Passion of Newsincerity

[The Patriarchy]

Chapter 1 The Sincere Sacrifice​

When I picture my own leaving, it never looks like this: the sour-fish stink of a Florida panhandle port, dawn pushing its way through a greasy lid of clouds, the wind so full of diesel and salt and decay that my eyes water like I’m the one being left behind. But I’m here, backpack and two duffels at my feet, hands sunk so deep in Sun Yuxin’s coat that I’m almost hugging her from inside out. She’s wearing the same ridiculous knockoff Canada Goose as always, zipper broken at the hips where her stomach pushes it open like a swollen jaw. I can feel the shape of our baby through layers, heat and thumping and that extra, shocking solidity, like the weight of a bowling ball wrapped in nerves.

She tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, fingertips cold. “New,” she says. The pet name that somehow stuck after an ironic throwaway, because we are both so new, so raw at this, so doomed to be the last ones in history to ever believe in anything sincerely. “You must write. I don’t care how slow WiFi. I want three hundred words every day. In English, because I am forgetting English already. And, and—”

She presses her lips together. She’s always prettier angry or about to cry, the tension making her lips stark and her cheekbones harder. I want to take a picture so I’ll remember her looking at me, like she’s the only one who knows I’m about to fuck up in a way that breaks the world open, but she never lets me. “And you must not come back if you fail,” she finishes.

She always plays it as a joke, but in every joke is a death sentence. “I love you,” I say, because it’s all I have left to do, and I need her to know I’m not pretending, I don’t have the armor other people get born with.

Her eyes flick, hunting for irony, but I refuse to supply it. “Wo ai ni,” she whispers, Mandarin pinched through a voice not quite ready to believe itself.

I hear her stomach growl, a tiny captive tiger, and remember the whole fucking point: “Hey—” I break the hug just enough to get out the envelope. It’s the last time I’ll ever have a literal envelope full of cash in my hand. All my ‘welcome to America’ service tips from six months slinging shrimp, plus the bonus from Ma Guanyu for taking the trawler spot on no notice. I’d done the math: it would cover three months of rent in the panhandle and everything the midwife said she’d need if the baby came early. I want to say, ‘It’s not enough, you deserve more,’ but if I start with that I won’t be able to stop.

I push it into her hand. She looks at it, looks at me. “You think I am so bad with money,” she says, mock-offended, and sniffs. Then she pockets it anyway, clutching the fabric. “I will send pictures of how much noodle I buy. All noodle.”

She shivers against me. We are alone at the edge of the warehouse loading dock. Nobody else shows up for the Black Dragon until it’s ready to leave. The trawler, long as a city block and black-painted to hide its filth, groans at the pier forty feet below us. Its rust stripes run like infected veins, oozing red down to the water line. Overhead, gulls wheel, disappointed by how little this place has left to take.

“Three months, okay?” she says, softer now. “Three months, and then you come home, or at least to a hospital. You swear.”

“I swear,” I say, and I mean it. I mean it even though neither of us expects me to last.

She pulls my face down and kisses me. Her tongue tastes like Red Bull and menthol, her teeth are sharp with anxiety. She holds on so hard it hurts my jaw. I think she’s going to say something else, but she just holds me, face buried in my neck.

Below, a horn splits the air: the signal. I untangle from her. “I’ll write you tonight. I’ll write you right away. Even if it’s just ‘I love you I love you I love you’ three hundred times.”

She lets go last. “Three hundred and one,” she says, and smiles through something complicated and very old.

The trawler’s ladder is a strip of corroded steel welded into the dockside. I pick up my bags. She’s already texting as I walk away, not watching me leave—she’d told me once that the pain only starts when you look back, so don’t ever look back, just go until you’re gone. I try to follow her rule.

Halfway down, the ladder shifts under my weight, and rust grits into my palms. The deck is wet and oily; I nearly lose my footing stepping off. A crewman waits, squat and yellow-booted, his face arranged into a neutral that says he already hates me. He gestures to my bags, then at a cluster of similar sacks lined up along the gunwale like body bags for lost tourists. I drop them, and instantly miss their weight.

Above us, footsteps—someone else descending, slow and heavy, like a cartoon villain taking the stairs one at a time so you know the doom is real. Ma Guanyu is shorter than I expected, not much over five seven, but built thick and low-slung, like a man designed for moving refrigerators. He’s wearing a captain’s coat, old navy wool, the cuffs chewed out by acid or rats, a cigarette somehow dry between his lips even with the mist blowing in sideways. His face is a mask of tanned callus, scar puckered at the cheekbone, eyes nearly black. When he grins, all of his teeth show.

He looks at the crewman, says something sharp in Fujianese, then fixes on me. “Sinclair Nathan?”

“Yeah. Yes, sir. That’s me.”

He makes a noise in his throat, halfway between laugh and cough. “Last night you had trouble with the paperwork. Next time, bring someone smarter.”

I start to stammer a defense, but he waves it away. “Now you go down.” He points at a hatch. “Quartermaster will see your phone, your bags, your name. You don’t need phone for fish. No signal, anyway.” His English is jagged but clear, every syllable a little sneer.

I hesitate, looking up at the dock. Sun Yuxin is gone, probably already halfway home with her envelope. I want to believe she waited to see me disappear, but my heart has always been built for believing things that aren’t quite real.

Ma Guanyu makes a show of checking his wrist. “We go now, not later.” He lifts his hand—there’s a flash of silver. I don’t notice what it is until he’s right next to me, and then I realize: He’s holding out a little passport-sized folder. “Passport, please.”

I take it from my jacket, thumb-warmed and already a little smudged. He snatches it, flips through as if he’s memorizing every stamp, every embarrassing visa photo, then pockets it in his coat. “Now you are ready,” he says, and his mouth does a thing I won’t call a smile.

I shoulder my way down the hatch. The steps are slick, painted in the kind of military green that makes even new ships look like they’ve been rotting since Vietnam. At the bottom: a hallway, low ceiling, the smell of ancient oil and fresh bleach, and a parade of open-mouthed fish faces, eyes still glassy, arranged on stainless steel racks along the walls. Two more crew—both Fujianese, both younger than me but already hard from too many months at sea—sit on an overturned plastic crate playing poker with tiny, oil-spotted cards. They glance up, glance away.

Quartermaster’s office is a closet-sized room with a desk made from an old hatch cover. The quartermaster himself is a bald man with gold rings in both ears, chain-smoking over a laptop that looks two centuries old. He takes my bags, my phone, my wallet, anything that can’t be used to bleed or clean a fish. My clothes, I’m told, will be ‘washed and ready’ by the time I finish orientation. The next time I see my duffel it will smell like formaldehyde and smoke.

He hands me an ID tag: black dragon, red paint, my name spelled wrong. “Wear. You get in trouble without.”

There’s a shirt and set of bibs with the trawler’s emblem stenciled on them—both three sizes too big. I ask about my berth and he points with his cigarette. “Down. Take left at shit smell.” He grins with black-stained teeth.

The way to the sleeping quarters is a gauntlet of narrow halls, pipes overhead, deck plates cold enough to bite through socks. The other new hires are already lining up outside the bunks, a mess of shivering college dropouts, Vietnamese grandfathers, two ex-Mormons, and a guy from Alabama with ‘NATE’ tattooed across his knuckles, already trying to start a fist bump circle. I pass through them and find my assigned bunk. It’s a metal shelf, no pad, still sticky from whatever or whoever bled last shift. I sit. My body hums like a tuning fork with everything I want to say to Yuxin.

But I know if I check my phone, I’ll see the first wave of her messages—already three missed calls, a dozen WeChats, a selfie of her pouting on the dock, pink scarf twisted up to her eyes. I want to respond, but I can’t trust my hands not to betray me. I can’t trust myself not to beg her to come back, to call the whole thing off.

So I close my eyes, instead, and I do what I promised: I compose my first letter, three hundred words, even if it’s just the same phrase over and over.

It starts: “I love you. I love you. I love you. I’m sorry. I love you.”

Somewhere above, a winch screams. The engines fire. The trawler heaves away from the dock, and the last I see of land is a blur of wet concrete, the crumpled silhouette of a woman I’ll never deserve, not even for a second, not even if I live through all three months and bring back every dollar they promised.

I won’t look back, I remind myself, but my whole heart is nothing but looking back.

​

They called it a cold snap, but the real word was "punishment." Sometime in the night the air over the Gulf shifted and the rain came in hard, mean, pelting the trawler with needles that made your bones jerk even under layers. The only sound sharper than the rain was the crew's boots on the deck, running laps around my shivering ass as I tried to remember which rope was which, which bucket wasn't full of poison or something worse. Nobody had slept—not really. My bunkmate’s sleep apnea meant he made pig noises all night, then an hour before dawn a klaxon split the hull and everyone lurched out like rats leaving a bag of drowned kittens.

My first job: deck scrubber, which sounded like a joke but wasn’t. The surface of the trawler was layered in scales, fins, blood, bits of foam and muscle that turned to a new kind of snot underfoot whenever the hoses hit them. Every morning the deck had to be "clean" for the inspectors, though the inspectors would never set foot on the Black Dragon unless they were paid off first.

The boots-in-charge worked in pairs, scraping with steel squeegees, yelling at each other in Mandarin, laughing at my slow, clumsy rhythm. My arms felt like rubber after an hour. After two, they didn't feel like mine at all.

At six AM they let us eat. Some kind of rice porridge, gluey and gray, with a handful of dried fish flakes floating in it for protein. I slurped it down because my teeth wouldn’t stop chattering, and because I hadn’t eaten since the dock, and because not eating was worse than whatever flavorless punishment this was.

At six fifteen we went back out. Rain still falling, and now the nets started coming up.

Nobody told me what to do. I watched, tried to copy, immediately fell behind. The netline was studded with iron rings, slippery as sin, and when I missed the handoff from the guy ahead of me, the next guy yanked it so hard I lost grip and banged my face into the railing. It didn't even hurt at first. What hurt was the cold when my gloves filled up with rain and my fingers stopped working.

They screamed at me, at first. Then they just laughed, and took to calling me “Bait.” It sounded the same in Mandarin: BAIT! BAIT! They’d scream, then pass the net right over my head and leave me grabbing at nothing.

By the third haul, my blisters had popped, one on each palm, stinging every time I twisted the rope. I tried to hide it but the blood left pink streaks in the water sloshing around my boots. The stench was getting worse: a slick, low-tide sweetness layered with chemical tang from the nets. Every time a fish flopped onto the deck, the rain matted the scales down until they looked more like raw chicken than anything living. We sorted by size and species, chucking the useless ones into a separate bucket where they frothed and gasped until they stopped.

The senior crew got to wear the good gloves. They watched, barely intervening except to bark when I was about to do something stupid, like walk across a coiled line or stand too close to the hook crane.

I looked up and saw Ma Guanyu watching from the pilothouse, hands behind his back, smoke curling around his head. He wasn’t even pretending to work. He just stood there, face set, the king of shit mountain, and when his eyes met mine he lifted one hand, slow, and made a little wave like a parent to a drowning child.

I heard a snicker from one of the older crew. He said something in Mandarin and the others barked laughter. I pretended not to notice, but my face burned.

Then the net jammed. I grabbed the cable, tried to loosen it, slipped, and slammed shoulder-first into the steel frame of the winch. I cursed, loud and embarrassing, in English. One of the crew pushed past me and did it right, hands working like he’d been born with them attached to fishnets instead of arms. He grunted, looked at me with disgust. “Too soft,” he said, in English so perfect it hurt more than the impact. “Maybe you want to go home to your mommy?”

I wanted to scream, to tell them why I was here, what I was working for, how I could take any amount of shit if it meant sending Yuxin pictures of a future that didn’t taste like garbage. But I said nothing. I wiped my face with the back of my hand and kept hauling.

Hour after hour the routine repeated. The bodies blurred together; my own body became just another object, bruised and sore and bent. I bit down on my cheek whenever the pain got to be too much, and when that didn’t work, I sang “I love you I love you I love you” in my head, the words so automatic I started to hear them in Yuxin’s voice, like a ghost comforting me from somewhere warm.

Around four PM, they called a break. I stumbled to the rail and puked. The vomit hit the sea and disappeared, like everything else.

I wiped my mouth, spat, and looked out at the ocean. The rain had let up, but the sky was still gunmetal. No land in sight. Just the endless churn, broken only by the ugly black mass of our own ship.

I leaned on the rail, let my hands go numb in the wind, and tried not to cry.

When I turned, Ma Guanyu was there. He had come down from the pilothouse, still smoking, the coat draped over his massive shoulders like a superhero costume for villains. He looked me up and down. “You learn faster than most,” he said. “Most white boy cry by first morning.”

I tried to say something clever, but my teeth were still chattering. “Guess I’m stubborn.”

He nodded, then gestured at my hands. “Show me.”

I opened them, palms up. They looked worse than they felt: skin already shredded, nails torn. A little bit of fish scale stuck to my wrist, glittering like plastic.

“Next time, wrap,” he said. He tossed me a roll of ancient, sticky tape. “Crew always watch. If you fail, they get more food.” His mouth twisted. “You are small, but you work. You not quit.”

I thought of Yuxin, her voice that last morning, her ultimatum. “Not quitting,” I said.

He looked at me for a long time, as if measuring how much more I could take before the bones gave out.

“You last, maybe,” he said, voice soft as anything I'd heard since boarding. “Or you die. We see.”

He walked away, up to the bridge, never once looking back.

I taped my hands. I breathed. I went back to work. Every haul I thought of Yuxin, of the child punching at the inside of her coat, of how much they were counting on me to be different, to survive.

The night came cold and wet and hard, but I did not go down, not even when my knees started to give out, not even when the blood stopped flowing to my fingers and I could not feel the rope. I heard the crew talking, heard “Bait” and “Stupid” and “Soft” but also my own name, spoken with grudging recognition. I took it. It was the only thing I had left that no one else could touch.

By shift’s end, I was shaking so bad I could barely climb the ladder down to the bunks. My skin was raw, my muscles were jelly, and my head felt like a cracked egg. But I was still breathing, and nobody had taken that from me.

Back in my cell, I rolled into the top bunk and stared at the ceiling. The steel beams above were lined with condensation, each drop gathering until it fell, landing on my face every few seconds. I counted them: one, two, three.

With every drop, I pictured Yuxin. Her face, her hands, the way she’d looked at me when I left. I promised her I’d make it. I promised the baby.

One, two, three.

I’d make it.

Or I’d die trying.

​

By the end of my second day I was less a person than a bruise smeared across the floor of the universe. When the shift change finally came, I shambled back to my bunk and collapsed without even peeling off the foul rain gear. My skin stank of brine, blood, and the weird ammoniac tang that rose from the lower holds whenever the trawler slowed. I’d barely managed to wedge myself into the shelf-space mattress before sleep hit me like a bodybag.

Sometime in the black between seconds, something furry brushed my leg. I jerked awake, panic fizzing—rat, I thought, rat, but when I propped up, all I saw was darkness and the faint orange glow of a safety lamp. No, not quite darkness: there was a shadow moving at the foot of the bunk, big and blocky, arms crossed and breathing slow.

“Sinclair,” it said, not a question.

It was the deck lead—the one everyone called cosmicx16. Nobody said it to his face, but the whole crew used the handle with a mixture of fear and mean awe. He looked like a human concrete block, barrel-shaped torso, arms too short for his body, skin pocked and red as though something had burned the humanity out of him long ago. He was the only other white guy on board, and he’d told me in the shuffle of night one that I’d never make it, not unless I learned to love humiliation.

“Shift’s up,” he said, and slapped my ankle hard enough to make my foot go numb. “Up.”

I must have looked like shit, because he smiled—not with joy, but with the slow, savoring pleasure of a kid tearing the legs off an insect to see how long it would wriggle. “Ma wants you on net detail. No breakfast until you’re through.”

I sat up, dizzy, everything coated in sweat and the piss stink that rose from the shared toilet cubby. My hands had stiffened into claws while I slept, fingers curled and leaking fluid from under the torn blisters. I cradled them, tried to get circulation back, willed myself not to cry.

Cosmicx16 moved in close, and I braced for more pain, but instead he pulled out a pack of American cigarettes—real, unopened, forbidden on deck but gold in the bunkrooms. He plucked one, lit it, and inhaled with a slow drag before sticking it between my lips. The taste was instant and glorious, the first good sensation I’d had since land.

He watched me smoke, then knocked the cigarette away with a flick of his knuckle. “Don’t forget,” he said. “They all think you’re soft. Ma thinks you might be useful.” He tilted his head. “But me, I want to see how much you break.”

It wasn’t a threat. It was just truth, delivered in a voice flat as the sea at midnight.

I dressed, hands shaking. The rain had stopped, but the cold hadn’t. Outside, the ocean was a thousand miles of wet black steel, nothing visible except the sodium glare of our own running lights smeared over the waves. I staggered across the deck, slipped once, fell into a slick of old blood and herring, got up before anyone could laugh.

The net detail was as bad as I’d feared: the ropes were heavier now, soaked and doubled by the catch, and the hooks that held the lines were so sharp that two of my fingers started bleeding just from touching them. Every time I fell behind, someone would bark my name—BAIT, BAIT, always BAIT—or shout at me in Mandarin, the tones rising and falling in ways I’d never grasp.

I worked until the horizon glowed yellow, then orange. When the bell sounded, cosmicx16 came to me again. He was grinning now, the kind of smile that said he’d just made money on a bet. “Locker,” he said, pointing down. “Go.”

I went.

The crew’s lockers were metal cabinets with holes punched in for ventilation, lined with black mold. I ducked into the only empty one, and only then did I realize: my phone was gone. The quartermaster had taken it, said it was policy, but now there was a phone taped to the wall inside the locker, screen cracked, Chinese characters scrolling across it like a bad fever dream.

At the bottom: a livestream link.

I didn’t need to guess. My whole body knew, before my mind did, what it would be.

I clicked it anyway. I was always going to click it.

Sun Yuxin’s face filled the screen. Not her old face, soft and bright from early dates or campus selfie mode, but her now-face: pale, drawn, circles deepening under her eyes. She was in our apartment, the blue polyester curtain visible behind her, same as always. She was wearing nothing but a men’s T-shirt—my T-shirt, the one with the dinosaur print, stretched tight over the mound of our baby. Her hair was messier than I’d ever seen, pulled back in a hasty knot.

The image jolted as the camera readjusted. And there, behind her, was a man.

Not just any man. He looked like me, if you peeled away everything weak and left only hunger and bone and muscle. His hands were on her hips. His face was cut off by the top of the frame, but his voice was audible: soft, low, Mandarin laced with words I could almost translate.

Yuxin looked at the screen, at me, and for a second her smile was real. The same smile as our first night together, when she’d said, “I could love you, but I won’t.”

Then she started to move. Her hips rode the stranger, slow at first, then faster, the curve of her stomach swaying. She arched her back, and for a second I saw the tension in her neck, the way she bit her lip to keep from making noise. When she finally moaned, it wasn’t my name. But a moment later, she said it anyway, in Mandarin: “Xin Ge. Xin Ge.” My name, as she called me when we were alone. Over and over, louder, eyes wide, like a dare.

The stranger’s hands crept up, cupping her belly. He leaned in close, said something into her ear. She nodded, still staring dead into the camera, into me.

My hands clamped onto the locker door. I wanted to look away. I didn’t.

The video blurred. When the image steadied, Yuxin was on her knees, sweat shining on her back. The man’s hand was on her head, pressing down, guiding her mouth out of view. The noises were wet, obscene, but underneath it all she was talking, rapid-fire Mandarin, giggling, moaning, then—just once—switching to English: “You see, New? You see?”

I didn’t know if she meant for me to watch, or if she’d forgotten I was alive.

I started crying. Not like a normal man, not silent and stoic, but blubbering, drool running down my chin, breath hitching so bad I had to bite my tongue to keep from howling. I wanted to close the browser, smash the phone, do anything to kill the connection.

But I watched. I watched the whole thing. I watched her come, then laugh, then come again, the way she always said she couldn’t with me, not really, not unless she faked it to make me feel better.

She looked into the camera, face spent and shining. “Miss you, New,” she said, lips forming the words perfect, unmistakable. “But it’s okay if you cry.”

The screen went black.

I sat in the locker, hugging my knees to my chest. I’d meant to last three months, to prove to her and to myself that I could survive any amount of hell if I kept my promise.

Instead, all I could do was sob.

After a while, I wiped my face, licked the salt from my lips, and crawled back onto the deck.

Nobody said a word, not even cosmicx16. They all knew. Maybe they’d all watched.

I worked the rest of the shift without thinking, a zombie with a heartbeat, bleeding into the ocean with every cast of the nets. The saltwater stung, but I didn’t notice it anymore.

Somewhere, the woman I loved was already making plans for the next man, the next livestream, the next reason for me to keep trying.

I was nothing but bait.

But I would not quit.

I would not quit.

I would not quit.

 

[cosmicx16]

I’m not going to say anything but it’s impressive you did all this as your writing submission.

 

[The Patriarchy]

I’m not going to say anything but it’s impressive you did all this as your writing submission.

There will be 5 chapters

 

[The Patriarchy]

Chapter 2: The First Humiliation​

The hold was the color of dried blood. Everything in it glistened—the floors, the benches, the knives, even the overhead lamps wept condensation and fish oil like glands. They’d thrown me down here because I was slow with the nets and useless with the winches, and because some part of Ma Guanyu’s leadership style depended on putting the least dangerous man closest to the danger. It was that, or maybe he just liked watching people wither. Either way, I had become the permanent second station on the gutting line, which meant hours of standing in a ditch sluiced with every chemical and body fluid ever produced by ocean creatures or men.

The stench worked its way inside your head until you started tasting it even in your sleep. Sometimes I’d find myself gagging for air, panicked, and only then realize I was upright, alive, still in the hold, still working.

That morning—was it even morning? There were no clocks, just the whine of the compressor cycling up and down—I’d cut my left thumb three times before break. Each time, it bled right into the line, indistinguishable from the hundreds of liters of gore already in the trough. There was an etiquette to injuries: you didn’t slow down, you didn’t wrap it unless the bone was visible, you definitely didn’t ask for help.

the only other white guy in the hold, if you could even call him a guy, was cosmicx16. He worked two stations ahead, breaking spines and yanking out the viscera with a rhythm that was almost hypnotic. He never looked back, but I could feel his awareness like a heat lamp: always watching for when I’d fuck up, always ready with a comment or a shove.

Every ten minutes or so, a crewman would cruise by the line with a mop and say something in Mandarin. It always sounded like an insult, and sometimes, when I let my attention slip, I could feel them all looking at me, the slow white monkey on the assembly line, mangling the fish and himself with equal incompetence. Sometimes the words broke into English, sharp and simple:

“Your knife is too soft!”

“He so weak he cut self, not fish.”

“Need baby glove?”

There was a rhythm to the abuse, too. After a while I stopped hearing it as speech and started hearing it as percussion—BAO BAO BAO!—smack of fish on steel, whack of viscera in the bins, the hiss of the hose when someone missed and painted the bulkhead with a jet of offal.

The job itself was simple enough. You took the fish from the ice bin, slammed it headfirst onto the block, then stabbed and pulled, the insides peeling out like a pink rope. My first week, I’d hesitated, always thinking of Sun Yuxin and her food aversions—how she’d never eat anything with the head still attached, how even a photograph of a dead fish would make her gag and fake a cough until everyone in the apartment felt sorry for her. Now I didn’t hesitate. The only part of me that hesitated was the nerves in my hands, which by day five had started to die in patches. If I squeezed too hard, the knife would slip, and sometimes I’d keep going even after I felt the burn of steel on bone.

One time I cut so deep that I had to fish the knife back out of the body. The blade came up painted with something gray, like a tongue, and the rest of the line just paused and watched me, mouths open, as if they couldn’t believe I was stupid enough to keep going.

But I always did.

A week into the shift, my gums started bleeding. At first I thought it was just from the scurvy rumors—everyone on the crew had a story about someone losing teeth or going blind—but then the blood just wouldn’t stop, and every time I spat, it was flecked with bits of old rice and what looked like iron filings. I tried to keep my lips closed when I talked, but the taste leaked out. It was worse than the hold, worse than the fish stink, worse than anything.

The food didn’t help. Every meal was a rehash of the same three buckets: rice, salted fish, pickled cabbage so sour it gave you cramps. The rice always came with little black weevils boiled in, and I used to pick them out one by one, until the hunger got so bad that the protein actually felt like a treat. By the end of the first month, I was so hungry I started having dreams about chewing on my own fingers, dreams where I’d suck the blood out and it would taste like childhood, like home.

Today, my hands were shaking more than usual. I’d run out of tape days ago, and the blisters had gone soft, not quite scabbing, just peeling back in layers until every inch of skin on my fingers was a different shade of pink or red. I tried wearing gloves, but they’d soaked through so quick that it just made everything worse. The worst part was the way the blood and guts got in under your nails, lodging there until the next soak, when it would rot in place and send up a little halo of stink with every motion.

There were two kinds of fish on the line: the big pelagic ones, silver and muscle-bound, which required a real effort to wrestle onto the block, and the smaller, slimy ones that slipped through your grip no matter how careful you were. I hated the little ones most; their eyes always popped out first, leaving them with these shocked cartoon faces even after they were decapitated. I tried to avoid looking at the eyes, but it was impossible. You couldn’t work here and not see everything.

After a while, the line got so fast that I lost track of my own hands. It was just a blur: grab, cut, scoop, dump, repeat. The whole world shrank to a tunnel, with only the pile in front of me and the slowly rising pain as my fingers went numb and then came back to life, full of tiny white-hot needles. At one point, I hallucinated that I saw a hand on the line—my own, or someone else’s, I couldn’t tell—but when I blinked, it was just another fish, headless, staring at nothing.

Sometime in the second hour, I started singing to myself. Not actual songs, just words, the same three words, like I was still on the dock that first day: I love you, I love you, I love you. Sometimes I’d get stuck on the second word, the “love,” and just mouth it over and over, tonguing the inside of my cheek until the taste of blood came back and snapped me out of it.

Cosmicx16 turned once, just once, and grinned at me with a mouth full of sharp, stubby teeth. He didn’t say anything, just lifted his chin, a challenge. I didn’t meet his eyes. I didn’t want to know what he saw there.

The shift leader, a guy everyone called Zhao but never to his face, did a lap around the hold at noon. He stopped right behind me, close enough that I could smell the menthol on his breath even through the haze. “You are slower today,” he said, English perfect but lazy. “Is your woman thinking of another man?”

There was a ripple up the line—a suppressed laugh, a few elbows. I didn’t answer. There was no answer.

He came closer, lowering his voice to a whisper: “You know, the crew, they all see. You watch the phone last night, yes? Maybe you watch again, after shift.”

My body tightened, but I kept my face blank. The knife kept moving, even as my vision blurred a little from the humiliation. “I work,” I said. It was all I could manage.

He snorted, but for a second, there was almost something like pity in his eyes. “Don’t cut your finger off,” he said. “Ma would make us eat it.”

Then he left.

I didn’t cry. I thought I would, but I didn’t. Instead, I focused on the job, on the endless gray muscle and the way the bodies resisted, then surrendered, every time the blade slid in. By the end of the shift, my shirt was soaked through and my fingers had gone stiff and pale, so numb I could barely peel off the gloves.

At break, I climbed the ladder and sat by the air vent, knees up to my chest, shivering in the wind. The sky was a slab of iron, unbroken in every direction, but at least up here the air only smelled of diesel and salt.

For a minute I closed my eyes and tried to think of Yuxin, but all that came was the image from the stream: her face, her voice, the way she’d looked right into the camera and said, “You see, New? You see?”

I bit down on my tongue and tasted blood.

The bell sounded, and it was time to go back down. I flexed my hands, felt the skin split a little at the creases, and went anyway. Because that was what I’d promised her. Because there was nothing left but the promise.

When I reached the bottom of the stairs, cosmicx16 was waiting for me. He clapped a hand on my shoulder, heavy as a slab of ice. “Not dead yet, are you?” he said, and for a second his eyes were almost kind.

“No,” I said.

He nodded. “Good. Ma wants to see you.”

That could mean anything.

I followed him into the bowels of the ship, toward the next hell.

​

The lowest deck had its own weather system—every surface slick, every edge ringed in yellow-white crust, the air thick enough to feel, not just smell. The bilge didn’t sound like the rest of the ship. It was quieter, with only the plop and burble of God-knows-what backing up in the pipes. Most days, only the truly unlucky ended up here. Today, it was just me and cosmicx16, and he was whistling a tuneless nothing, already holding a length of chain in one hand.

He waited until the door shut behind us before speaking, and then it was only to point at the deck plate by the rail. “Down,” he said, and it wasn’t a suggestion. I went down. The metal was cold even through the knees of my coveralls. There was a patch of grease or something worse right where I put my palm, and I didn’t have the energy to wipe it off.

He looped the chain around my waist, twice, then snapped a padlock through the hasp. There was nowhere to go but maybe a foot in any direction—just enough slack to scrub the plates but not enough to even stand straight. I knew the drill: this was “punishment,” supposedly for dropping three fillets in the bin that morning, but really just because the crew needed something to laugh at, and I was the only show in town.

He squatted in front of me, pulling a pair of cheap airline earbuds from his pocket. The cord was stained and one of the tips was missing, but the moment I saw them my whole body went hot and cold. “Time for lesson,” he said, and his smile was clean and empty, the way a doll might smile. “You listen good.”

He shoved the buds into my ears, then produced a little black phone—probably the same model as the one I’d found in the locker. The interface was all Mandarin, but he knew exactly what to tap, and in a moment the only thing I could hear was the sharp, too-loud voice of Sun Yuxin.

At first, it was just her humming. She did that when she cooked, when she showered, when she was about to say something mean. The sound cut through everything, even the stink. Then her voice, a little tinny, a little distorted:

“Today is Friday, I think,” she said, in the voice she used for streaming—bright, slightly put-on, but not fake. “We are making noodle for a guest. Special guest! Maybe you remember him, New. He’s the one you met at KTV, the one with the tattoos? So big, right?”

A man laughed in the background, a snort, and then Yuxin’s giggle, sharp as broken glass.

Cosmicx16 patted my cheek. “You work now,” he said. He pulled a battered scouring pad from the rail and dropped it in front of me. The expectation was clear: I was to clean the metalwork while listening, while chained up, while the rest of the crew watched from the shadows. I started scrubbing.

On the phone, Yuxin’s voice went up an octave: “He’s very strong. He can pick me up even with the baby, not like some people. Maybe you get stronger on the boat? I don’t know. But don’t worry—I always think of you.” Then, switching to Mandarin: something fast and dirty, punctuated by the new man’s voice, low and growly. I didn’t need a translation.

The pad burned into my hands, stripping off the last layer of skin I’d built up on the line. I scrubbed harder, partly to drown out the sound, partly because I knew if I slowed even a little, cosmicx16 would have a reason to hit me again. He didn’t move far—just sat on the ladder above, arms folded, waiting.

The stream cut to video. I couldn’t see it, but the audio was enough: Yuxin narrating, breathy, sometimes breaking into English just to make sure I understood. “He is in my bed now,” she said, voice syrupy. “He says you are very lucky, but I think maybe I am the lucky one.” A slap, a yelp, then moaning. The bed creaked in a pattern I knew too well. “You can listen, New. You can imagine. You always had good imagination.”

My dick twitched, unbidden. Even here, in hell, my body could not betray itself fast enough. I wanted to cut it off. I wanted to turn inside out and be nothing. I scrubbed harder, feeling the pad slip on the gore, fingers starting to tingle.

The door opened, and Zhao walked in with two other crew, all carrying plastic mugs of something brown and strong. “Punishment time?” he asked, grinning at cosmicx16.

“Almost finished,” cosmicx16 said, and nudged me with his foot. “Listen good?”

I didn’t answer. My jaw was locked so tight I thought my teeth would shatter.

Zhao leaned in, put his face inches from mine. “She sounds happy,” he said. “You want to see?”

They propped the phone on the rail so I had no choice. The angle was fucked, just an arm and a flash of skin at first, but then the camera tilted and I saw her—hair wild, skin flushed, eyes so wide you’d think she was terrified if you didn’t know her tells. The man was behind her, face hidden, but his arms were around her hips, squeezing until her stomach folded over the waistband of her underwear. Her belly looked enormous, round and red where it pressed against the sheets.

She moaned. I realized, with horror, that I had never heard her make that sound before.

“Do you miss me?” she whispered to the phone, as the man thrust into her slow and deep, hands gripping so tight I saw nail marks. “Say you miss me, New.”

I said nothing. I scrubbed. I scrubbed until my hands were raw, until the smell of bleach rose above the rot, until the blood from my fingers made the water pink.

The man behind her spoke, something in Fujianese, then switched to English: “He like to watch?” The accent was thick but the meaning was clear. “He watch you now, same as we fuck.”

Yuxin laughed, then started talking in Mandarin, the words running together like rain down a window. She reached between her legs, found her clit, and looked right into the camera. “This is for you, New,” she said. “You can come too, if you want.”

I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to more than I’d ever not wanted anything. But my body was heat and shame, and the sound of her moaning, the vision of her fucking someone else in my bed, with my baby between them, was too much. I pressed my forehead to the rail and bit down hard, but the pressure built anyway, slow and awful, until I came in my pants, the pulse hidden by the noise and the filth but undeniable, the aftershocks like shrapnel.

When I finished, I started shaking. I kept scrubbing, but my arms were trembling so bad I couldn’t even keep the pad on the metal. For a second, everything went gray, and I thought I might faint.

The crew clapped and hooted. Someone said something in Mandarin that I was glad not to understand. Zhao crouched down and lifted my chin with two fingers. “You are the best show,” he said, almost kindly.

They let the phone play, audio looping, as if I needed the reminder. Yuxin’s voice trailed off, breathless: “It’s okay if you cry. I like when you cry.”

I cried.

Cosmicx16 unlocked the chain and dragged me to my feet. My legs buckled, but he kept me upright. “Go clean up,” he said, not unkindly.

I staggered to the wash room and rinsed the worst of the slime off, though nothing could touch the stink inside me. I stripped my coveralls and tossed them in the bin. My hands shook so badly I could barely work the latch on the next set.

I sat on the toilet, face in my hands, and let it all out. Not just tears, but the sound, the animal sobbing I’d always hidden from the world, the sound I’d heard my father make only once, the night my mother left for good. Now it was my turn.

When I’d finished, I washed my face, splashed water over my eyes, and stared at myself in the mirror. I didn’t recognize the man looking back. His eyes were ringed in red, skin sallow, lips chewed to nothing. He looked older, but also hollowed out, like something essential had been scooped away and left on ice with the rest of the guts.

I didn’t dry my face. I didn’t want to feel clean.

The next shift would start soon. I had a job to do.

I would not quit.

​

The next day the sky broke open. Thunder shook the trawler like an empty can, and the surface swelled to jagged hills, each one higher than the last. When the wind cut the deck, it felt like it might shave the flesh right off your bones. All of us shuffled around in our rain suits, hoods cinched down to little pinholes, boots sticky with salt and old blood.

The haul started at dawn. Nobody said it, but everyone knew this was going to be a big one; the nets had been dragging behind us for almost twelve hours, scraping bottom, scooping up anything dumb enough or dead enough to stay in the path. The winch whined, pulsing, the cable quivering like it was holding back a secret.

Zhao yelled from the pilothouse. “All hands!” That meant even me, even now, with my hands half bandaged, half raw, the bones in my wrist still shuddering from the night before. I went to the rail and braced, just in time to see the net surface.

It looked like a tumor, bulging and twitching, shreds of black weed stuck to the mesh. When they winched it up, everything inside fought for air—crabs crawling over dead fish, eels biting anything that moved, even a small shark thrashing so hard it snapped its own tail. At the bottom of the pile was a lump of something blue and impossible, a color so wrong it had to be alive.

Someone cut the cable. The net hit the deck with a splatter and the world went white with spray. I shielded my eyes and coughed. When the mist cleared, I saw what the blue thing was: a turtle, enormous, shell scored by the mesh, flippers battered into ribbons. It lay on its back, mouth opening and closing, a long thread of snot trailing from its nose.

Nobody moved to help it. That wasn’t the way here. Anything that came up in the net got sorted: keep, toss, or ignore. The turtle was in the “ignore” category, too big to sell, too ugly to eat.

I watched as the rest of the bycatch got shoveled off—dozens of reef fish, two more sharks, a rain of crushed starfish and the white goop that came out of their bodies when they broke. The deck ran red. The turtle just stared, one lid half-closed like it was trying to fall asleep.

After a while, someone got tired of seeing it flop around and kicked it, hard, right in the head. The thump echoed down the hull, followed by a sharp spray of laughter. “Football!” one of the crew yelled.

I knew I should look away. Instead, I kept watching as two guys picked it up and heaved it over the side. I heard the splash even over the diesel thrum.

I had no idea if turtles could survive being hauled up, bashed, then dumped back in open water. I thought maybe I’d ask Yuxin, if she ever talked to me again. She liked animal facts, the weird kind, like how turtle hearts can keep beating for hours after they die. She’d always say, “Like zombie, but romantic.” I tried to imagine the heart still pulsing, deep in the Gulf, drifting down and down.

The rest of the day passed in that state—half present, half ghost. I worked my station, packed fillets, iced the bins, bled from new cuts I barely even felt. Every so often the crew would walk by and slap my ass or throw a scale at my neck. Sometimes they’d play the recording of Yuxin’s stream on a speaker, just loud enough for me to hear the sex noises over the engine.

I wondered if she was thinking about me. If she knew what the inside of this place was like, what I’d become to buy her a future. I tried to remember if she ever loved me, or if that was just a thing we both agreed to believe until we ran out of reasons.

That night, I crawled into my bunk without even washing. The stench clung to everything, but I’d stopped noticing. Around me, the other men snored or coughed or masturbated quietly, and the ceiling sweated water onto my pillow. I turned to the wall and stuck my hand under the mattress, found the photo I’d taped there the first night on board.

It was Yuxin, mid-laugh, hair whipped around by the wind on the dock. Her eyes weren’t looking at me, or at anyone. Just past the edge of the frame, as if already planning her next escape.

I pressed my thumb over her mouth, traced the curve of her jaw with the cut pad of my finger. I waited for the hurt to come, but it didn’t. All I felt was a deep, slow kind of peace.

“Honestly,” I whispered, so soft only the turtle, sinking somewhere far below, could hear. “Honestly, I still love her.”

The next day would be the same. The next day, and the day after.

But for now, I let the picture fill my whole world. For now, I held on.

 

[The Patriarchy]

Chapter 3: the Breaking​

The time between moments had stopped meaning anything. Either it was dark and you were working, or it was darker and you were supposed to be sleeping, and every part of your body became a clock for pain: the knuckles first, then the knees, then the back, then the slow, persistent chewing of your own teeth in your head because you couldn’t eat without tasting rot and you couldn’t rest without tasting blood.

I lost count after the second week. You could look up at the sodium bulb they never turned off above the bunks and try to calculate by how many flies were stuck to it, but even the flies seemed to have surrendered to the idea of forever. Every morning—there was no “morning,” but the shift where the lights flicked to a hotter, meaner yellow for the cameras—someone would slam open the hatch and start screaming in Mandarin, and a dozen bodies would tumble out of their racks like bones shaken from a bag. The trick was to not be last, or you’d be in the deck log as “lazy,” and then they’d double your hours. I was never first, but I wasn’t last.

The net lines cut deeper after day five. At first it was blisters, then just raw meat, then callus over the raw, then the callus splitting open and leaking a pale liquid that stung as bad as any acid they used to bleach the tanks. They told you not to wear tape unless you wanted to be mocked, but everyone wore tape by the end; it was the only thing that kept the skin from coming off in shreds. The first time I saw a finger pop open on a knot and spray blood over the winch, I thought I’d puke, but after that it was just another red line added to the deck, more proof that we’d been here and we weren’t dead yet.

Food was rice, and always the same: boiled until it turned to snot, ladled into steel bowls, no seasoning unless you counted the grit and the black bugs that floated to the top. On Sundays, if we’d kept quota, the quartermaster would unseal a drum of pickled cabbage so sour it numbed your tongue. Most guys ate twice as much those days, even though the cabbage made your stomach clench until you’d shit it all back out by the next shift. There were rumors of real food—shrimp, crab, even pork for the officers—but I never saw it. I didn’t care. I ate because I had to, because if I lost weight I’d get pulled from deck to the engine rooms, and that was supposed to be a death sentence. I tried to gain weight, and instead I lost ten kilos before I realized it.

The real monster was the thirst. Water was rationed. You got two bottles per shift, and if you dropped one or lost it to the ocean, you had to beg or barter for a replacement. The regulars pissed into a communal jug and passed it around as a joke, but after a while, you learned the color of the day by how clear it ran. If it was dark, you’d all be crankier, slower, meaner, and fights would break out over nothing. If it was clear, it meant rain had filled the barrels, and sometimes the galley hand would even run the ice machine, if Ma Guanyu was in a good mood. I wanted to ask how a ship in the middle of the fucking ocean could be so desperate for water, but I already knew: nobody was ever desperate enough to fix the system, so the only thing that changed was who got to suffer more each day.

The smell got inside your bones. I started to hallucinate Yuxin’s perfume at night, and then it would dissolve into the bleach-and-fish-and-mold cocktail of the real world. The air in the bunks was never not wet. The mattress I shared with the Mormon was always damp, and sometimes you’d roll over in your sleep and press your cheek right into a little pool of sweat or worse. The Mormon’s name was Jack, but I only found that out because he used to moan it in his sleep—“Jack, Jack, Jack, you’re going to Hell”—like maybe he thought God would get him out if he just repented enough. He snored louder than a chainsaw, and sometimes I’d have to elbow him to make it stop, but the only thing worse than his snoring was the silence, when you remembered how alone you really were.

They rotated jobs so nobody could slack off or get too comfortable. Some days I was on deck, tying lines and sorting the catch. Other days I’d be in the hold, gutting fish until my fingers cramped, or on scut, mopping the walkways and cleaning up the crew’s endless trail of mucus, blood, and whatever other fluids they could leak onto a surface. My favorite was the brief moments on lookout, even though it was a punishment shift for “being slow,” because for once you didn’t have to listen to the others, and sometimes you could just close your eyes and pretend you were back on land. That’s what I told myself, anyway. The truth was that up there, with the wind and the open sky and nothing to block out the noise of your own head, it was easier to think about Sun Yuxin, and the baby, and what it would be like to go home as a survivor instead of a fuckup.

They called me “Bait,” and by the end of the month, it felt like a compliment. I didn’t talk much, so the crew filled in the gaps: Bait, because I was always on the line but never caught anything; Bait, because I’d probably be the first to get thrown to the sharks if shit went sideways. I laughed when they called me that, tried to play along, but every time the laughter would die off, I’d hear “stupid,” or “white dog,” or just “loser” in Mandarin. I stopped trying to understand them. I stopped trying to fit in. All I wanted was to make it to the end, to bring back enough money to pay the rent for Yuxin and the kid, to buy a fridge that worked and a hospital visit that wouldn’t bankrupt her.

At night, I dreamed of her. Sometimes she was the old Sun, wild and unpredictable, laughing at my bad Chinese and kissing the tip of my nose. Sometimes she was just a voice, a whisper at the edge of hearing, telling me to keep going. And sometimes—too often lately—she was the Sun in the videos, her body rocking on top of someone who looked like me but wasn’t, her eyes glazed over with something between anger and pity. I hated those dreams the most. I hated how real they felt, how they made me wake up with my heart clawing at my chest like it was trying to rip itself out.

One morning, after a 26-hour run where I’d slept only by accident and pissed myself at least twice because the hoses in the hold didn’t reach the toilet, I found myself in the galley, staring at a cup of rice I could not make myself eat. The smell of it made my gums ache, and when I tried to chew, a hot stream of copper ran down my throat. I spit into the bowl and saw the streaks of blood, bright against the gray starch. The quartermaster saw me gag and smirked, then handed me a dented can of Red Bull and said, “Is good for bleeding. Drink, then go up. Ma wants you.”

I drank it. It tasted like electricity and failure.

Ma Guanyu was waiting at the top of the stairs, his shadow thrown huge against the white fiberglass of the wheelhouse. He never needed to yell; even the loudest guys went quiet when he walked past. He eyed me up and down, then poked my chest with two fingers. “Why so thin, Sinclair Nathan?” he said, grinning wide.

“Trying to fit in, sir,” I said, too tired to be funny.

He nodded, then held out a phone. It wasn’t mine. It was his, shiny and new, screen already smeared with sweat. “You call,” he said. “Tell your woman you alive.”

My hands shook as I dialed. The call took forever to connect, and then her voice, raw and grainy with lag: “New? Are you—where are you calling from?”

“Captain’s line,” I said, and tried to smile so she’d hear it.

There was a long pause, then: “Are they treating you okay? You look so skinny. You must eat more.”

I wanted to cry. I wanted to tell her I couldn’t, that everything tasted like bleach, that my teeth were falling out and my nails had gone soft, that the men here were not really men but some breed of animal, half-starved and rabid. But I said, “I’m good, Sun. Honest. Just missing you. And the little one.”

She sniffed, and I could hear the wetness in her voice. “Baby is kicking now. I think he knows you’re not here.”

I closed my eyes and gripped the phone until it bent in my hand. “I’ll come home, Sun. I promise. And we’ll name him whatever you want. Anything.”

She was silent a moment. Then, softly: “Don’t quit, New. You must not come back if you fail.”

“I won’t,” I said, but the words tasted like a lie.

Ma took the phone and ended the call without a word. He patted my cheek, once, twice, then turned back to the wheelhouse, already laughing at something on the screen.

The rest of the shift passed in a blur of cuts and numbness. I bled from my fingers until I ran out of rags to wrap them in. When the sun finally dipped below the oily skin of the Gulf, I dragged myself down to the bunks and collapsed on the mattress, not even bothering to wipe off the slime from my neck and arms. The Mormon didn’t snore that night; he just lay on his side, muttering to himself, clutching a photo of his own baby like it might bring him home faster.

I pulled my own photo from the pocket of my overalls—the one of Yuxin in her old apartment, hair wild and mouth wide open, like she was about to bite the world in half. I held it up to the faint light leaking through the hatch. My vision was blurry, but I could still see her face, still remember the way she’d once looked at me with something like pride.

“Honestly,” I whispered, barely making a sound, “it’s all worth it for you.”

My hands throbbed. My teeth ached. My chest was a hollow cavity, filled only with salt and hope.

But I didn’t let go.

Not even for a second.

​

The world peeled apart at the horizon. You could see it coming, the way the sky blackened around the edges, like someone burning a hole through the clouds just to prove they could. Ma Guanyu stalked the catwalk, shouting in English, Mandarin, sometimes both at once: “All hands, all hands, storm time! Hold tight or die!” The veterans grinned, some lit cigarettes just to show they weren’t scared, but the rest of us braced for what everyone said was the real baptism—the Gulf in November, when the weather changed so fast it could break a man’s neck if he looked up at the wrong time.

They put me on net duty with cosmicx16 and two of the Vietnamese guys. The wind knifed straight through every layer, and the water on deck ran ankle-deep, swirling with blood and offal from the last catch. I couldn’t feel my hands, but that was normal now. What wasn’t normal was the way the swells kept coming, each bigger than the last, so that every ten seconds you’d lose the horizon entirely, then crash back to earth when the bow slammed into the next wave. The noise was unreal—steel screaming, engines howling, men yelling just to hear themselves over the chaos.

The net was up, bulging with something huge. My job was to guide the line through the block and make sure it didn’t jam. Simple. But the salt had eaten away half the glove on my right hand, so every time I touched the rope it chewed a little more of the skin off my palm. Cosmicx16 barked at me to move faster, but I was already at the limit. My arms ached. My head felt stuffed with sawdust and cotton. I blinked, just for a second, and that’s when the line bucked.

It wrapped around my fingers, hard, and then the winch kicked in with a bang. The next second, my hand was yanked into the block, caught between steel and steel, the pressure so absolute I felt the bones in my fingers melt like wax. I screamed, but nobody heard it. Even I barely heard it. The world shrank to a single white-hot spark, then a rush of black, then the sight of three fingers—mine—folded backwards, skin torn to the knuckle, blood fountaining onto the deck like a fucking cartoon.

I staggered, tried to pull free, but the line was still moving, grinding the meat into pulp. The second Vietnamese guy—he had no name, only a number—slammed the stop button, and cosmicx16 grabbed me by the collar, wrenching me back so hard I thought my shoulder would rip out. My hand came loose with a wet pop. For a moment I just stared, fascinated, at the way the index finger dangled by a single red ligament, the nail already turning white.

Cosmicx16 clamped his own hand over the wound, squeezing tight, and spat into my face: “Stupid, you want to die? Hold it high, idiot, high!” He wrenched my arm above my head, then half-dragged me down the ladder to the engine room, where the deck nurse waited—old man, lazy eye, never spoke unless it was about sex or politics.

He looked at my hand, made a tsk noise, then poured what looked like gasoline over the mess. It was probably vodka, but the burn was so bad I pissed myself a little. He didn’t bother with stitches. He just wrapped it in a rag that used to be a T-shirt, then taped it so tight my fingers turned purple. “No break,” he said, in English, shaking his head. “Captain say you go back. No break.”

Back on deck, Ma Guanyu stood by the rail, arms folded. His coat was zipped up to the throat, but his hands were bare, fingers splayed like he needed to feel the storm for himself. He didn’t even look at the mess on my hand. He just gestured at the line, then at the ocean, then at the line again. “Go,” he said, soft, like it was the only word that mattered.

I went. I couldn’t use the hand, so I worked one-handed, hauling and twisting while cosmicx16 picked up the slack. Every motion sent a new shock of pain up my arm, but after a while the pain became a kind of music—always there, always the same, sometimes rising, sometimes fading, but never completely gone. I bled through the T-shirt in ten minutes, but nobody offered a new one. The deck nurse just watched from the stairs, smoking, waiting to see if I’d faint or fall.

At the end of shift, I collapsed on the scupper, gasping. The blood had pooled around my wrist, soaking into the cuff of the overalls. I peeled back the bandage to see if it was still there, the hand, and found the three fingers now swollen double, skin ballooned and shiny like they were already dead. The tips were black. The index wouldn’t move at all.

The crew walked past, some laughing, some just shaking their heads. “Bait lose finger, maybe Bait lose balls next!” someone called out. I didn’t care. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to see Yuxin’s face.

I tried to dream, but the fever came first. It started in my arm, crawling up from the hand to the shoulder, then into my jaw, into the roots of my teeth. Everything ached. I sweated so bad the sheets turned slick under my body, and then the chills came, hard and fast, making my whole frame shake. The Mormon shook me once, tried to get me to wake up, but I only remember him as a blur, a mask, his mouth moving in slow motion.

In the haze, I saw Yuxin—not the real Yuxin, but the one from before, the one who wore denim shorts and a T-shirt and let me touch her belly while she pretended to hate it. She sat at the end of my bunk, hair down, eyes bright, and said, “You’re so dumb, New. Why do you keep hurting yourself for me?” I tried to answer, but my tongue was a piece of wood.

She reached out, took my ruined hand, and pressed it to her cheek. “Honestly,” she whispered, “I wish you’d quit. I wish you’d just run.” Then her face changed—harder, meaner—and she said, “But you’re not allowed to quit, are you?”

I woke up screaming, the sound raw and animal. Someone punched me in the gut to make it stop. I puked onto the deck, then rolled over and saw that I’d pissed myself again. The fever kept coming, wave after wave. Sometimes I blacked out for hours, sometimes just for seconds. Every time I came to, the pain was different, but always there, like an old friend with nothing left to say.

The next day, cosmicx16 came to my bunk, dropped a bottle of aspirin on my chest. “You work tonight. No hand, use mouth. Get up.”

I tried to stand, but my legs wouldn’t listen. The deck listed beneath me. I crawled to the washroom and stared at myself in the mirror: eyes sunk back so far they looked painted on, lips split and blue, three fingers ballooned to double size and leaking yellow from under the nails. I tried to laugh, but it came out a whimper.

Back on deck, the wind was less but the cold was worse. I took my station at the hold, used the one good hand to stack boxes, to shovel ice, to sweep. The rest of the crew ignored me except to tell me how slow I was. Every time I dropped something, the pain shot up like fireworks, but I didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop. The only thing worse than this was what waited if I gave up.

At break, I found a chunk of fish and chewed it with the side of my mouth that hurt less. The taste was pure rot, but I forced it down. I needed the calories. I needed something to keep the shivers from knocking my teeth out.

That night, in the dark, I wrote a letter to Yuxin. Not with a pen—I couldn’t hold a pen now—but with my mind, repeating the words until I thought maybe the waves would carry them to her.

Dear Sun,

I’m sorry I’m not strong enough. My hand is broken, but my heart is the same. I miss you. I dream about your laugh and our little boy. I will come home. I promise. Even if I come home with nothing but bones and skin, I will come home. Tell the baby his father is still alive.

Love always, New

I whispered it to the walls until the fever won again.

When I woke, Ma Guanyu stood over me, arms folded, the shape of a gun or a pipe bulging in his jacket. He looked down at my hand, then at my face, then back at the hand. He didn’t say anything at first. Then, very quiet:

“You keep working, Sinclair. If you die, we throw you out, but until then you work. Is this clear?”

I nodded. He smiled, the kind of smile that meant nothing and everything. “Good boy,” he said, and left.

The days blended together. The hand went numb, then throbbed, then went numb again. The fever never left. Sometimes, at night, I thought I could hear the bones shifting under the skin, little clicks as they set into new, ugly shapes.

Through it all, I thought of Sun and the baby. I thought of the last thing she’d said on the phone: “You must not come back if you fail.” I thought of her voice in the fever, asking why I kept going.

I kept going because it was the only thing I had left. The pain was just the payment. The suffering was proof I was still here, that I was still myself.

When the next storm hit, I was back on deck, one hand wrapped in tape, the other slick with salt and sweat. The wind tried to knock me over, but I held on. The rope burned into my good palm, and the deck rolled so hard I thought I’d go overboard. But I didn’t.

I stayed.

Even when the sky opened up, even when the ocean tried to pull us all under, I stayed.

Because I had to.

Because she needed me to.

Because I needed to prove I could suffer enough to be worthy of her.

The world shrank again, to a single point, a single voice, a single promise.

And I did not let go.

​

They waited until sunset, when the deck cooled and the old stains of blood and rust faded into black. That was when the crew liked to put on a show. Sometimes it was a fistfight, sometimes a bet over who could chug a whole can of brine without puking. But tonight, I was the show.

Cosmicx16 came for me just after last catch, dragging a length of rusty chain. I still had fish scales in my hair and my one good hand was slick with the guts of a thousand mullet, so when he grabbed me by the back of the neck and marched me to the bow, I didn’t even try to resist. The whole crew was already there, arrayed on overturned crates and nets, smoking and talking over each other in a low, eager buzz.

He chained me to the deck rail, high enough that I had to kneel with my back straight or risk choking myself out. The deck was cold through my coveralls. The wind stung. I felt every blister and scab from the last storm, and the old bruises came alive under the fresh pressure of the steel.

Zhao, the shift lead, stepped up with a battered speaker and a set of cheap headphones. “Entertainment,” he announced, and everyone whooped. He plugged the headphones in, then yanked them onto my ears so hard it snapped one of the plastic bands. He held the earpieces in place, digging them into my skull with both hands.

There was a buzz of static, then a voice—Sun’s voice—clearer than I’d ever heard her in real life.

She was laughing, at first, breathless and half-giggling in the old way she did when she was tipsy or nervous. Then a man’s voice, low and sure, whispering in her ear. The sound made the back of my neck prickle. There was a beat, then a thump, and then Sun moaning, sharp and sudden, her Mandarin slicing right through the white noise: “Yes! Like that, deeper—yes! You’re so much better than my little boy in America, so much stronger—”

Zhao let go of my head and stepped back. The whole crew leaned in to listen. Some had their own speakers, synced to the same feed, and the rest just listened to my reactions. The shame was immediate and total—every sound in my ears, every wet slap and gasp and grunt, piped directly into my skull while a dozen men watched to see if I’d flinch or cry.

I gritted my teeth. I tried to block it out. But the volume was so high I could feel the vibrations in my teeth, and no matter how hard I tried to stare at the horizon, I could see her face, in my mind, all teeth and cheekbones and those black eyes, wild with pleasure.

Cosmicx16 squatted down to my eye level and smiled with all his teeth. “She like Chinese dick more, I think. You miss her? You want to say hi?”

He grabbed my jaw, twisting it so my mouth was open. He spoke into my face, not quite a whisper: “You can come, Bait. Nobody judge.” The crew laughed, the words bouncing down the deck.

Then Zhao produced a length of thick, greasy rope, dipped it in a bucket of seawater, and flicked it once to spray droplets everywhere. He let the end soak, then swung it in a low, lazy arc—testing the weight, showing off. The first strike landed across my back, sharp enough to punch the air out of my lungs. The next wrapped around my ribs, and the third licked the back of my neck, just under the headphones.

The sound didn’t stop. Sun was getting louder, moaning and begging in English, taunting me with every phrase. “You hear, New? You hear how I love this?” There was a wet noise and a sharp, animal yelp. She switched back to Mandarin: something about being filled, being stretched, being real. Her voice shook with the force of it.

The crew started betting—how long until I cried, how long until I puked, how long until I pissed myself. The rope kept coming, regular as the tide. After the sixth or seventh strike, my back stopped feeling pain, replaced by a thick, hot throb that just pulsed in time with the voice in my ears. I couldn’t tell if I was bleeding, or if it was just sweat and old scabs tearing free.

Zhao crouched in front of me and slapped my cheek, hard, not to hurt but to focus me. “You like this, right? You love her so much, you want her to be happy?” He signaled to the others, and suddenly they were all chanting: “Love her! Love her! Love her!”

Sun’s voice crested, high and breathless. She said my name, over and over, but not in a way I’d ever heard before. “New, New, New—see how I am now? You never make me like this. You just baby. This is for you, all for you, you see?”

The rope landed again, right across my lower back. I felt something tear, and a hot trickle ran down my spine. The pain should have been blinding, but it wasn’t. It was almost clean, almost clarifying. My vision went sharp, then blurry, then sharp again. I wanted to scream, or to beg them to stop, but the only sound that came out was a broken gasp, half-laugh and half-sob.

Cosmicx16 saw it, saw the way my body was shaking, and he pointed at my crotch and shouted, “Look! He getting hard!” The men howled. The noise was worse than the rope, worse than the voice.

I tried to tell myself it was just the fear, just a spasm, but I could feel it—my own body betraying me, blood racing to the wrong places, cock swelling against the scratchy cotton of my coveralls. I shut my eyes but the sounds kept coming, louder, closer. Sun’s voice broke on a long, ragged moan, then came back, softer, almost tender: “You can come, New. It’s okay if you do. I forgive you.”

I came. I didn’t want to, but I did—spasming so hard I almost choked myself on the chain, the shame burning through me hotter than the saltwater and the welts and the pain together. It happened in front of all of them, and they all saw, and it was the most honest thing I’d done in months.

The chanting stopped. For a moment, nobody said anything.

Then Zhao leaned in, peeled off the headphones, and wiped a streak of blood from my cheek with his thumb. “She would be proud,” he said, not unkindly.

They left me chained there until midnight, dripping and shaking, listening to the echo of her voice on repeat. When they finally let me go, I crawled to the edge of the deck and puked until nothing came up.

I lay on my side, hugging my knees, and looked out at the lights of the nearest ship, maybe a mile off, maybe farther. For a moment, I let myself imagine it was her—Sun, waiting for me, laughing at how weak I was, loving me anyway.

“Honestly,” I whispered, so soft the wind swallowed it, “I really do love you.”

My hands were ruined, my back was raw, my heart was somewhere at the bottom of the ocean.

But for one brief second, I was free.

And that was enough.

​

The air in the hold was thick with secrets. Even after the night on the rail, after the mockery and the welts and the jokes that lived in my ears long after the bruises faded, I could feel the tension between the crew growing—tight as piano wire, sharp enough to snap any moment. The storm season was over, but a different kind of storm was building under the decks, the kind that started as a whisper and ended in blood.

I took comfort in the routines. Even after they’d humiliated me, the job stayed the same: cut, haul, clean, sort, repeat. My hand was a ruin, fingers splinted with sticks and medical tape, but I could still hold a knife. I became the best with one hand on the line—fast, neat, so good at gutting the catch that even cosmicx16, in his cold way, started to nod approval instead of just insults. He’d come up behind me sometimes and whisper, “You get it now, Bait. No quit.” I hated him a little less each time he said it.

I stopped talking to the others except when I had to. The Mormon had gone silent, stopped praying out loud, just stared at the deck with glassy eyes and moved where they told him. The two Vietnamese guys changed beds twice, then vanished—nobody said why, but there was a story in the way the bunks were stripped bare and nobody talked about it. One morning, there was a streak of blood on the inside of the bulkhead by the laundry locker, scrubbed but not gone. I got used to those kinds of stains: stories in residue.

A few times, late at night, I’d hear voices under the noise of the engine—soft, careful, just a shade above a breath. It was the old men, the ones who’d been on the ship for years, trading rumors about the debt. They talked about the ledger, the way nobody ever paid down what they owed, the fees for passage and gear and food and cigarettes. Even the crew’s clothes were rented, paid for in cuts from the end-of-trip payout. “You work, you owe more,” said the oldest, a guy with one tooth and no fingernails. “Not so bad, if you like the sea. But no man finish rich.”

I didn’t care about getting rich. I just wanted to go home.

But as the days went on, the stories got sharper. “Somebody try to run,” said one guy, voice thin with terror, “they take you below, and you come up different.” Another time: “You see the new camera, over the bunks? Now we always watched.” Once, in the galley, I heard the quartermaster mutter to a mate, “No law here, only company.” The words stuck in my head like a splinter.

Two months in, they stopped letting us use the sat-phone even for emergencies. Mail home was intercepted, read, sometimes rewritten. I started to wonder if Sun even got my messages, or if she thought I’d vanished, died, abandoned her the way her own father had. The thought made my guts twist. I tried to keep hope, but it was shrinking, the way everything on this ship seemed to shrink: your pride, your will, your place in the world.

I lost more weight. My teeth got looser. Sometimes, when I flexed my ruined hand, I could feel the bone move under the skin like a thing with its own life. The fevers came back, not as bad as before but enough to put me under for a day or two at a time, hallucinations of Sun and the baby and strange shapes on the horizon that vanished whenever I blinked. In the dreams, she always said, “Keep going, New,” and I did, because I had no other choice.

On the seventy-third day, we refueled at sea—a ghost ship, painted gray, no flag, just a crew of masked men who wouldn’t meet your eyes. Ma Guanyu supervised the operation, and for once he looked nervous, pacing the deck, always checking the rail. “No mistake,” he kept muttering. “No fight, no talk, no look.” We worked through the night, pumping diesel, loading crates. At dawn, a rumor passed down the line: one of our crew, a Filipino kid who spoke better English than me, tried to get a message to the refuelers, tried to buy his way off the boat.

He failed. They found him at lunch, arms twisted behind his back, blood running from his nose and ears. Ma Guanyu did not wait. He and Zhao dragged the kid to the stern, called the crew to witness. No speech, no lesson. Just a savage, systematic beating—first the fists, then a length of steel rebar, then a boot to the head until the body stopped moving.

Nobody tried to stop it. Some of the men turned away. Some watched. I watched, because I knew this was what happened to people who quit, who let go, who dreamed out loud about another life.

When they finished, Ma wiped the blood from his knuckles, looked at the crew, and said, “Now you know. Debt always get paid.”

They dumped the body over the side and cleaned the rail with bleach.

The hold was quiet for the next week. I worked my station, head down, not daring to think about anything beyond the next shift, the next meal. I saw the world in snapshots—knives, ice, sweat, Sun’s face on a torn-up photo under my pillow. I let myself remember her sometimes, the way she’d bite her lip when she was about to say something honest, the way she’d hold my hand under the table and squeeze so hard it hurt. I held on to those memories. I held on to the pain.

I stopped writing the letters, but I composed them anyway, in my head, while my hands worked the line.

Dear Sun,

They say I belong to the company now. But my heart still belongs to you.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll last. Maybe I’ll come home with nothing but scars. Maybe I’ll never come home. If you find someone better, I won’t be mad. I want you to be happy. I just want you to remember me. Not as the Bait, not as the loser, but as the one who kept the promise.

Love,

New

One night, after a double shift, I sat in the bottom of the hold, watching the drops of water trace lines on the steel. My hand was swollen and stiff, the fingers curled into a useless claw. My body was thinner than I’d ever been, every bone visible under the skin. My head was full of Sun’s voice, and the echo of the crew chanting “Love her! Love her!” and the sound of the ocean, louder than anything else.

I tried to imagine the future. Maybe I’d see the baby, just once, and hold him with the good hand. Maybe I’d die here, and my bones would sink to the bottom, and nobody would ever know what happened to me.

But even then, in the dark, I couldn’t let go. I couldn’t stop loving her. Even if she’d already moved on. Even if it was all a trick.

I lifted my ruined hand, held it up to the thin strip of moonlight that leaked through the hatch. The skin was glossy and red, the nails black. It looked nothing like the hand I remembered from before.

“Honestly,” I whispered, voice barely a ghost, “I still love her.”

The words sounded ridiculous, but they were true. More true than anything I’d said in my life.

The ship kept moving. The work never stopped.

And I did not let go.

 

[Suigin Trismegistus]

It ain't easy being a merchant sailor.