The Seas Read Online Free PDF

his heart through his shirt so his scars of gill-cutting don’t show. I’ll close the bathroom door though not all the way. I’ll lift my shirt. Jude will peek through the half-closed door. I will listen to my own heart. Then I’ll hold the stethoscope above the mold in the shower and it will say, “We never would have left the ocean had we known what a horrible place this is.” And I’ll say, “Me too.”
    After the woman who owns the Seas asked me about why the ocean would make such a storm that both her father and brother would die in it, I asked Jude about it. He didn’t know why exactly but he said that on the surface of the ocean, the tallest theoretical wave made by the wind could reach a height of one hundred and ninety-eight feet. This would be called a rogue, any wave over seventy feet is called that. He told me little is known of these waves because if you see one you most often die. These rogue waves usually come in threes. The three sisters is what they are called and I thought, just like the dry land to name the cruel things in the water after women.
    The man who traversed the crevassed glacier with brass tacks in his shoes, the man whose picture is tacked to my wall, had arrived at Elephant Island in nothing more than a large launch. He’d left most of his shipwrecked men behind when he went for help. In the launch he saw one of these rogue waves, but because of its height and absolutely straight up slope it did not make him think of water. The man pointed to the foaming crest of the wave rising above him and said to his crew, “Look at that strange cloud.” That is how tall the wave was. He, somehow, lived though that wave.
    A rogue wave would stick out like this: Imagine you are reading a book and have arrived at a certain page, but imagine that when you arrived at that page instead of being five inches wide it is one hundred and ninety-eight feet wide. So wide that when you turn the page it crushes you, pins you underneath it. You would never make it to page 38.

THE SURRENDER PLACES
    My mother is a small woman, five two. She is strong but her bones are tiny and sometimes when I hug her I can feel her heart beat through her chest like the battering of an insect trapped in a lamp.
    This town goes to bed very early but my mother does not. She doesn’t sleep well without my father and so she avoids sleep or she fakes it. She likes the town better at night. She likes things to be quiet. It is what she is used to.
    There is a school on an island just off the coast a few hours south of here. It is a school for deaf children and outside of the school’s building there is nothing on the island but the founder’s pet cemetery. Horses, dogs, birds, and cats mostly. My mother grew up on this island. Both of her parents were deaf. Her father was the Plant and Property Man responsible for haying a small meadow, shoveling snow, mulching trees, repairing busted desks, washing the chalkboards at night, replacing rotten stairs and broken windows. My mother’s mother worked in administration typing health records, report cards, annual budgets in triplicate, and, twice, certified depositions on the accidental deaths of two children enrolled in the school, one drowned, one jumped.
    Of the fifty to sixty people who lived on the island there were very few people who could hear things. My mother was one of them. She loved living on the island. She liked not talking and was annoyed that her parents sent her on a ferry every morning to a school for hearing people.
    One surprising thing she told me about life on the island was that deaf people are actually very loud, especially deaf children. The reason is because they cannot hear to gauge the volume of their guttural emissions or excited shrieks. In fact my mother says she grew up accustomed to hearing her parents have sex because neither of them could hear the mighty creak their bed made and she was too embarrassed to tell them. So my mother was one of the few people