A small atoll sits brown on blue water that stretches beyond the horizon. They pull their traps under the impossibility of the milky way. Wind blows against his body warm. He can smell her sunscreen. Its like coconut and cheap lotion. He hates it. He hates her and he can’t remember why.
The dinghy bobs up and down and she stands in the stern pulling another trap out of the deep.
“Got one,” she chirps and the impulse to stab her in the spine grows.
Her hair blows like strawberry sand.
The skin of her legs is bronze and ripples over well-worked muscle. She wears the orange and blue of their Florida university proudly in the form of a windbreaker and ball cap. And he grips the folded steel knife sliding it open an inch before letting snap closed again.
“Kill her now.”
Yes, he agrees, and when the hand holding the cephalopod releases so does the impulse and he does nothing but thinks about the abyss he almost breached.
Stories 