Cooter don’t mean for his butt, half of it at least, to have to be chopped off. He had to have his right butt cheek and some of his thigh cleaned out good and that meant cutting and digging and cutting some more so as to get rid of the infection that was starting to go in and eat up his pelvic bone, up top near by the iliac crest. I saw it myself cause Cooter came to me looking for help with caring for the wounds and didn’t wanna deal with no more hospitals. He was all cut up and it was like looking at a piece of exotic fruit, trying to identify something familiar.

Cooter had gotten skin grafts that set like two little islands of meat from his thighs and saw where the doctors left them in the ocean of red where his butt shoulda been. He said the doctors who had done it were jerks and he told me that he didn’t want to go back for more skin grafts. I told him he should go back cause the edges of the grafts had all rolled up and there was pus everywhere and it was hard for him to find any parts of his butt left to inject his dope in. I told him I’d go with him to see the jerk doctors even though I knew he was brave and could handle himself.

But he wasn’t gonna go and he didn’t have much money. Cooter picks up scrap metal and other useful things from the yards of hoarder houses while chickens and sometimes guinea hens run about in the yard. Cooter just wanted simple things like gauze or period pads or baby diapers, anything that could be put across the area where a butt should be and keep the weeping things a bit more dry.

Lisa, Cooter’s sometimes girlfriend and sometimes thorn in the side, was creative and torn white sheets into large strips, large enough to cover a man of smaller stature’s butt, but she had torn all the sheets she had, cut up the towels for padding, got him puppy pads at Dollar Tree and then would tape it all down to him like she was wrapping a present. Lisa was a good friend to Cooter even though she said he doesn’t always treat her right and he spends more time in jail than with her cause he don’t listen to the things she says when she tells him all the things he shouldn’t be doing.

Sometimes I bring him puppy pads and abdominal pads and medicines in a big brown paper Kroger bag. Sometimes my friend The Nurse helps me out and I can bring antibiotics when the place where his butt is gone turns red and green like Christmas with little drops of plasma weeping a twinkle light in the sun where he’s working and you can see it on his jeans where the wetness has come through. I give him a shot in his other butt where the cheek is still there and it gives him some antibiotic coverage for a bit. It’s hard to keep wounds clean when everything you love has touched the dirt. Sometimes after I leave he texts me and says “baby, ur blue eyes smile in the light” and I say “u idiot my eyes are green”.

Rebekah Morgan is a writer based in East Tennessee. Their writing can be found in Oxford American and Joyland Magazine among other fine places.

⦆

The sound goes out from my dark little room at the end of a long metal pier, collides with something, and returns.

Protocol: note all targets. The sonar display doesn’t give details, submarine or creature both just blurring dots. But I know that’s her, on the scan at last.

I can hear the stories in the ultrasonic echoes, the specifics that the machine can’t detect. I was slow to learn to keep it to myself. Aboard the Suffrance, I said too much, became a standing joke.

Now the closing shape’s a beacon, lit by spinline. Bright as the line passes and fading through the next rotation. Flaring another tick closer. Moving towards my dark little room, chasing the source of the sound she can hear.

In the log, I write: unknown target, though I know what it is.

⦆

One of the stokers on the Suffrance had something wrong inside the chambers of his chest. When I told him so, he said I could keep that to myself. But he took a shine to me. Rankled like a bear at the other boys’ derision.

Radio crackles. Downcoast checking in. Bored, congested with a cold.

Ears, this is Downcoast. How’s the view?

Can’t complain. Over.

Got a name on the monster they pulled up. Over.

They hauled the young one in at the downcoast station just yesterday, tangled in a trawler’s net. Whether or not it was dead when they caught it, it was lost to the world an hour later.

What is it? Over.

Architeuthis, he says. Big old squid.

I’ve heard the young one and its mother: long heads, too many limbs for me to count, eyes that scatter sound. But the sonar carries more than shapes. Today, the whole resounding space of the sea is raw with grief.

Huge, he says like this is news. Six meters long.

Under the floor, the pier’s bearings groan like men. Where the beams meet the platform, the metal is red with rust. It comes away on my fingers, sticks under my nails, leaves smears on the lid of the coffee machine.

⦆

I first saw the mother and the little one as smudges on the sonar screen. Listened as they feasted through a school of fish. The little one was slow to learn.

Once, when they wandered close, I paused the spinline and pinged them a hello. The baby darted forward, echo full of curiosity. The mother set her body in the sonar’s path. Mantle wide, she rushed the little one away. Broad like the stoker, squaring his shoulders at the others’ mockery.

On the scan, she flares bright again as the line continues its rotation. I calculate her distance and her speed and note it on the clipboard.

○

Hey, Ears, Downcoast calls again. Boys’re saying they’re gonna pay to stuff it. Sell it to a museum or something. The monster. You wanna buy in? Over.

Under my tight fingers, the pages of the log crumple, nearly tear. The rust under my nails leaves red lines across the neatly labeled rows.

I’ll pass. Over.

Your loss, he says. Dull as rocks otherwise. Anything down there?

Her outline etched by the reflected sound. The billows of her long limbs, her vast intent. Two kilometers and closing.

Protocol: call in unknown objects. The whole point of dark little rooms at the end of long metal piers. Safety and security and the national interest.

All clear, I say. Out.      

⦅

After a dive off Peterhead, the Suffrance surfaced in a bank of fog. Nobody knew yet that we’d drifted. Only blurs on the sonar screen. But I could hear the edges through them, some dead volcanic peak.

I told the control crew we would break our hull along the ridge. The navigator took my collar in his hand. Not going to change course because a sparker thinks he’s better than the scan.

The bow took water and we sealed it off too slow. Saltwater hit the batteries and turned to chlorine gas. By the time a merchant steamer reached us, 46 hands were lost. No one could tell me what happened to the stoker, if it was sea or gas that put him on the roster of the dead.

⦅

The radio again, static before his voice crawls through. Always wondered, he says. Did you believe it? Your magic hearing thing.

Don’t clog the channel. Over.

Boys down here say you’re really crazy.

Jeers in the crew mess. The stoker standing, head scraping the ceiling, asking if anybody wanted to say that one more time.

I put my thumb on the switch that stops the sonar’s spin. She’s closing now, her jets in the display’s revolving beam.

⦅

Protocol: maintain and observe the rotation of the scan. Whether gas burned through the fluid in his lungs or breakers trapped him in the hull, I never found out how the stoker died. As the mother nears, the only sound she makes is the rush of water through her body like blood in the valves of the heart. She won’t find her baby’s body here, but I know where it is.

I thumb the switch, a narrow slice of ocean stranded in its range. Direct it south, a degree offshore, where the downcoast station and the body of her little one sit just beyond the sonar’s beam.

For a moment the scan is empty. But then a blur on the display. The echoes contort behind her as she follows the signal’s course, her intention sharp and set.

At the sonar’s farthest reach, she slows. In the sound I see her drift a moment upright. Her eye turns towards my sound, smooth and round and shining black. As though she can hear me in the echoes too, I lift my hand.

Ellen Wiese is a Chicago-based writer. Ellen’s previous publications include Portable Gray, AGNI, Wigleaf, and Lost Balloon, and her writing has appeared on the 2022 Bristol Short Story Prize shortlist, the 2022 Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize Long-Longlist, and Glimmer Train’s 2018 Very Short Fiction Top 25. She graduated from the MA Prose Fiction program at the University of East Anglia.