THE FOLLOWING TEXT CONTAINS: VIOLENCE, CANNIBALISM AND UNREALITY.
Bonnie traces her fingers through the sinking holes of her cheeks, staring at her reflection in the moss and rust-encrusted mirror. A gentle slope that shouldn’t be on anyone but some corpse’s jaw. Receding, like her eyes in their sockets. Her knuckles, around the wash bowl feel like bone grinding against bone with every new movement.
Through gritted teeth her breath comes sharp…
And angry…
And terrified.
She was only eleven when her father died. The dumb fuck cut himself on a knife neither of them knew was laced with illness. Stupid, really. On land this would have been tended to in a heartbeat. Medicine might have stopped it before it became anything terrible. A little whiskey or rum to disinfect it.
But at sea, with a storm rolling in, that cut became the death of him. Turned him into bones and a bag of skin rotting all around him. Wet slick sick eating away and leaving her there alone to drown.
She tried to throw him overboard but it turns out dead weight and paper skin made that task exceedingly slippery. Left her coated in his blood from feet to face.
Bonnie pulls a bottle from her coat, thick dark liquid congealing inside it. She unstoppers it and drinks the last of it’s contents. The taste of metal and death on her tongue was the promise of a life eternal.
Looking in that mirror, however, that life eternal was starting to feel like a death closing in. Sometimes she woke up to the crawling feeling of decay in her skin, eating away at the organs beneath her skin before she puked what little contents she still had in her stomach, out between her feet. Sometimes she swore she saw maggots squirming in her bile.
A sharp knock pulls her from her wandering thoughts. She never used to have those, thoughts that wandered, plagued with the fear of death below the black waves, deeper than she’d ever like to witness. Where those awful devils they called Gods, lurked.
“What’s it?” She grunts, slipping the empty bottle back into her coat.
Her first mate’s voice is muffled behind the door, “It’s the beast, captain. She nears.”
“Turned back?”
“Aye.”
Bonnie looks at her reflection a moment longer before she dons her hat and makes haste. Both their lumbering figures climbing narrow crooked steps all the way up to the top deck.
It’s like the beast put on a show just for her. The moment she sets foot in the rain and the wind it breaks the waves. The beast’s long face, snout, like a skeletal horse, skin pulled taut against ribbing beneath—dripping with water and weed, emerging higher and higher, past the crow’s nest.
Various voices cascade in the wind around her. A mass of panic and urgency. Men begging for her command. Bonnie holds, any moment an appendage, a tail, tentacles, something will grip the ship and tear it in two. She’s seen it before, only once.
She’s never let that happen to her own.
“Goddess be.” Her first mate breathes at the sight, wide-eyed, open mouthed horror. He rubs his thumb along the scrimshaw of an ivory tooth on a tether around his neck. “Orders captain?”
“We kill it. Same as the others.”
“The only thing worth being afraid of is dyin’ real slow.” She was sixteen bumming whiskey out of the cups of older sailors too drunk to finish their pints. Between her thick hands she nursed the dregs of a dirty mug whilst the man listening to her tail nudged the one next to him, amused by her candour.
“Ye wouldn’t be sayin such, face ta face with the beasts of the deep, lass.”
She stood, compelled by liquid courage and her own earnest bravado, grinnin’ wide showing off all what teeth she had left, “I’m gonna kill em. Every single one of those devils in that deep. Mark me.”
The sailors exchanged amused, daring looks and three months later she was on their ship, digging her fingers in the devil’s seam and staring down into the deep blue waves that lurked below with naught but a knot at her hips keeping her from it.
“To yer places! Y’know what ought be done!” Bonnie shouts over the roar of the storm. The men scramble over one another, tumbling with each wave—the next crashing starboard, nearly tipping the Livyatan. Bonnie staggers, but keeps her footing. She marches forward, unperturbed by the onslaught of the storm and the sea giving her men a hard time, plucks a harpoon from harried arms and takes aim.
The monster seems to only stare in turn at her, large black eyes, pools into the depths below, dragging her down. It might have frightened most, but rot scares her more than any beast might. She grits her teeth against the sharp pain in her knuckles, threatening to skew her aim.
With a cry she reels back and pushes every ounce of force and energy she has left within her into her arm. The harpoon she lets fly from her hand whistles through the air in a sharp swift arc, made visible only by the rope that follows suit.
It bites into the beast’s forehead with a sharp thok. A sound she can only imagine but swears she hears it clear as day. It rings down into the joints of her knuckles, thick and sharp and red.
She’d been looking towards captainhood as young as twenty, younger still if she could manage it. But the big man wouldn’t endorse her. Kept saying she wasn’t ready for the job so she toiled under him, for years and years working harder than any of the other men on board under her captain’s unforgiving gaze. She soured in that time. Floated mutiny only once to her big mistake, she almost lost a finger, a hand, a limb once he found out. He relented but the rest of the men never forgave him for being soft on her.
She forgave him even less for it.
Bonnie watches as the beast drops. Its massive form ought to fall back into the sea, dead, sinking. But instead it falls forward. Its shape changes, shrinks, and then lands hard—its weight just as heavy, violently dipping the nose of the Livyatan just below the waves and kicking up water. Washing the sea up against the planks like a shoreline. The beast, a figure, a woman… Kneeling on the bow.
Harpoon straight through her head, bloodied points on the opposite side, dripping.
Bonnie watches the blood in rivulets, pool at her feet. But the beast—a woman, breathes in a sharp rasping breath, her crew mirroring the gasp, in shock.
“You slay us and drink from us the wine from our veins—look now we are not so unlike—” each pause a rasping gasp, the woman lifts her head and stares into the mass of men looking on in horror, in fear, “you must stop this hunt of our kind, are we nothing—we slink to the depths—find shelter in the waters—and still you mock—and you hunt—and you search—what do you search for?”
Bonnie approaches, the thick soles of her boots heavy against the creaking wood. The monster—the woman cranes her neck to meet Bonnie’s gaze.
“We were the same—I just as you—a man—a mortal amongst mortals—why do you drink of me—AH—”
Wordlessly, Bonnie takes the end of the harpoon in her hand, forcing the woman on her back. She presses a boot to her breast and, with a sickening lurch, pulls the weapon free from the beast’s head. The woman writhes, gasps and, finally stares, a wide-eyed, opened-mouthed gape and dies.
It’s only after a few beats of her heart the silence is broken by her own first mate, his whisper only just audible above the rain, “Wh-what have ye done?”
“Lass.” She was awoken from her sleep, squinting up from her hammock below the arse of another sailor, squinting into the near-toothless grin of another. “Yer the one what spoke mutiny.”
“Years off.” She grumbled, sinking deeper, shutting her eyes.
“Got somethin’ in the stores for ya.”
She peered to the man who stood waiting, not taking no for an answer as a queasiness squirmed in her gut.
Quiet as she could, she followed him into the stores where the first mate sat, twirling a bottle between his fingers. He caught her eye, smirked and tossed her the bottle without warning, caught still deftly in her thick hands.
“What’s this?”
“Drink it.”
She peered, her gaze flicking between both men. A challenge. If she didn’t take it her answer was already committed. She rolled her eyes and unstoppered the bottle, swirled its contents and knocked it back.
The taste of iron, thick metal coated her tongue, lined her throat. She shivered, fighting the urge to spit it back up. The first mate watched her, curious, impressed.
“That.” He said, “Is the captain’s store. Bottles of elixir said to make you live forever. Made from the blood of the beasts of the deep.”
“What ya givin’ it to me for, then?”
First mate grew serious, “I want you with me when we toss Captain overboard.”
Her face grew hard, “Not unless ya endorse me, after all’s said.”
First mate thrust his hand out to shake and she didn’t once hesitate.
Bonnie replaces the boot at the dead woman’s chest with the harpoon she pulled from her head and stares out into the shocked faces of her crew. Wide-eyed. Uncertain. Livid. She stops her sweep on the man who spoke first and replies, “She was a beast, just like the rest.”
But her first mate, he’s gripping the lapels of her thick coat and shoving his weight hard enough into her she staggers. His eyes are wide and wild and staring, sunken in, cheeks hollow just as her own. He repeats, over and over with increasing panic, “What have ye done? What have ye done??”
Bonnie hardens her stance, digging her feet into the deck’s unsteady ground. She was never small but the sickness is making her weak, just as it’s done to most of her crew. All of them, like a sea of names she can’t even remember now. Wide, white eyes against the dark portrait of the sea raging behind them. Rushing forward on the same instinct as the first mate whose turned to betray her.
A slurry of voices, a cacophony of accusations: she was a woman. She was a god. She’ll never turn but an evil eye upon them now. Were they all women? Were they all gods? How long had they been a part of such blasphemy.
Bonnie is overwhelmed, her face pressed into the wood, into the blood of the gaping dead-eyed woman staring back at her. Bonnie howls, into the wind, “She was a beast! They were all beasts! Have I not given you everything you’ve asked?”
But, like a fungus, a sickening rot—doubt is a funny thing. Once given the chance to spread, it reaches. A steady, overtaking of every other thought and whim drowning anything what crosses it’s path.
Bonnie’s hands are bound, her feet affixed to an anchor, the body of the woman—the beast tied to her back, laden with what herbs and spice deemed most religious. The fools understood nothing. She fought them with each knot tightened and each word of panicked prayer spoken past their lips.
Finally they stood back—a calm before her untimely death. Her sacrifice. All she could do was laugh. A loud bellowing of sound from deep in her soles as she cried, “You believe this will absolve you lot? Of all your sins?? YOU CHOSE ME. KILLER OF BEASTS TO DO YOUR BIDDING. TO DRINK YOUR BLOOD IMMORTAL.” Bonnie’s voice was raw in her throat, and still she forced more of it from her body, “You were cursed the instant you drank of their blood. This will not absolve you. I’ll make fucking sure of it.”
There was nothing she could have said to change the outcome. Bonnie was tossed to sea laughing, sharing a joke with the dead-eyed woman—beast, as they fell into the shocking green depths below.
She fell and perhaps she welcomed, too willingly, the taste of the salt in her lungs, choking on a sharp mortality which never came to pass.
COVER ILLUSTRATION BY TAS