Points of Departure by Pat Murphy Page A

we swam together. I’ll be going with him soon. Look.” Morris held up one hand. The webbing between his fingers stretched from the base almost to the tip of each finger. Thelight from the overhead bulb shone through the thin skin. “I’m changing, Nick. It’s almost time.”
    “What does your mother say of this?”
    “My mum? Nothing.” His excitement was spilling over.
    He laid a hand on Nick’s arm, and his touch was cold. “I’m going, Nick.”
    Ten years ago, Nick had been diving at night off Middle Cay, a small coral island not far from East Harbor. He had been diving aloneto study the nighttime ecology of the reef. Even at twenty-five, Nick had possessed a curiosity stronger than his sense of self-preservation.
    The reef changed with the dying of the light. Different fish came out of hiding; different invertebrates prowled the surface of the coral. Nick was particularly interested in the flashlight fish, a small fish that glowed in the dark.
    Beneath each eye,the flashlight fish had an organ filled with bioluminescent bacteria, which gave off a cold green light. They were elusive fish, living in deep waters and rising up to the reef only when the moon was new and the night was dark.
    At night, sharks came in from the open sea to prowl the reef. Nick did not care to study them, but sometimes they came to study him. He carried a flashlight in one hand,a shark billy in the other. Usually, the sharks were only curious. Usually, they circled once, then swam away.
    On that night ten years before, the gray reef shark that circled him twice did not seem to understand this. Nick could see the flat black eye, dispassionately watching him.
    The shark turned to circle again, turning with a grace that made its movement seem leisurely. It came closer;and Nick thought, even as he swam for the surface, about what an elegant machine it was. He had dissected sharks and admired the way their muscles worked so tirelessly and their teeth were arranged so efficiently.
    He met the shark with a blow of the billy, a solid blow, but the explosive charge in the tip of the club failed. The charges did fail, as often as not. But worse: the shark twistedback. As he struck at it again, the billy slipped from his hand, caught in an eddy of water. He snatched at it and watched it tumble away, with the maddening slowness of objects underwater.
    The shark circled wide, then came again: elegant, efficient, deadly.
    The shadow that intercepted the shark was neither elegant nor efficient. In the beam of the flashlight, Nick could see him clearly: a smallboy dressed in ragged shorts and armed with a shark billy. This one exploded when he struck the shark, and the animal turned with grace and speed to cruise away, heading for the far side of the reef.
    The boy grinned at Nick and glided away into the darkness.
    Nick saw five lines on each side of the boy’s body—five gill slits that opened and closed and opened and closed.
    Nick hauled himself intothe boat. He lay on his back and looked at the stars. At night, the world underwater often seemed unreal. He looked at the stars and told himself that over and over.
    When Nick was in the Islands, Morris usually slept on the porch of whatever house Nick had rented. Nick slept on a bed inside.
    Nick was tired from a long day of travel. He slept and he came on the forbidden dreams with startlingurgency and a kind of relief. It was only a dream, he told himself.
    Darkness covered his sins.
    He dreamed that Morris lay on a dissecting table, asleep, his webbed hands quiet at his sides. Morris’s eyes had no lashes; his nose was flat and broad; his face was thin and triangular—too small for his eyes. He’s not human, Nick thought, not human at all.
    Nick took the scalpel in his hand and drewit through the top layers of skin and muscle alongside the five gill slits on Morris’s right side. There was little blood. Later, he would use the bone shears to cut through the ribs to examine the internal organs.