EXCERPT
Just before midnight, a bulge of sea rolls smoothly past Good River Harbor. It’s the flood tide of the dog-salmon moon, the highest tide of the month. On its dark currents, it carries a lost gill net, drifting unmoored. These are the dangerous nets, detached from human intention. A dog salmon nudges into the net. Her head slides through the mesh, but her body is too wide to pass. She backs away. The net snags her gill plates. The fibers dig into the feathery red tissue, deeper as the salmon tugs to get away. She curls her body and snaps it straight, yanking at the net until her blood pinkens the sea. There she hangs by her head, caught by gill plates bright and round as the moon, cratered with the moon’s shadowed seas. More salmon nudge into the net, flashing silver as they struggle to escape. A school of salmon weaves through the kelp forest, approaching the net, wary in the night. Salmon and salmon and salmon nose into the net that seizes them more tightly the more they flail. The nets bulge and recoil. Silver tails swirl.
Tasting blood, a salmon shark sways close to the net, singing his rough flank against the fibers. He snatches off a thrashing tail, snatches another. But then he veers and noses into the net. He catches first a tooth, then pushing forward, catches another. The shark whips his head from side to side, savaging the net, driving the falling scales into silver swirls. He vomits salmon tails and trailing intestines that sink through the currents. A gray cod snaps up the falling pieces and pushes into the net, where she finds her own death. Heavy now with the dead, the net slowly sinks until it settles, swaying on the floor of the sea.
A hermit crab reaches tentatively for torn flesh. Dungeness crab move in, scuttling sideways. A small sculpin thrusts its spiked head into the red tissues and spins, tearing off flesh. The water is cloudy with sea-fleas and shrimp eating the soft meat under the silver skin, nibbling around the bones, a cloud of eating. Hear the tick of small teeth, the click of small claws. Spot-shrimp stalk in on spidery legs, following their orange prows. Long antennae reach toward the dying and the dead. Bubbles pop from shrimps’ mouths and stream toward the moon. When the banquet is finished, there is no flesh, only skeletons and strips of white skin, swaying.
Without the heavy flesh, the net rises again on its floats. Listen now. Skeletons with silver skirts ride the ghost net, hissing. Strips of skin swirl. Plated heads grin. The ghost net floats past the town on great tidal currents, gathering bones.
