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Hastur had noticed the man because he had been still. It was uncommon to see someone at rest in the early mornings on the docks during the season. It was always hands busy with the constant untying and tying of ropes, and shouts across water as the small fleet of boats battled to be the first out to sea, to stake claim to the few places there were still cod. Amidst the frantic pace, the man had been an island, sure and unmoving, appraising his surroundings in a threadbare tweed flat cap and a pilling, grey wool sweater.
Hastur had stared the man down as he walked past. He’d been at the bottom of the pecking order his whole life, and the only people he could ever outrank in this hideous little village were come-from-aways. The man had unquestionably come from away.
Hastur had meant to glare, to make use of his unnaturally dark eyes. He knew they were spooky. Anyone he came into contact with had no trouble telling him so. A gift, he suspected, from a father he’d never met, since his mother’s eyes had been pale as ice, to go with her buckwheat hair like Hastur’s. He’d just wanted to be a little scary, to make this still, dark stranger wary enough that he’d keep his distance.
Hastur learned then that the man’s eyes were as shocking as his own. Much lighter than he had expected. Vivid amber. Almost glowing in the morning light.
The colour made Hastur pause, swallow. He finished his glowering with less conviction than he’d started with, and continued his journey to the end of the pier where the Wren was tied. The captain, Beezus, was there already. They were always there before Hastur, always left last at the end of the day. Hastur wondered if they slept there. He’d never asked, never considered asking. He and Beezus didn’t ask questions of one another and that suited him fine.
Crowley hadn’t arrived yet, but he was always late. He got away with it because Beezus badly needed the help. Not many self-respecting men in a village like theirs would work on the ocean taking orders from a - whatever Beezus was. Crowley didn’t seem to care, though he wasn’t much of a fisherman, and Hastur, well, his options had always been limited.
Beezus raised their eyes in greeting as Hastur boarded. He responded with a subtle nod of his head and a sneer that was his default expression, and proceeded to help them stack lobster traps.
The sky was overcast but the sea was calm, and there was no reason to expect any different as the day moved forward.
“Morning.”
Beezus and Hastur looked up to Crowley on the pier, dressed in all black, his wild ginger hair tousled by the sea air. On his heels was the stranger. Crowley dropped into the boat, brushing off his jacket once he found his feet. Hastur rolled his eyes at the man’s attention to his appearance. They’d all be sodden and smelling of fish by the time the day was out. He didn’t see the point.
Beezus’s hands had stilled on the traps, waiting for Crowley to explain the appearance of the stranger.
“He needs work,” Crowley said, gesturing with his head up to the man still on the pier. He hauled himself up onto the bow to begin unknotting the ropes that held the boat to shore.
“You can fish then? Been on a boat before?” Beezus asked, eyes narrowed and trained on the interloper.
“Yeah. Done it all my life.” The man’s voice was low, but warm. Hastur busied himself with the traps.
“Not here though.” Beezus retorted.
Hastur thought Beezus was being awfully picky for someone who had been complaining since the loss of their fourth - a kid who had picked up and moved to the city - that they’d been shorthanded, with no one signing up to help.
“No. Not here.”
“Well,” said Beezus, grimacing. “We’ll try it for today. Bring the anchor up.”
Hastur and Beezus watched silently as the man found and began to draw in the anchor with little effort. Crowley came ‘round the cabin, long legs adjusting to the shallow dips of the boat in the water.
“What do we call you?” asked Beezus as the boat came away from the pier, pulled as if by a magnet out of the shallow harbour.
The stranger looked over his shoulder, his eyes the brightest thing on the boat. “Ligur,” he grunted, and that was that.
The village had never been big, but it had seen better days. When Hastur’s mother was alive, she’d speak mournfully of her younger years, when the train stopped at the station every day instead of twice a week, and when no one went hungry. His grandparents and their contemporaries reminisced about a time when the harbour was so thick with cod it was more fish than water.
In those days, to be a fisherman, to be on the boats and know the sea, was the highest honour. A respected job. But when the fish started to disappear, so did any regard for the men who risked their hides on rough waters for the better part of the year. It didn’t seem to matter that their small catch still kept the village’s shrinking economy afloat.
The children graduated from the small one-room schoolhouse and left on the train to the city, making promises that they’d be back. Promises that would almost surely be broken. The population dwindled and the village, which had never in its life been a boomtown, no matter what some people claimed, continued its descent.
The village needed the fishermen, the boats, but those in town who fancied themselves respectable still looked down on men like Hastur, and especially Hastur, as if they were vermin. He would’ve spat in their faces, or pointed out their hypocrisy, but he had never been good with words. He could just barely read, having left school early to work at sea. When he had been younger, so many of them did.
Now, he kept a home that overlooked the harbour, if one could call the ramshackle assortment of boards topped by a tin roof a home. The lumber that made up the walls didn’t quite meet, and in winter, which began in October and sometimes lasted until June, brutal winds slithered through the cracks, leaving Hastur permanently chilled.
If he thought himself cold-blooded, the frost stung less.
A bed with an old mattress, a wood stove that was his only source of heat, a couple of salvaged chairs, ropes and old traps and other refuse abandoned under the docks filled the rest of the space. He would never have called it fine , but it never occurred to him to want more.
Maybe he might’ve said he was lonely, if he had any idea what that was, if he hadn’t lived it every day of his life, never knowing what it was to not be lonely.
The boat needed a fourth hand and Ligur proved himself competent, so he stayed on. He was a quiet man, whose eyes stayed steadfastly on the ground when he was not on the ocean, who communicated via a series of grunts and single words, never quite bringing himself to craft a sentence from beginning to end. That restraint in itself wasn’t uncommon for a man who worked at sea, but matched with his unknown history and the colour of his skin, no other boat would’ve taken him on. Only the most desperate of crews would accept such an obvious outsider.
The Wren belonged to Beezus. Hastur knew, vaguely, that Beezus wasn’t from a sea family, that their family had been planted firmly on land. Hastur knew, vaguely, that Beezus had once had another name, another future laid out for them. He knew for certain that they had chosen the sea for the questionable freedom that it allowed, and the space from expectations that life in the village created. Beezus spat and cursed and took up more space than their small frame would ever suggest possible. He’d only seen them off the dock a handful of times, skulking around the village after the sun had set, visiting the general store, the post office. They looked ill at ease anywhere but on the water. Just like Hastur.
Crowley was different. He played at living on land. He tried to say the things that townspeople wanted to hear, to look the way a man with a shorebound life would look. Hastur suspected that Crowley fancied himself better than his crewmates. As if he were fooling anyone. Crowley pretended he belonged to the land but he always came back to the sea. Though Hastur would never admit it, Crowley was the smartest of them, the most creative, suggesting possible fishing spots, changes of practice. It had been Crowley who’d suggested leaning more heavily on the lobster catch when it became clear that cod were getting scarce. It didn’t bring in near as much money, but it was something.
Hastur couldn’t put his finger on the reason why no other vessel would take Crowley, why he lived at the margins. He wondered if it might be the rumours he’d heard other crews whisper - that Crowley carried on with the village doctor in a way that raised eyebrows and had other fishermen spitting on the ground in his wake. The doctor was a recent import from the city, which didn’t help Crowley’s cause.
The thing about Hastur was that he should’ve been able to join another crew, marked less differently than Beezus and Crowley. Every boat tied to the pier was manned by plainspoken men who knew the sea and lived simply. Hastur would’ve thought himself part of that cohort, but he remained decidedly at the fringes. He never made the effort to change it, simply accepted his station. His only choice was to work beside Beezus and Crowley, and so he did.
To say any of them liked one another would’ve been an overstatement. Like wasn’t part of the equation. Like wasn’t a necessity to take the boat out day after day (except Sundays, when boats were to stay at the pier in deference to a God in which none of them believed), to toss nets and haul traps, to organize catches. They didn’t need to like one another to make a living.
So it was a surprise when after several weeks, Hastur found that he liked Ligur.
It was an easy and quiet camaraderie that bloomed as hand passed over hand, pulling in nets and gathering up traps, assessing which of the catch to keep and which to return to the sea. It came as they shared lunch, bologna on white bread with American cheese and an apple or two, when the village store had them. Ligur always had less than the others, and he accepted Hastur’s offerings with contained gratitude. His eyes would meet Hastur’s for a moment with a flash of amber, then drop, as the exchange of half a sandwich was completed.
The crew paired off to sort the catch at the end of long days. Beezus and Crowley bickered for the sake of bickering, while Hastur and Ligur found consensus quickly, exchanging as few words as possible. They learned to watch for hesitation in each other’s hands, the momentary dip of a wrist that indicated a fish wasn’t good enough to go to market, that they could put it aside for themselves. The tilt of a chin and squint of an eye in the direction of Beezus and Crowley would indicate exasperation, a sense that the other two wasted time running their mouths.
They built their own language, as the weeks passed. Quiet gestures and minuscule expressions, near silent grunts from the back of their throats or chuckles when things went awry. It was easy and it was warm.
As long as Hastur had been on the boat, which felt like almost his whole life, at the end of each day the crew would divide among themselves those fish or lobsters too poor to go to market. From the day he joined them, Ligur refused his share.
“Too good for it, then?” Beezus said, with a sneer to mask their genuine confusion.
“Nah,” said Ligur, taking it on the chin, the corner of his mouth curling into something that suggested a smile. “Just tired of looking at ‘em, is all.”
He’d split off at the end of the day, heading up the pier, and Hastur would find himself wondering where Ligur lived. At night, sometimes, he would picture it. He wasn’t a terribly creative man, so he saw Ligur, in his flat cap and grey sweater, in a small home like Hastur’s own. Same grubby surfaces, same window out towards the water, same squeaky metal bed frame topped by a failing twin mattress that dipped low in the middle.
“You ought to take something.”
Hastur held the rejects of the day's catch out to Ligur, who after two months still refused to take anything home at the end of the day. Ligur waved him off and shrugged his broad shoulders, unwinding a tangled rope.
“We did alright today. We’ve got all sorts. Take something, for once.” Hastur didn’t look at Ligur as he said it, something about the encouragement making his chest tighten.
“Nah,” grunted Ligur, casting his eyes over the harbour. “Won’t eat it. It’ll just go to waste.”
This time, when Ligur ambled away as the sun hung low in the sky, Hastur followed. He watched from a distance as Ligur wove his way around other fishermen and dock workers, as he wandered down the main street in town and past the church. He went through the graveyard as the night rose and then, exiting out the north side, he turned back towards the bay. Hastur followed still.
By the time it was dark, they were back where they had started, at the docks. Hastur watched Ligur slip behind the warehouse where some of the smaller boats were stored in the winter, where frayed ropes and old traps found a home.
Hastur found the loose board on the back wall that faced the town, and he moved it. On the other side, Ligur waited.
Hastur froze. Ligur’s eyes blazed in the low light.
“Have a nice walk?” he asked.
Hastur sniffed. “You knew, then.”
“Course I knew.” Ligur smiled. “Not real sneaky, you.”
Hastur had thought himself discreet, mostly because he hadn’t had anyone notice him before. Something like embarrassment nipped at his throat and he looked around the space. Tarps and barrels, buoys. An abandoned anchor.
“You sleep here,” he said, half question, half statement.
“S’hard to find a room,” said Ligur, and it suddenly occurred to Hastur that people in the village might not rent to him, might actively make it difficult for a man like Ligur to stay. It wasn’t as if he had funds to make his point. Work on the Wren brought in some money, but just enough to get by. Not enough to convince cold hearts, to grease stingy hands.
Ligur didn’t bring home fish at the end of the day because he had nowhere to keep it, nowhere to cook it.
“Nearly winter now.” Hastur wondered where Ligur even slept. “Y’can’t stay here. They’ll find you. Kick you out when the boats come in. It’ll be too cold.”
Concern tasted sour in Hastur’s mouth and he swallowed it back down. Ligur shrugged. They stood in silence for several deeply uncomfortable minutes, Ligur scrubbing his face and Hastur shoving his hands deep in his pockets.
“Well,” Hastur finally said, not comfortably, several feet to the left of comfortable. “Should probably come with me then.”
Ligur didn’t argue.
It wasn’t as if there was room in Hastur’s small home for a second person. There was barely room for one. But it still provided better amenities than the warehouse. A small range and an ancient cast iron kettle for tea. A backhouse not a far ways off and the pump down the lane. Hastur suspected Ligur wouldn’t complain.
On the opposite end of the single room were a couple of old sails, balled up and shoved into a corner. Hastur had saved them from the refuse pile some time ago without knowing why. They’d do for now.
“We can ask ‘round. For a mattress,” he muttered, gesturing to the sails.
“Nah,” said Ligur. “S’fine.”
Ligur took off his hat and his coat, and set to folding the sails in such a way that maybe he could sleep on them. Hastur watched for a long moment, then took the kettle off the stove and went out to the pump.
Without invitation or spoken agreement, Ligur did not leave. Or, rather, he continued to stay.
There was no slow burn. It was not an epic love story. There were no smouldering glances over lobster traps and the day’s catch. No weighted touches as hands passed over ropes over the course of a busy day - at least, no more than there had ever been.
It was a bitter winter evening. The wind ripped over the barren cliffs and nearly shook the one room house off its uneven foundation, the window panes clattering in their frames. The air hissed through cracks in the walls. The wood stove produced meager heat, and after being on the ocean the better part of the day, neither man could dispel the heavy cold that lived in their bones.
Instead of going to bed on the makeshift mattress of sails in the corner where he’d retired each night for several months, Ligur slipped onto Hastur’s narrow cot. His broad chest pressed into Hastur’s sharp shoulder blades, and they shared what little heat they had. They did not speak of it, and Ligur didn’t return to the sails on the floor after that night, or ever again.
Hastur had never much worried about the passage of time. He did not own a calendar. He only vaguely knew when his birthday was. It was the seasons that were important, the way the ice moved, the migration of schools of fish. But one week was burned into his mind. The seven nights that Ligur slept in his bed, before touching him.
On the seventh night after the night that Ligur had started sleeping snug against his back, a strong, callused hand with blunt fingers pressed down Hastur’s front. As it made its descent, both Hastur and Ligur stopped breathing, Ligur waiting for an objection that would not come. Hastur couldn’t have said he wanted this, because he wouldn’t have known the words for it. He couldn’t have understood what his desire looked like.
No one had ever touched him like this. No one had been close to him, like this.
Ligur’s fingers wrapped around Hastur’s length, sure and certain. Hastur swallowed, wondering if this were the moment another man would lash out and fight back. Perhaps in another life he pushed Ligur off of him. Perhaps in another life he beat the piss out of him and threw him into the winter night, demanding he never appear in Hastur’s line of sight again.
But there wasn’t another life. There was this one, where Hastur had spent each of his years hungry for a quiet affection he never thought he was due.
He encircled Ligur’s forearms with his hands, and moaned into the touch. It was a revelation, the closest thing to a religious experience he had ever had. Ligur’s hands, his breath on Hastur’s neck. Low grunts and the brush of lips over Hastur’s shoulder.
When they finally kissed it tasted like the sea. Like salt, like kelp, like clear and open air. Like it was supposed to.
In the early mornings they would wake slowly and climb off the cot, stretching their limbs, popping joints. Ligur would fetch water from the pump up the hill. They'd wash in silence, water sluicing down their necks and faces and forearms. In the winter, they would warm it on the stove and the small room would fill with steam. Hastur would watch Ligur through the haze and feel something open in his chest, some real, deep and beating thing that he had not known was alive.
After a strong, dark tea, they would shrug their jackets on and walk down to the pier.
Neither spoke of what happened that first night, or any of the nights that followed. They never put words to what that tangle of limbs and sweat and spit meant. They did not put a word to what they meant to one another. Hastur wasn’t sure he knew one. The closest he could think of was permission . To be allowed to hold and be held, to rock against one another in the dark. Permission to need something beyond the barest essentials. Permission to want something. Something more.
For years, they did not speak it. They did not name it. They simply stood next to each other on the boat during the day, and lay next to one another, body against body, at night.
If Beezus and Crowley knew, they did not say. They wouldn’t have the words, either.
On Sundays in the summer they would pack something to eat and a deck of cards and walk out along the cliffs, away from the village. On the warmer days they would walk for hours until they were far away, out of sight. They took no beaten paths, walking through long grasses where maybe no one had ever been, to find a place they could rest.
Even in the summer the winds were cool, the days overcast, and sometimes, Ligur would slip off his grey sweater and hand it to Hastur without speaking. Ligur knew Hastur was always cold, showed it in the way he curled Hastur’s stiff fingers into his own each night.
When Hastur wore the sweater he could not quite say that it smelled of Ligur, because at this point, they smelled the same. They were made of the same stuff, and were never apart.
The schoolteacher was mad. Everyone thought so. The other men on the docks would look at the girl walking along the shore in her long skirts, dark hair trailing behind her in the wind, and click their tongues, mutter what a waste it was that a pretty face like that was attached to a woman who claimed to be a seer. She read tea leaves and palms and wandered the cliffs, divining rods in her hands, looking for something no one in town would dare ask about.
She was mad, like her mother and grandmother had been mad, but she was the only choice they had to stand in front of the single classroom, and so she did. Mothers prayed their children would leave with the ability to add sums, recite bible verse and list off the Prime Ministers, largely unscathed by her ravings.
The sky was calm and blue, the breeze light, and the boats prepared to go to sea on a late spring morning. Hastur took a lobster trap from Ligur and loaded it onto the back of the boat, and then another. They both paused when they heard a woman’s raised voice. A rare sound on the pier, among the seagulls’ cries and the waves against the docks.
Beezus came out of the cabin, dark brow furrowed, looking up the ladder. Crowley turned and searched for the source.
Suddenly, she was upon them, having been shrugged off by the other crews along the pier.
“Don’t!” A delicate hand, not at all weathered from work on a boat, closed around Crowley’s arm. “Don’t go out.”
The schoolteacher looked up into Crowley’s face, eyes wide and pleading. Her knuckles white with effort. Hastur could see the strain in her face from where he stood in the boat below.
“What are you on about?” Crowley hissed, attempting to peel her off. He was clearly frustrated at his misfortune of being the one person left on the pier to be accosted by her.
“Don’t go out today!” She tried to hold onto Crowley, as if she alone could keep the fleet from going to sea.
“Geddoff me,” he snarled, and started down the ladder.
The schoolteacher went to her knees and clutched the edge of the pier, watching Crowley descend. She looked wildly at the rest of the crew, brown eyes through round spectacles landing on Hastur, Ligur, and finally Beezus. “Please,” she called down. “Listen to me!”
Beezus sighed and began to unwind the knots that held the boat against the dock as Crowley landed on the deck. “Shouldn’t you be teaching kids astrology, or something?” they bit out, pulling up a buoy that was slung over the boat’s edge.
Inch by inch the boat crept away from the pier. Beezus looked out anxiously at the others that had gotten ahead of them. Hastur knew the look. They’d lose any chance at one of the prime spots, have to go out further afield to have a shot at a worthwhile haul for the day.
The schoolteacher moaned in what sounded like agony, and turned her attention to Hastur and Ligur, who hadn’t yet vocally dismissed her. “You can’t… there… don’t go… there’s a storm! A storm is coming.”
Ligur chuckled and looked Heavensward, then glanced to Hastur. His eyes said look at that sky. A storm? No. Crowley and Beezus scoffed. They had decades of life on the sea between the four of them. This was not a day for a storm.
There was nary a cloud, barely a breeze. Nothing had come through the weather report. The day was to be perfect. Hastur looked up to the woman getting further and further away as Beezus switched on the engine, and steered the Wren out of the bay. The schoolteacher stood, clutched her shawls around her, and on the breeze, Hastur could have sworn he heard her wailing.
By the time they left the narrows, the schoolteacher had left their thoughts.
They went out into the ocean, further than they would’ve normally. They’d been late leaving, and the prime fishing spots had been staked out by newer boats, the larger ones with more robust crews. The Wren couldn’t compete, and wouldn’t try. They sliced through the waves, passing jagged cliffs, old lighthouses, flocks of puffins and seabirds. They went out from shore until they couldn’t see it anymore.
Cod skirted the place where the air met the ocean in heaving schools, and each crewmember felt like they had gotten somewhere near lucky. They dropped nets and trawled for the better part of the morning. The catch was dumped on the decks and they were up to their calves in fish.
It was a good day. Until the air shifted.
How none of them had noticed was a mystery, but it was Crowley who first turned narrowed eyes to the sky and made a noise of discontent. They all followed his gaze. To the south, the sky had gone startlingly dark, and the wind was beginning to make itself known with the rise of the waves, the quieting of seagulls. It was silent and unsettling.
Beezus cleared their throat. “Let’s, ah, let’s head back, yeah?” It was a mark of the strange circumstances that Beezus would frame anything as a question. None of them would have ever thought to object.
Hastur and Ligur hurriedly packed the day's catch into coolers as Beezus turned on the engine and steered back towards the village, back towards the safety of the shore.
Lightning cracked across the sky above and waves lurched below them. Beezus stared determinedly ahead from their place in the cabin, their grip on the wheel so tight Hastur was surprised the wood, with the varnish worn thin, hadn’t splintered beneath the captain’s fingers.
They all knew it was futile, even as the motor on the boat roared over the waves and they thought hopelessly of the pier. There was no way the Wren could outrun the storm that had descended upon them from the cruellest heaven. They all held on tight as the ocean was whipped into a frenzy, and then the rain came down.
Within seconds they were soaked to the bone. It was as if they were in the ocean and not on top of it, for the way the water ran down their faces, dripped off the brim of their caps.
For a brief, terrifying moment Beezus lost control of the wheel and the boat hit a wave at the wrong angle. Hastur and Ligur held tight to the cabin and Crowley lost his footing, slid halfway down the deck until he collided with and held fast to a trunk of supplies that was bolted down. They all watched in despair as their catch fell overboard and sunk to the bottom of the sea. But their horror at losing the day’s income mattered little, when their grasp on their very lives felt shockingly tenuous.
Beezus pulled hard on the wheel to regain control. They wiped the water from their face with a sodden sleeve, grimacing at the wind and the wet, the salt water in their eyes. For a golden moment, even with the rain beating down, there was a feeling that they had it. That Beezus had them on track and it would be harrowing, but they would get home.
Then Crowley screamed, and they all turned to him where he stared wild-eyed out to the great expanse of grey ocean.
A wave of tidal proportions thundered towards them like a runaway train. Roaring, slicing through the storm. There was nowhere to go but through.
In the seconds before it crashed into the boat, each of the crew dug their fingers into wooden beams and walls. But in the end, what were mere fingers against the pull of nature? What chance could they possibly have stood?
The brutal wall of water slammed into them, enveloping the boat in the most horrible embrace, and time stood still. The weight of it felt enough to break Hastur’s bones, to crush him into the nothing that he had always felt he was, but then a hand grasped his arm. Blunt fingers, callused and strong, but against the rip of the tide, flagging. The only hand he really knew, other than his own.
A hand that carried water, that made tea, that touched Hastur in the dark with an unexpected gentleness that Hastur had never quite known if he had earned.
Hastur reached through the wave to grab the forearm to which that hand was attached, and he held on for the dearest life he knew (not, as he had thought until that moment, his own).
He opened his eyes to find the world around him was the clearest it had ever been. The only thing in his line of sight was a pair of familiar amber eyes, searching, begging him to hold on. As if Ligur needed to beg, as if Hastur wasn’t giving this single moment everything he was made of, channeled his every desire into that grasp. The eyes said it will not be enough . Hastur opened his mouth and, impossibly, it made words.
“No, oh no.”
It was the closest he’d ever come to acknowledging the thing that he and Ligur held between them. It was the closest Hastur had ever come to saying
You are the only person I would have touch me for all of my days. I know what it means when you are breathing. I know what you are feeling in the way you move your hands. I am a man who has never asked for anything, but is it too late to ask for a life quietly at your side?
It was too late. Ligur’s arm slipped from Hastur’s grasp, inch by horrible inch until the contact broke between them, and in spite of the frigid water, Hastur’s skin was on fire. He flailed wildly in the wave, hoping for what could not be, that Ligur was somehow still there.
The storm raged around them still and yet all he could hear was a high pitched screech, a mourning wail that sliced through the waves and the wind. He only realized in the moments after that it was him, the sound born from his own wretched lungs. Crowley slipped on the water-logged deck, his arm looped in a rope to keep him from going over, and leaned over the edge, searching for his crewmate. Searching, and seeing nothing.
Hastur pitched himself towards the boat’s edge, casting out for Ligur’s arms, looking, pleading for his face. Anything of the man at all, and when he couldn’t see it he almost threw himself headfirst into the swirling, murky depths.
Suddenly Beezus’s arms came around his waist. They were strong from years of hauling nets and tying knots and doing absolutely everything on their own, refusing help from anyone who might help them. Beezus pulled him back and they both landed hard on the deck, the water splashing up around them, Hastur’s head smacking the wood.
“He’s gone!” Beezus cried, their voice wrung out, strangled from having the air punched out of them from the impact of Hastur landing near on top of them. Then, in a hoarse whimper, reaching out for Hastur’s hand. “He’s gone.”
“We have to go,” yelled Crowley. “We have to keep moving. We’ll all be -” His voice cracked as he found his footing, even as another wave washed across the deck, drenching them all again. “We’ll all be overboard.”
Hastur had never been to war but he wondered if it were something like this, a relentless assault. An attack on one’s very being. Leaving one’s beloved behind on the battlefield to surely die if he hadn’t already succumbed to the onslaught. He’d stopped screaming. He’d run out of breath. He didn’t think he could stand, and as if mocking him another wave swept over him, salt water choking him, settling in his throat.
Beezus pulled him up to sitting. Their small hands twisted in his shirt. “We have to go,” they said, just loud enough to be heard over the storm. “I’m so sorry, but we have to go.”
The Wren pushed through the storm, but Hastur couldn’t say how. He was empty, unseeing. He had left any vigour that lived within him on the ocean floor.
The return to land was cruel. As the bay came into focus, the skies cleared and the sea calmed, as it had been that very morning. It was as if nothing had happened, as if the one person who meant anything, who gave Hastur’s life the barest meaning, hadn’t been stolen away not an hour before.
The pier emerged as they came through the narrows, crowded with people. The bay was lousy with boats. Hastur would later learn that all the other boats had stayed closer to shore. They all got back, narrowly missing the storm, their crews intact and together.
The Wren came up to her spot on the pier and ropes were dropped down to her diminished party. Hands were reaching down for them, hands of the other fisherman who on a normal day derided them and gossipped about them. There were people from the village as well, drawn from concern, perhaps, or maybe just there for the show. Hastur couldn’t tell. He didn’t care about any of them. He didn’t care about anything at all.
Hastur allowed two other men from the docks whose names he might’ve known once, but did not now, to haul him up onto the pier. He could barely find his feet underneath him. The abrupt shift from the rocking boat to solid ground felt like a brutal period to what had just happened. He looked back to the open of the bay.
He is out there, and you are in here, and that is the way it will be.
In the chattering around him he could not register if any of the people on the dock realized there were now only three of them where there were four. (There were two, once, and now there was only one.)
Someone took his arm, and when he looked up, wide-eyed, he could see a soft pale hand on his bicep. Hastur looked into the face of Crowley’s posh doctor, who was speaking to him, saying something in the dulcet tones of someone who grew up far away but it fell deaf on Hastur’s ears.
The doctor reached up to touch Hastur’s head. Hastur shoved the hand away, just as it made contact. He could see on those soft fingers, blood. Shaking his head, Hastur backed away. Whatever had happened, it didn’t hurt. He couldn’t feel his own skin. And no one else was to touch him. Not today. Not ever.
There was a brief commotion as the postmaster, a tall, broad man who Hastur (and everyone else) thought too self-important for his position, pushed through the crowd. His careless gait forced the doctor to jump out of his way, but the postmaster didn’t notice. He simply went to Beezus, who looked even smaller in their sodded clothes, and took them in his arms. Beezus’s face turned to Hastur, and their eyes looked like an apology.
For a brief and beautiful moment, Hastur detached himself from everything else that had happened that day and wondered numbly what the postmaster’s wife would think. Just for a moment, before the stark reality of the rest of his life rolled out in front of him, empty. Beezus’s eyes apologized because they would have someone, and Hastur would not.
Rivulets of water still ran down Hastur’s back as he broke away from the crowd, and began to drag his waterlogged shoes towards the empty shack where one man lived.
He stared resolutely at the ground, the grass beaten into some semblance of a path, until his gaze was interrupted by two small feet in black leather boots, laced tight around the ankle. He followed the long line of the leg up, to the anguished face of the schoolteacher. In her piercing eyes he could see that she knew - that there were two, and now there was one. She looked at him and saw him for what he was: a man made of nothing but despair. A black mark on the village. A shell of a man.
She parted her lips but said nothing, not the kind to say I told you so . Eyes rimmed with tears, she moved out of his way, and let him continue on. As Hastur moved past her, one of her hands twisted in her shirt, and the other covered the mouth that had told them so.
At the end of the path he reached his shack, and with little ceremony opened the creaking door.
Hastur sucked in a sharp breath as he allowed the door to swing shut behind him. Alone until he hadn’t been, he was alone again. All was the same as he had left it, as they had left it that same morning. The kettle on the wood stove. Well worn work shirts hung up over the bed. In the chair by the window, a dark grey sweater. In the beautiful weather, Ligur had left it behind.
The sweater, thick knit, rough wool. The sight of it nearly took Hastur to his knees. He approached it, both hungry and terrified to touch it, as if knowing what the weight and the weave felt like absent its owner would be the striking blow. As if it hadn’t already been dealt.
His shaking hands ghosted over the wool and then he couldn’t hold back. Hastur brought the sweater to his bony chest, the very same that just that morning Ligur had run his hands down with a tenderness no one knew that he had been capable of. Except, of course, Hastur, who knew how soft those hands could be in a way no one else could.
His mouth opened, and it was a beat until sound escaped him. A wail, full throated and from the very bottom of his rotten gut. With that wretched sound his knees gave up and his shins hit the clapboard flooring, hard. He didn’t feel it. All the angles of him folded inward and he pressed his face into the knit. He sobbed in a way he never had. Not once.
Wailed and sobbed and screamed until he was wrung out. Until he was carved hollow. Until all that is left is a husk of a man who used to exist.
His only friend. His only love. He should’ve gone after him, and let the sea take them both.
In the years that follow he becomes a harder man, colder. He speaks little, smiles less. Each day he goes to the boat and works without speaking, falling into old patterns with Beezus and Crowley. He spits into the sea.
Every night, he sleeps in the embrace of a grey wool sweater.