believe I’m approaching one hundred of them and have lost the ability to remember all their names.”
“So you’re a fallible god,” David said.
“Fallible, infallible?” the lord seemed to grow agitated but quickly calmed himself, “It was your Father who created the trope of infallibility. He was clever, very clever. We, as gods, chose to exhibit, suffer, and reflect the same failings as the humans we watched over. Yet your Father claimed infallibility. We never thought humans would believe such nonsense.”
“We are the fallible ones, right? Original sin and all that stuff. You might have seen that one coming,” David quipped, clinging to the belief he had been drugged and was dealing with some hippie freak who thought he was a guru. What he struggled with was how lucid he felt.
“Socrates said you sat like frogs along the edges of the Mediterranean, both for physical sustenance and to create the gods you needed to guide your moral development. There is truth in that. We were created in the likeness of those that created us, we revealed ourselves to be as fallible as the humans we nurtured. We were temperate and understanding of our foibles as well as theirs. But your Father, filled with guile and cunning declared himself infallible. You understand the problem, right?”
“I hope this isn’t one of those quizzes where only one answer is correct, because I’d really just be guessing at this point,” David said. The Lord was displeased by this and held his trident up to David’s face as though he was about to make an unpleasant point, but then he let it fall.
“Gigantus, seize him!” he ordered, and once again David found himself unable to react before he was lifted off his wooden pony and locked in the giant’s iron grip, but still facing the Lord.
“Now what?” David asked. “I was just hoping for a little clarity.”
“Quiet!” the Lord said. “I really don’t have time for this. A little clarity, or a lot of clarity? A little bit fallible or very fallible? Can one be a little infallible?”
“No,” David said without hesitation.
“So now you see the problem?”
“Yes,” but David wasn’t as sure as he tried to sound.
“When one is infallible one never loses.”
“So you lost.”
“Yes. Most retired in the face of such treachery. Others fought until their demise. And some of us staked out geography man would never dominate: the heavens, the planets, the oceans of this earth. The anchovies you bought to sacrifice are mine, Gigantus my loyal knight is mine, the octopus I will soon dine on is mine. You are nothing!”
“Did I say I was?” David asked feeling a bit confused.
“Oh, you did, little god. And very clearly too. I have ears, or rather ways, of understanding all that happens within my domain. Today you declared yourself a sea-god. Your Father has amassed so much power that He’s more than willing to use it to encompass the waterworld in his dominion.” Suddenly he was roaring, “And I for one won’t stand for it!” The Lord’s voice was as thunder from the heavens and generated an unexpected fear in David’s heart.
Gigantus released David, cast his head down, and dropped to a knee. Noticing the unqualified obeisance, David took the cue and followed suit. The Lord’s face softened slightly, as light does at the margin of dusk, just enough for David to know the mood was changing. “You are filled with the spirit of God’s son, yet you genuflect to me?” the Lord asked.
“In all truth, Lord, I have no idea what you are referring to. I do admit to being a teenager that said something that was kind of, like, boasting? As to why you know I did that, I’m solidly clueless. There’s nothing godlike about my parents, sometimes kind of the opposite, but most kids my age feel that way, right?”
“I’ve known a few children in my own lineage who acted questionably at times. Prometheus always comes to mind . . .”
“Right, Prometheus! He disobeyed. Sometimes that’s what kids like us do. I apologize. Really, I do. There was this girl, Luna. She and I . . . we connected suddenly. I said a stupid thing. We’re supposed to be meeting now, so if that clears things up, can we call things good between us?”
“Good between us?” the Lord asked. David noted a tone of righteous indignation, so he bowed his head lower.
“My Lord,” David said, “Whatever you want to call it. I’m just looking to wrap this up and be on my way. This has been really a trip. A serious trip. I’m guessing I got a good dose from our, well, from your stew tonight.”
“Silence!” said the Lord. “You referred to me as ‘My Lord’ when everything about you says the body and blood of the Infallible One’s only Son inhabits you! Are you a prevaricator? And this young maiden is given to your Father; first communion they call it. Even now she receives the sacrament, the eucharist, your Father’s imitation of the sacrifices we used to receive regularly. And if the two of you mate? What then? Another Child of God, but born of the Sea? This I cannot abide!”
“Then don’t abide it! What do you want me to do? I’ll do anything! I just want this to end.” Whatever David had said, it seemed to do the trick. The Lord became calm and almost solicitous.
“As a concerned party to this dispute it wouldn’t be fair to try and persuade you.”
“I’m persuadable,” David said. “I’m open to all and every suggestion.”
“No. Perhaps we should seek my brother’s counsel. I understand he has an opening in,” the Lord paused, trying to recall and then do the math, “Ah! About two centuries.”
“I’ll be dead by then. Doesn’t sound like a plan.”
“Most of you dead, surely, but not the relevant parts.”
“Still a bad plan.”
“We do have a contingency, but I confess we’ve used it a number of times and it has not been gracefully received.”
“Contingency? Excellent. I’m in.”
“Is that wise?” the Lord asked.
“I’m guessing it is given the alternative.”
“Are you wise?” the Lord asked.
“I think I am. Yes,” David answered.
“Does a wise man think himself wise?” the Lord asked. A trick question, David thought.
“A wise man questions every thought,” David said.
“Very good,” the Lord replied. “So how does a wise man answer?” David took a moment. To his credit, he thought about how preposterous this whole episode was. He thought about how normal his day had been. He thought about Luna and how, after all these years of being friends, something special happened earlier, in the surf and on the sand. A wise man seizes the day. Carpe diem, and all that stuff.
“A wise man says, ‘Go for it, dude! The next wave may be washed out!’”
“Yes, very wise,” the Lord answered without conviction. “Gigantus, prepare the little god!” And with one step the giant was behind David, clenching David’s head in his oversized hands. David tried to struggle, but for no use. Gigantus’ hands were as effective as a steel vice. Nothing moved and the Lord approached.
“Your left eye is sorely red,” he said. “I don’t want the infection to spread.” David had no way to respond. The Lord reached out with his left hand and held David’s eye open, very wide open, then, just as he had done with the octopus, his right hand moved faster than David could comprehend. His longnailed forefinger popped out David’s left eyeball and in a single, coordinated movement his hand fell to his waist and drew his dagger, then severed the optic nerve that attached David’s left eye to his brain. The Lord caught the falling eyeball in his left hand and shushed the scream David was working on expressing. He replaced his dagger, and with his right hand held wide the socket that had moments ago cradled David’s eye, he snapped his left hand’s fingers. David’s remaining eye perceived a blindingly bright flash, at the moment meaningless to him, and although he had not seen and could not remember, the snap had created a high voltage ionizing spark that cauterized every arteriole and vein in the now empty socket. David was left on the edge of consciousness. From his intact eye he saw the Lord examining his former eye. “This we should send to the Infallible One,” the Lord said. “Perhaps call on Hermes.”
“Hermes took flight many years ago. I will deliver it myself.”
“We shall go together,” the Lord said. “Now I’m afraid you’ll have to give up that eye patch I gave you earlier, Gigantus. You seem to have become very fond of it.”
“It does make me feel . . . heroic,” Gigantus said, but he took it off, revealing a perfectly fine left eye. “I apologize for my hubris.”
“No need, no need,” the Lord mumbled then said, “It’s been quite some time since you’ve been called to action. Give it to me.” Gigantus complied and the Lord slipped it over David’s head, covering the empty cavern he had just created.
“You likely won’t remember this,” the Lord said to David, “But the seas are mine. If I don’t defend them, I lose them. I’m sure you’re a good boy. You’re simply a prawn is all.” Then he snapped his fingers again, and David lost consciousness.
* * * * *
