Dagger Key and Other Stories

At length, alert for surprises, she creeps down the ladder, pushes open the door with the point of the dagger, and passes through the galley into the sleeping quarters. Selkie is lying on her belly in a bunk, one foot in the air, wearing a pair of opaque pink panties. She’s leafing through a magazine, headphones over her ears. Annie’s captivated by the shape of her leg, the curve of her back. So like Mary in her carefree attitude, yet entirely unlike her in form. Plush and soft where Mary was lean and muscular. Annie steps inside the cabin and undergoes a dislocation. It’s as if she’s standing in a ruder cabin with dark, ill-fitted boards and a port whose glass is warped and bespotted with birdlime. The vision dissolves and once again the windows are narrow, the walls paneled, the bunk carpentered out of some polished reddish wood. Yet the shade of that other cabin persists and she thinks it may be a sign of more significant persistence. She recalls a Hindu sailmaker aboard the William who told stories of souls passing from one flesh to another, stories that charmed her with their easy, airy logic and caused her to rethink the moral oversimplifications of the Christian creed (not that she was ever a zealot)—it seemed just that the character of one’s life, as the sailmaker claimed, was a punishment for sins committed during a previous existence, that good be rewarded with perfect emptiness, that evil men be reborn as calves or suckling pigs, kings as chattels, and pirates as whores, all that was hard and strong in them made pliant and submissive.

Selkie turns onto her side and sees Annie. She registers the blood on his clothing. Her eyes drop to the dagger, sheathed in Klose’s blood. A look of fright occupies her face. She presses back into the corner of the bunk, breasts nodding, one hand clutching the sheet, the other braced against the wall.

“The money,” Annie says.

Tremulously, Selkie says, “In the galley. The cabinet under the sink. Please! Don’t hurt me.”

Annie half-turns, intending to investigate, but is struck by a more vivid dislocation—Mary, brown and naked, holding out her arms, inviting her into an embrace.

“Mary?” Annie says. “Is it you?”

She cannot believe it, yet neither can she deny the temptation toward belief—she wonders now if the things of herself she recognized in Selkie were intimations of Mary reborn in this harlot’s flesh. They shared a soul, she and Mary, though Annie owned the stronger half of it.

“Mary?” she says again, and her heart beats faster, as if those two syllables keyed the racing of her blood.

Selkie’s fear has been diluted by bewilderment, and Annie, uncertain herself, comes a step nearer.

“Do you not know me, Mary?” she asks. “It’s Annie.”

Bewilderment, again. And then a canniness shows itself in Selkie’s expression. Hesitantly, she puts a hand to her temple, the gesture seeming to convey that she’s experiencing an inner turmoil, that what Annie said has waked something inside her and provoked a fleeting recognition; yet it’s such an artificial gesture, it fails to convince, and the look of dismay that accompanies it accents this failure.

“Annie?” she says. “I…”

She makes a second pass with her hand, the fingertips just touching her cheek. A feeble noise issues from her throat. It appears she’s caught between grief and the memory of love, between her husband’s blood and a fleeting glimpse of another time.

Annie realizes that Selkie must have heard the story of Dagger Key from Klose and, confronted by this dangerous man with her husband’s blood on his knife, someone she must assume is deranged, she’s attempting to play a tune he’ll dance to—but that she’s acting is no proof of anything. Mary was always quick-witted. It may be she’s both acting and stirred by a memory.

Lowering the dagger, Annie sits down on the edge of the bunk, places her hand on Selkie’s thigh. A tremor runs through the milky flesh, but Selkie does not freeze up, rather her expression grows dreamy and unfocused; her eyes drift to Annie’s fingers, lying so near her quim. And Annie, possessed by yet another memory, re-envisioning the time when Mary first revealed herself and, lying back, let her knees fall apart to show Annie her rosy…Annie twigs aside the flimsy pink fabric and slides a finger along Selkie’s lips. Already moist. She cannot be, Annie thinks, so good at playing a part that her body would not betray her.