He sucks at my breasts and tugs my nipples, and—with one finger—presses down on the median of me until a single egg emerges from between my legs.
He smoothes the peak of my hairline and the sweaty locks around my forehead, leaving a residue of my oil on his thumb that will stay for days.
I am exhausted but will return to the ridge to watch the ships.
A tall, narrow spritsail, mainmast sprit-rigged.
Reef point at upper edge.
Dawn.
He carries my egg in a waxed leather sack. It rests within a nest of dried seaweed, warm and chalky as phosphate.
And later I will return, cold, from the ridge at sundown and build a fire in my hearth.
As always, it will produce a black haze so thick my flesh itself turns gray.
But in its dark, gentle heat, I will let down my hair and pick it out quietly with a comb, the small bodies of my lice igniting with a hollow pop in the coals near my feet.
The men load caskets of eggs into the small boats and take them out toward the holds of the deepwater ships.
In the men’s deep-floating, double-hulled ships are barrels of eggs packed in dried straw and brown algae.
Each egg the size of a fist.
Some with shells fierce as oyster shucks.
Some eggs, more fragile, have already broken open and begun to cloud, staining the crated hay a viscous black.
I scrub at my teeth with a handful of sand, and pick out the grains that lodge beneath my fingernails.
I sit, knees crossed, on the low ridge above the shore, watching the men standing tall in their sterns.
Jib tacked to stemhead.
In the mornings, the flat boats leave the shore low to the water and tie up a while at the ships’ sides at high tide, then return, lightened, to be tied up again at shore through the night.
Night will fall, and at shore the empty boats will float high at low tide.
Their heavy daytime waterline of stained oak and barnacle raised in the moonlight.
Dark falls charcoal on the sea.
The ships anchored far out of reach.
Orion.
Cormorants.
The sailing men are on land with the women.
The ships are anchored far out to sea.
The small boats are empty at the shore.
At dawn they will again be filled with eggs.
My skin is smooth and pale as duck fat.
I am more fierce than wolves.
I have clawed open seashells with my fingers, then crushed and eaten them.
I have honed my teeth to points with handfuls of sand.
He harvests the egg with his tongue.
He leaves with my egg in his bag.
When he stands shoulder to shoulder with the other men and packs my egg into the morning barrels, mine is the pale lichen white of young fangs: slightly luminous and unbreakable.
He looks down at a sea pinked with blood.
My bed is filled with crow feathers.
He returns.
We leave my bed together at dawn, and I leave the door open for new air.
I walk apart from him toward the morning shore.
When we reach the water, we move in opposite directions.
The man, with his purse of egg heavy at his thigh, is expected at the ship.
He retraces his footprints backwards from the night before.
I walk apart from him toward the south, holding my iron eel rake.
At times I stop to loosen tiny pebbles with my toes and examine them for size and smoothness. I warm them in my palm, then knot them into the hem of my blue dress.
The man’s odor still carries to me from the north.
It echoes the scent of his thumbs on my forehead, and along my spine and thighs.
I find my usual inlet for eel—a calm place where the sea snakes linger in the silt below seaweed. It has taken them thirteen years to travel from the Sargasso to nest in these cold northern waters of the Baltic.
Untying my rocks, I swallow them.
I will wade in—then dive—and sink heavy in the shallows before scything out an eel with my rake and pinning it to a tine with my hands.
Small. Rough.
It arches up and twists, tough, but I wring it, and its spine stills after the crack.
I will walk back alone with my catch.
A thin fall of blood streams from the eel, its skin cut from my rake.
I will lay a bed of seaweed over the gray ash and pinecones of last evening’s fire, and later add shavings of rue, birch, linden. My eel steams and smokes as the sun rises slight above the dunes.
The men stand high in the stern with their barrels of eggs. I can pick out mine by his silhouette. It’s a private matching of night man to day man, and it happens in the ducts between my eyes and the insides of my skull and chest and hips.
The smoked eel is not yet stiff in my fingers.
My throat holds the taste of war and liquor.
A stone settles into my uterus with the lowering sun of afternoon.
It will turn a young green inside, form albumen, form a yolk of mold and gold muscle.
Soon as dark falls, the sailing man will come, coax it from my pelvis, then raise anchor, and away.
