Fearful Symmetries by Ellen Datlow Page B

own hands before. Fish scales and fish slime. You couldn’t fish without getting it on you, but where was his catch?
    “I’ve got a tuna hook on that rope, and I put a whole mackerel on it, case you’re interested. You boys fish?”
    I nodded.
    “Thought so. I’ve pulled in a lot of leopards and blues out here. Eight-footers and ten-footers. Even a twelve-foot mako. There’s a four-foot steel leader. They can’t get through it—even the big ones.”
    I nodded again. I didn’t know what else to do. I loved to catch things. I loved fishing, even if it smelled. It was a different odor from the one that filled the streets around our quarters at night, under the biggest banyan tree anyone had ever seen.
    The next time we went, the sailor wasn’t there. It was as if he’d never been there—never existed—but I knew that wasn’t true. I knew what was real and what she could take away. I’d always known. That was why (Grandma said) she hated me so.
    Tommy was frightened of how empty the end of the pier was, so we came home.
    The time after that, the sailor was putting a live mackerel on a hook that was wider than our father’s hand. He let Tommy touch the hook. Tommy touched it without getting scared. He just stared at it, eyes wide, and touched it more than once.
    I knew she would have put Tommy on that hook if she could, but I was watching Tommy, and my grandmother was watching me even when she wasn’t around.
    The next time, the sailor was leaning over and making a sound. When we got up to him, we almost left. He was throwing up.
    He looked at us and straightened up, embarrassed. His eyes were red, like he’d been crying.
    The rope was gone.
    He looked so sick.
    “You all right?” I asked. My parents and grandmother had raised me to be courteous.
    He didn’t answer that. Instead he said: “I found a dog, a pretty big one, over by the barracks. He was starving to death.” He stopped talking and bent over again, but didn’t throw up. “That’s what I used. He didn’t fight me. He was weak. I don’t know why I did it. I knew something was out there, something bigger than twelve feet, and I wanted it. . . .”
    He pointed to the cleat where the rope had been.
    “It took the whole thing. What would it have to be to take the rope, the whole thing, like that?”
    I didn’t know what to say.
    “I keep seeing that dog. I had a dog once when I was little. . . .”
    I saw Tommy on the hook—because that was what she wanted. But she’d have to find another hook. This one I was watching.
    The next time we went out, and the four times after that, the man was gone. When I asked another sailor—one that worked in the metal shops by our quarters—he said he didn’t know any sailor like that.
    “He was out at the end of the first pier a lot,” I said.
    “A swabbie catching sharks?”
    “It was after work,” I said. “On weekends, too. I think his name was Curt.”
    “He’d have been with the metal shops. No one by that name here. You sure he was a sailor?”
    “He wore blues,” I said.
    “You must have been imagining things,” he said suddenly, and for a moment he sounded just like our mother. He
was
our mother. Her voice, her body just below his skin. Not in our heads, but completely
real
—because that is what witches do. She could do things like this, I knew, and she knew I knew.
    I looked away. I didn’t want to see his eyes, which weren’t his. I took Tommy home. I led him down the street between the machine-shop Quonset huts to the dirt path, past the goldfish pond and the greenhouses, into our house with all its rooms, holding his hand tightly because he was my brother.
    I missed talking to the sailor, the one with the rope and the hook, even though Tommy had nightmares about the dog. The nightmares stopped. I had bad dreams, too, but they helped me remember that I had a dog—a little one, a fox terrier named Walter. How I’d forgotten him, I didn’t know, or I did, but didn’t