when it comes to slaughter, you will do your work on water
SNP Westerhout is a thousand feet long, steely grey with a red belly. Sheâs been at this for almost twenty years by the time you join her skeleton crew.
One of the young seamen, Buchanan, doesnât like you much. From the time you joined the crew heâs doubted your age out loud in front of everybody. He says shit like, âYou donât look nineteen. Do you think he looks nineteen, Cillian? He canât be.â
You turn seventeen in a few days, but thatâs besides the point. Itâs right there on your fake ID: nineteen.Â
Youâre a real pussy about it, too;Â prideless, cowardly, invisible. But not to Buchanan; to him you must be some threat.
You are, in the end. At his end.
đ¤ PRETZELS AND VIOLENCE BELOW THE CUT đ¤
He does nothing without an audience. Passing by each other in an otherwise empty corridor, he says nothing. Wonât even look up off the floor in front of him. But when the other guys are milling around, heâs full of condescension, full of doubt about you, full of theories. You think you donât give him anything to work with, but sometimes it feels like your shame is a long strip of magnetic reel heâs unspooling in front of everybody. The things he says, stupid as they are, cut you open and dissect you so everyone can lean over and see whatâs stowed inside your skeleton.
You donât like it, but youâre not gonna do anything about it.
The more you demure, the ballsier Buchanan gets. He starts trying to pick fights, albeit only when thereâs somebody to see it. Heâs a little bit shorter than you are, but bigger. (Everybody was bigger than you back then, when you were a kid pretending to be a man pretending to be human.) When he pushes, you stagger. When he shoves the heels of his hands against yours, he can push you down onto your knees, then he kicks you in the ribs. It happens about that way a couple times. It knocks the breath out of you and you canât get back on your feet right away, so the sight of you on your hands and knees sucking for air is a nice spectacle â but it doesnât hurt, really. Not for long. The seamen and the oilers get tired of watching you long before youâre on your feet again. Itâs funny for them, but not impressive. Some of the older guys think he could stand to pick on somebody who stands a chance for a change.
You do start to wonder if you ought to take offense. You catch sight of the bruises he leaves and wonder if they shouldnât go deeper than they do. If your pride shouldnât feel bruised and soft like overripe fruit. It doesnât, though â it feels more like watching some character you donât care much about get the shit kicked out of him on TV.
Westerhout is headed for the Strait of Malacca when you finally talk to him. Everyoneâs nervous because some smaller vessel got hijacked a couple weeks back. One of the pirates had a grenade-launcher, Cillian tells everyone at lunch-time. You listen, but only because you like the look of him. (This is something you grapple with from time to time, but mostly you accept it. Itâs far from the worst thing about you.) If pirates want to try and steal forty-foot containers loaded with mysterious contents, they could just kick you about it, too. They can blow you up â what choice does anybody have?
But Buchanan is real nervous about it. He doesnât say anything at lunch; just wears this chary look on his face. Part of you wants to feel smug about that, but looking at him just makes you blue. He canât sleep that night. Itâs strange that you even notice â but youâre fresh off your shift, and the sky is a cold, cold shade of grey. It blazes silvery behind the ovular windows leading from your room, which you share with a guy called Lopez, to the snack machines. Theyâre bubbly with condensation, and the bright primary shades of the containers out on the deck blur like a surreal, preschool dream.
You pause and look out over the deck from the doors to the emergency escape. Your hand clears water from the glass and you squint at the dark shape leaned over the deck rail. The stacked containers look like a city built around him, like Buchananâs standing at the edge of the world.
Spotlights on the deck light the way to him. Youâre forgoing a bag of out-of-date pretzels for this, and donât quite know why. By the time you see him through a narrow frame of corrugated steel boxes stacked forty feet high on either side, youâre sure what you want to do. (It was iffy, at first, because your mind kept snapping to the little utility knife in your back pocket on your way here. Mustâve been self-preservation, though, because Buchananâs kicked you so many times.) When you reach him he doesnât turn around, so you lay your hand briefly on his shoulder then lean over the rail next to him and you both watch foam lap out of the black ocean.
Buchanan mutters something like an apology, which you donât answer. The follow-up is excuses: he guesses heâs a little bit homesick. He was in the foster system for most of his childhood; his adopted father recently passed away. Can you be homesick, he wonders, if you never had a home?
Youâre barely listening, but you understand doubt and confusion and lonesomeness so intimately it comes as a shock that anyone else could be acquainted with them without you hearing about it. It shouldnât surprise you, though, because these things donât talk. (Thatâs kind of the hell of it, isnât it?)
You look over at him, finally, and he looks at you like itâs the first time heâs ever seen you. Like he didnât know who it was he was talking to all this time, or knocking down, and you realize heâs not the age he says he is, either. He looks heartbroken for a beat and his mouth works around a âWhy,â but itâs eaten up by waves rushing against Westerhoutâs belly and he abandons whatever it is heâs gonna say. Reaches out instead and holds onto to the back of your neck while he looks in your eyes like heâs sorry, then all of a sudden heâs coming closer and closer and you canât begin to imagine what it is heâll do
and you never find out, because you slip the knife from your pocket and spring it and jam it down to the hilt between his ribs.
He clenches up and grabs at your skinny wrist. His eyes drop down and his mouth moves â probably another one of those why questions but only blood comes out â and you donât know, exactly, but you think to him, you know why. It occurs to you to yank your knife out of him and drive it in a dozen more times, but it also occurs that his blood would paint an abstract expressionist work of evidence against you, so you shove him at the railing instead. Heâs heavy and you canât seem to lift him over. The lightâs leaving his eyes the whole time and his body starts to list and sag. He drapes his spine over the metal and you grab his pants and haul him the rest of the way, then let go. Your knife slips out of your grip and falls with him. He hits the water and you imagine he bobs back to the surface in the dark gloom, but the knife sinks.
You step back and look at the rail. Itâs clean. Thereâs a glob of blood on the deck, which you wash away with a styrofoam cup and sludgy rainwater you dug out of one of the garbage cans fixed to the outer deck. You do the same with the blood crusted at the corner of your thumb nail, then buy your pretzels and take a long shower and youâre in bed eating when Lopez comes into the room.
Itâs a few hours before they start looking for Buchanan. You canât sleep, but pretend to wake up, then help look for him at one in the morning. Knowing you wonât find him doesnât diminish your effort. It takes thirteen men a long time to scour a ship that size. Hours after you dropped him over the railing, they call in a search and rescue.
This "chapter" needs more editing than others, and may or may not ever make it to the official chronicle of yote lore. Posting it anyway! đ Taggin': @fortunatetragedy @saturnine-saturneight @cowboybrunch














