His shoulders tense as he finds a finger, long and white, with a scratched and stained fingernail on one end and a root system of grey and black veins on the other. The flesh is white and pruned, but plump and alive. He puts it in the bucket. 

          

A massive concrete building overlooks the bay. He sings a song of gratitude to the curling dragons of smoke coming out of the stacks.

           

When his bucket is full, he heads back up the slippery hill to the house where he lives with the mother. He digs his toes into the grassy hillside carefully, bracing himself with a free hand.

           

Her hands are covered in pigment. On the easel behind her an apparition stares from deep-welled pastel pupils. She checks his dripping bucket of fingers. "I’d like some arms next time," she says with a smile while kissing him on the forehead. 

           

He laughs, "do you really think arms will grow down there?"

           

"Of course they do, where do you think the fingers come from?" She fillets each finger, removing the black veins. A chittering calls up from below the kitchen table.

           

"Orkoo, these aren’t for you."

           

Orkoo responds with a dissappointed boo. 

           

"I wish I had a father," the boy says.

           

"Well, you don't," she says. She puts the fingers to roasting. "I pulled you whole out of the bay. You were the only fully formed person to ever come out of that muck."

           

"On TV they have fathers."

           

"Have you ever seen anything else on TV in real life? That’s what TV is, made up." The small house creaks with the weight of something and they both tense. "What, with the dormingers about that you should be worried about a father who doesn’t exist."

           

"They came early tonight," he looks worried.

 

#

           

Sundown and the house is lit with fat-soaked rags in jars. The lights smell of old meat.

           

A bell on top of the stove dings. She looks into the oven. "Fingers are ready", she says. "Don’t forget to peel the nails off!" She pulls the steaming tray from the oven with an old towel. They are stuck to the tray, juices oozing.

           

She serves him a plate of roast flesh. He picks each finger up and peels the nail off, which comes loose easily, held only by a string of cooked nailbed. Each fingernail goes on the side of his plate in a small pile. 

           

"These are a good find," she says. "Next time you’ll find arms though, I’m sure of it."

           

"Will the arms have fingers too?"

           

"I’m certain they will. I bet those arms were out there today. You just didn’t dig deep enough. The fingers will grow back by tomorrow. Do you remember the spot where you found them?"

           

"Oh yes, I do."

           

"Tomorrow, when you find a finger, reach down into the hole. You should feel a bony hand. Don’t pull on that, because it’ll come off, and a hand is really not as good as an arm at all. When you feel the hand, follow it down to the wrist. Go past the wrist to the forearm. Grab hold of the forearm and pull with all your strength. If we’re lucky, you’ll dislocate the shoulder and we’ll have a bicep too, but a forearm is nice."

           

The boy listens, reaching into the dark mud behind his eyes. 

           

"Don’t let your fingers get cold dear.”

           

"But, if there are arms, might there be a whole person down there too? What if I pull up a whole person?"

           

"Don’t be silly, you aren’t strong enough to pull up a whole person." She smiles and sucks the meat from a finger, leaving a knuckled series of bones, held together by milky sinew. "They don’t need those arms, and they will grow back in a day."

           

Orkoo scratches at the boy’s leg. "Ow, Orkoo, bad you." The boy kicks his legs under the table and Orkoo scurries away on his thick padded hind feet.

           

After dinner, the mother puts the plate with the bones on it into a locked box while Orkoo watches. "Shoo, go outside and find your dinner," she says and pushes him toward his little door. At the threshold he turns quickly and tries to bite her fingers with his long teeth. She is fast and tucks them into a fist and punches him in one of his long floppy ears. Orkoo cries out and runs from the house. She locks him outside.

 

#

           

Boy and mother sit together in front of a relic, a humming and sparking tube in a box with pictures moving on the front. 

           

Arms and bodies below the muck press him. He blinks at appendages swaying underwater at high tide, collecting fish and snails to feed their bodies still buried below the riverbed. They sway like grass and animal combined in a organism of a single-minded purpose, to feed. As part of the mud, they are more of the earth than of the sea, but the fragile way they are held together is like a sea creature when it’s taken out of the water.

           

The mother falls asleep and the TV broadcast ends. The screen shows a flag on a pole, waving in the wind. It’s a lonely thing, that there is motion and wind at the end. He watches until the screen goes crazy with a tearing sound. Then, he turns it off and sits in the darkness with the snoring mother.

             

#

           

Maybe the entire bay was a body. 

           

At the bottom, a sea of waving grey arms. A frenzy of splitting knuckles and knobby elbows flailing blindly. The prickly wetness of their blood. The finger factory reflected in a glowing green cloud. Tendrils of micaceous sparkling hair, chunks of mud descending in trails to the muckbed. the anti-freeze sunset, haloed in brackish green, 

           

A deathless thing rotting alive. 

           

The next day his small hands empty the bone drawer into the furnace. He is unable to thaw the frozen space between his feelings. Comfort recedes into hypolimnion. Down at the shore he wonders about the old boat, decaying at its mooring. A segmented worm crawls over the muck in the beached hull. He picks up a rock and throws it at the slick mover. 

           

A set of rose-quartz eyes watch him intensely from a few feet away. Orkoo! he shouts, but the animal sits still watching. Orkoo? he asks. The creature backs silently into the bush until just the tips of its ears are visible. 

           

Spooked, he gets out of the boat. The late afternoon light turns to a copper reflection. His breath quickens as he runs to the spot. He drops to his knees with his spoon and digs. Water and muck splash in wide incautious arcs and quickly cover his bare back in blue-black splatters. A finger breaches the soup and floats in front of him. 

           

His breath quivers as his own hand disappears. Focus deforms into brash-bodied action. He pushes and slides his hand deeper. The veiny back of a cold thick hand slips past his forearm. Bony and tired and limp. A pulse, faint arhythmic tapping. He lays on his belly and plunges down. Chin in the water. A sheaf of elongate muscles. The sun touched the tops of the trees.

           

The arm tries to snake away. His fingernails dig into flesh. It dislocates with a sickening pop. No time. The disk of the sun is now missing an edge and dormingers will be out. The arm gives a weak twitch.

           

Feet slide in muck. Falls face first and the arm lands on top of him, twitching on his bare back, fingers flicking helplessly at the muck. 

           

The veil lifts slowly.

           

He slips again climbing the hill. The arm limps slowly back toward the bay. He lifts his bucket high above his head and brings it down with a clunk. A ragged collection of grey and blue-black flesh, torn white sinews. A tree behind him creaks with the drop of a dorminger settling on a thick branch.

           

A lone flower dried to a sphere of feathery wisps. The flowerhead bobs back and forth on its stem. A gusty breath flattens the stem and explodes the flower into a hundred future flowers. The smell is like burning carpet.

           

Orkoo appears. Its eyes now carmine and glowing. Rears up on hind legs, split upper lip draws apart and flexes a pair of four-inch incisors dripping with half-chewed bear scat. It leaps over the boy's head, a long fawn blur.

           

He leaves the arm in pieces, runs swinging his bucket wildly around his head. The house is dark, the tree line beyond is a black ribbon, save one spot which glows with ambient laughter.

 

He slams into the door. The impact knocks him to his bottom. Orkoo's screeches behind him cut into him. He looks back. There is a type of man. Orkoo is baying at his heels as he walks toward the boy and stoops to one shaky knee. His grey fingers, black streaked nails, one solitary arm, shake as they reach to the splattered mess on the ground. He stops short of touching the pieces of himself scattered there. 

 

The man turns to Orkoo and reaches tenderly for his head. The beast chitters and bows but submits itself to his affection. The bucket, laying on its side, pours shame out into the grass, where it waters some dandelions growing there.