Sometimes I heard her praying at night, not to God but to her own Mother, and I never asked too many questions when I found the collection of bones that she had hoarded from our supper that had once been destined for the garden. She had said, “I am going to make a body for Mother like she made a body for me,” and I didn’t press.

  Little girls had active imaginations, after all.

  The next time I went to town to sell the fish we’d caught, I reluctantly took Mara with me. She was again an able helper when we set up on the docks, but I had to swath her in clothes too much for the ocean sun so that people would not spy her sea-wounds from afar. When villagers came to buy our fish, I made sure Mara was away from prying eyes, made busy elsewhere.

  I heard strange voices, men pressing the port vendors not for their wares but for answers, instinct railed against my gut. I made excuses for Mara to climb into my boat, out of sight.

  The men approached, three in total. When they came close, I could see that the man in the centre had been crying, his ocean eyes reddened from tears and his sandy cheeks sallow. I’d seen a similar look in my husband’s eyes and in the mirror. A lump formed in my throat with the dread of what they might want.

  One of the men—not the one crying—said to me, “He lost his girl. Overboard.” He glanced at the man with wept-red eyes. “We’re hoping to find any trace of her.”

  He procured a photo from his pocket and held it out to me. Hands shaking, I took it.

  Dark hair, and skin the colour of warm sand, ocean eyes. Even without holes in her flesh where she’d become fish food, even with life in her eyes, I recognized the once-alive Mara. “How long has she been missing?”

  The two men who hadn’t been crying exchanged a look over their heartbroken companion. “A week and a half.”

  I tried to still my hand as I passed the photo back. I steeled myself for the hurt my next words would cause, words that had been said to me years ago. “Even if you found the body now, it would be eaten beyond recognition. I don’t know if you would know her on sight.”

  I saw the man choke. There was a sob caught in his throat and behind his eyes.

  One of the men said, “He’s looking for closure.”

  I grunted. My heart ached for another grieving father. “Well, I haven’t seen anything.”

  The men turned stoic faces on me. They started to turn away, but one besides the father stayed. “The townsfolk pointed you out to us.”

  “Did they?”

  “Yes. Said you lost a girl, once. That you’re cursed, brought blight to the very fish in the sea. That you’re the reason the catch is meek. That your husband left you because, without your child, you were more wed to the ocean than to him. That this is why you left town—no daughter, no husband, no life. Thought maybe you’re why this girl died, too. Still cursed. But her father gave you credit. He wanted to ask you. He thought it meant that you’d understand. That you’d help.”

  I kept my gaze steady. I thought of Mara, in the boat, half-dead but the closest to my girl I’d ever have again. I looked at the grieving father a short distance away.

  Mara had only ever mentioned Mother.

  “Well, then he was wrong, wasn’t he?”

  The man gave me a hard look, then rejoined the grieving father and his other companion. I watched them leave, then packed up my things. I didn’t want to tell the townspeople to shut their fucking mouths, I wanted to just get my things and take Mara back home. My catch had been too meagre for much to sell anyway—the fish continued to dry up, and more and more were inedible. Wrong.

  Mara helped as I haphazardly loaded up the boat, unsecured the line, and raised anchor. Only when we were away from port did she ask, “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, Mara,” I said. She gave me the look of a girl wiser than her years, and I felt bad for lying, but couldn’t tell her what had happened. I selected a fish and gave it to her. She ate it raw—a habit I was indulging too often—and stared off the bow into the water, at just safe enough a distance that I wasn’t worried about losing her.

  I heard her singing softly to Mother.

  The fish continued to disappear from the ocean. My net caught more disintegrating guts than it did life. I fed Mara first with what little flesh was salvageable. I could not lose a daughter twice.

  I should have been afraid when I found the sculpture in Mara’s room, a few days after the last time I had caught any fish. I knew she’d been hoarding the bones meant for meal, gathering them in the bedroom that had once been my daughter’s, but I hadn’t expected her to have knitted them together into something almost human. Somehow, I knew it was a woman, or meant to be something like one. She was missing part of her left arm, but otherwise was almost complete, a skeletal face built from fish bones, sharp teeth embedded in an unnaturally shaped jaw. The face contained raw anger and passion despite lacking in flesh, the fish scales knit into her eye sockets telling a powerful tale.

  She was beautiful in her abhorrence. The bones were pieced together into something that could have been divine.

  “Who is she?” I asked.

  Mara smiled to me, the picture of girlhood innocence even where her gums had receded from her teeth to expose the nerves and the roots beyond shrunken lips. “Mother.” The word came naturally. It was the answer I had known, and Mara understood that I had recognized her Mother. “She gave me this body. I made one for her.”

  The body of Mother called to me. I heard her breathing even though her bone-body was lifeless. Her breath was like the waves, crashing upon the shore.

  “She isn’t complete,” I said.

  “No,” Mara agreed. Her face fell in childlike disappointment. She looked to the arm. The last piece to be completed. “There haven’t been any fish in days.”

  It was true—Mara and I had been fighting not to go hungry, eating only the scarce vegetables from the garden. The last of the fish had gone away.

  “It’s true.” My heart hammered. The ocean roared in my ears. My husband had left because I had been more wed to the ocean than him after our child had been lost to her. And here she was: the ocean-Mother in all her glory. Or soon enough she would be. “We’re fresh out of fish bones, aren’t we?”

  Mara nodded. She looked away from me, from the body for her Mother, and out to the sea beyond the window. The waves crashed upon the shore. “She won’t come for a body that isn’t ready.”

  I thought of how angry the sea had been. I thought of how lonely she had been. I thought of how angry and lonely I had been before Mara—this new Mara—had been caught in my net, a gift from the ocean that was Mother.

  I did not have to look at Mara to see her heartache. If she could not bring Mother to her, perhaps she would return to the sea to rejoin her.

  And I would do anything to keep my new daughter.

  I went to the kitchen to find the descaling knife.

  Standing on the cliffside, staring out to the ocean, we were a family. Mara, the ocean, and me. The ragged stump that ended my left arm still bled sometimes, but my right hand held that of my new wife. I felt my own wedding ring loosely hanging off the fingerbone I had given to her as my vow, my own flesh slowly disintegrating off her hand from the salt in the air with no more blood to sustain it. Soon it would be so much bone, just like the rest of her.

  The rising tide had climbed enough to start to eat away at the rock below, subsuming the lower shores of the island. My boat struggled to keep float, stern tipping into the water, the tie dragging it down to a pier that had long since disappeared beneath the waves.

  The water was clearer than it had ever been, steam rising from it as it purified itself. Yet the fish were thriving, thousands of them frothing over the waves, a thick mass of aquatic life that would have prevented my boat from traveling the sea even if I had tried to save it from its slow, sinking death. Even from atop the cliff, I could see their misshapen teeth glinting in the sunlight where they breached the water.

  In the distance, I could see the mainland. The water around the disappearing pier was steadily leaching blood into the ocean from the drowning town. All was quiet, but for the waves crashing upon the store.

  I turned to my wife, to the ocean-Mother, whose own fish teeth glinted in the sunlight. I could see the slow growth of ocular organs swelling out from under the scales in her eye sockets, the flesh of new eyes pushing through the cracks in her bone-and-scale face. Yet, despite her ill-formed eyes, she saw me looking to her, and I could tell she looked back. Her sharp-toothed, lipless smile grew.

  She did not speak, but we were finding ways of understanding each other already, through soft touches, through gestures, through inelegant sign language we invented together. She was so much more than intelligent—there was something too-knowing contained within those bones.

  I did not know if something like her could love me. I did not know what havoc the ocean might yet wreak, if the drowning seaside village across the way was only the beginning. But I felt that she accepted me for caring for her child, some alien soul that had been given a drowned girl’s body to wear. I loved Mara, and so the ocean would spare me from whatever she might do next.

  I knew I would never fully understand the unkindness of the ocean. But for now, yes, we were family—and the sea would provide.

  My Grandfather's Sacristy

  ~ Ellis Bray

  Scrubbing floors is sacred work—

  There’s purity in pain

  and penance in the callouses

  on knees and fingers,

  spine and brain—

  The house must find you worthy

  Should you offer labored prayers.

  Grandmother was worthy.

  Withered and bent at the end of her years,

  but worthy and faithful

  In rede and in rote.

  “Don’t stare,” she said that final day.

  Her rosary frothed between her fingers,

  counting down her life.

  “This house is theirs, in beam and root,

  so, if you look, don’t stare.”

  I never did—

  candle flames with fluttering light

  icy drafts on hellish days

  the choking breath of basement rock—

  I always looked away.

  The house belongs to them, she said;

  the living only haunt it.

  But when her vanished saffron scent

  swims across the vacant room,

  I twist my rag and scrub my sins

  I count the beads and hum the hymns

  I whisper dim doxologies

  And struggle not to stare.

  Right and Bright

  ~ E. E. Marshall

  The grease spot on the living room coffee table was Elma’s worst enemy. It wasn’t her only enemy by a ways, but it was clearly her worst. Some days, it hid there, a corruption in the maple grain, silently taunting her from beneath the doily she had tatted specifically to cover it. Other days, it slid out from under the doily and openly harassed her.

  Andrew didn’t care—couldn’t understand.

  He was four years into his executive fast-track. He was doing what he was born to do, obsessing on power and bottom lines. To him, she acted as support personnel. He displayed her, showed her off, and expected her to play the part of corporate wife, lover, and general Martha Stewart model.

  She liked the deal they had struck. Her children would come. Her dream of her home was becoming a reality, a reality completely different than the counter-culture vagabond’s Ford LTD wagon her parents raised her in. It was more like her grandma’s home, a magic place she had visited only a few times: once when the wagon was in the shop and gramps was still alive, once at Christmas after gramps died, and once with Andrew to pick up the few things her grandma had left her.

  Today, Andrew was bringing home his new boss, so she hoped grandma would help her kill the spot.

  She crouched low, trying to peer into the dark cabinet chasm beneath her sink.

  The front lines of her weapons were arrayed in normal formation. Drain clog remover, abrasive chlorine cleanser, ammonia window cleaner, an empty rubber bucket with several grades of stiff and dry sponges inside.

  Each weapon had its uses, and each was a weapon she used often. None had ever had any effect on the coffee table spot.

  Today, though. Today, she needed something special, something that would really make a difference. She wanted to show the grease spot what was what and who was who.

  The black dispose-all canister hung beneath the sink, dark, enigmatic in its incipient power.

  She thought how much it was like her, how a flip of the switch could set that little black can’s motor spinning, its blades grinding away at whatever fell in, a mindless maw of destruction.

  The grease spot had flipped her switch one too many times. Andrew would not bring his new project manager home to see her losing to a spot on the living room coffee table.

  She had to get it done before her husband came home. She didn’t want him yelling at her in front of his new manager. Of course, she knew she was a little nuts. Andrew wasn’t often completely wrong when he yelled at her. He just yelled at her for the wrong reasons.

  Beyond the disposal, she kept grandma’s bottles and cleansers—in the shadows back with her Pine-Sol, rat poison, roach motels, and collection of lost twisty-ties. There, she had the weapons of her mother’s mother hidden in brown bottles and wrapped in oil-paper.

  Today, for herself and for Andrew, she would pull out her big guns.

  She slipped the useless 4-karat diamond ring from her hand and set it beside the sink. She slid her long, elegant fingers into the protective armor of her rubber cleaning gloves.

  Reaching into the darkness, she retrieved the oil-paper package first, placing it gently on the paper towels she had laid out to receive it. Then, she pulled out the two brown bottles. One was quart-sized, brown glass, and stopped with a cork sealed in wax. The second was only the size of an aspirin bottle, but it was the real deal, the spot-death in a bottle. Grandma’s own problem solver.

  It was the only one that had a label.

  In Gram’s shaking, loving cursive, the fountain pen lettering gone to faded blue and spread out into the paper, it said, “To set things right, one teaspoon has might. To make things bright and start anew, two will do.”

  “Thank you, Grams.” Elma put the bottles down on the paper towel next to her oil-paper.

  She slipped a butter knife under the folds of the oil-paper wrapping and slit the tape that held it closed. As if ready and waiting for the moment, the paper unfolded almost the whole way.

  It pleased Elma to see that her weapons were so happy, so ready to serve. If this worked, Andrew would not complain to his new project manager about her housekeeping tonight.

  She carefully unfolded the paper the rest of the way. Inside, a black stone, a square the size of a sponge, waited for her rubber-covered hand.

  The butter knife made short work of the wax seals on the bottles. Un-corking, she got a good whiff of the almond and onion smell from the small bottle. A smile came to her before she understood why. That bottle smelled like the love in her grandmother’s house.

  It wasn’t the smell of cigar smoke and whiskey from when the Ford wagon broke down. It was the smell of home and order in the old house on the lane later on, when Elma was older, when she had baked cookies with Grams, after Gramps was gone and lost forever.

  She dipped her butter knife into the smaller bottle. A few drops would do. Secret weapons should be used sparingly. The little bottle was only an activator, after all. That, and it provided a scent that didn’t offend. Somehow, the almond smell made the onion smell seem sweeter, more soothing.

  The first drop hit the black stone. White steam rose from the surface. It didn’t surprise her. she’d seen Grams use the stuff once to take a coffee stain, Andrew’s, out of her white carpet. No doubt there was still some of Gram’s cleaning fluid in the stone. The second drop hit, and Elma was happy. The scent filled the kitchen. The stone changed color from black to deep, cobalt blue.

  She nodded, corked the little bottle, then lifted the big one.

  Her hand shook, and she was afraid she’d slop some of the precious fluid over the edges of her teaspoon.

  She glanced at the microwave clock. Almost three. She still had two hours.

  Of course, she’d have to put herself together. That would take some time. Then, there were the canapés and mixed drinks, but she could do that while she had guests. Andrew didn’t mind her puttering in the kitchen while he entertained. It looked good for him. It was cleaning while people were in the house that he couldn’t abide.

  The fluid, red as butchered chicken blood and just as thick, poured into the teaspoon.

  Carefully, she poured it onto the black stone.

  One would make things right.

  Once again would make things bright.

  One teaspoon was enough. She only needed right. The stone had already turned white, deep and pearlescent. It seemed to be filled with liquid, with some impossible soapy solution that swirled and whirled just underneath its cold, hard surface.

  Just before her grandmother had cleaned that spot from the white carpet, she had smiled, laughed just a little, and raised one of her white eyebrows as if she were sharing an ancient, hidden secret. “Here, Dearie.” She held up the pearlescent stone. “This is how it should look if you want to take out a spot.”

  The stone looked exactly like it had that day. “Perfect,” Elma said to the Grandmother she remembered. Carefully, she recorked the bottle and set it aside.

  The stain saw her coming. It knew what she was up to. It pulled itself up under the doily, trying to pretend it was gone.