Today's body is skewered through the old church spire, a gray-black whale peeling in fleshy wisps. Dead too long for food.
From between my fingers or with my glasses dangling aside, I am still sometimes too scared to see how life has changed. Trailers refurnished with fish and eels under sunken sofas, cardboard boxes soggy and broken into bite-size pieces, and bodies torn up by the crashing waves. I don't like to look, which means, of course, that I have to.
The bloom has claimed much of our town of Mercy, red algae spilling over the Mississippi and adjacent floods like entrails. Our boat cut through it easily, but the micro-plants are probably sticking to the hull right now. It should've been like any algae bloom—spill toxins into the water, kill a bunch of fish, ruin the local economy, and leave us to pick up bootstraps and get back to work—but no, since Hurricane Arlene twenty-one months ago, these red tides have become the longest-lasting bloom known to humans.
Worse, not all the animals die. Wrecked on the levee, the whale gapes in anguish, as if to scream, Why me?
"Cẩn thận nhe con," Mom says. Her eyes are trained on the riverside, searching for the outsize tree that flanks the fortune teller's home. Without looking, she reaches over and rubs Vicks under my nose to ward off the rotten egg stench on the breeze. The glob burns my upper lip.
I turn the three-spoke wheel, cautiously guiding our forty-foot trawler on the blood-red river. "It's 'be careful,'" I say, because that's our implicit deal: I learn how to steer a boat and she talks in English. They are the skills we each need to survive without the other. Just in case.
Brows pinching together, she mutters, "Be careful."
I steer our boat over the tombs lurking below, hoping that none moved again in the last storm. This close to land, anything can rip through the hull. The most dangerous stuff is always unseen. Mom should know; she spends most days staring into watery depths, searching for dark silhouettes. Monsters, people like to whisper.
It happens a lot actually—people claiming they discovered a new species or the southern Loch Ness, when really, this dead whale just washed up and became post-mortem kebab. Maybe some deep-sea creatures got curious about the sun and swam up. Ninety-five percent of the ocean remains unexplored, so it doesn't surprise me to see strange animals. A two-headed shark is still a shark. I should know. Before, I wanted to be a marine biologist, though I probably would've ended up pregnant and stuck here. With most of Mercy abandoned due to off-and-on flooding, I never have to worry about being a late bloomer anymore. I am my best self in this apocalypse.
Mom is not.
