Bycatch

Candace shifted left-foot-right-foot. She was wearing fleece-lined slippers for travel but the old padding compressed to a wafer from use and the thin rubber sole did little to keep the cold from seeping up. Under a pink puffy jacket she still had on the jammies she'd put on for the long bus ride in to Seattle, pilling gray polyester scattered with rainbow stars. She and her mother stood on the long frozen concrete slab of the lightrail station at Angle Lake bus terminal. A small backpack hung from her left hand, her right hooked with fingers waxy from the chill in her mothers. After an eternity, the train arrived.

It was fairly sparsely populated on the train but Candace still found a seat and towed her mother over to it. While putting herself on the bench, Candace bumped into her seatmate, a grizzled old man in a beanie. His sleepy eyes brightened, and he glanced from Candace up to her mother, then stood up shakily.

"No, you're alright." Candace's mother said, taking stock of him, but he lifted himself from the seat and shuffled to the far side of the train as it accelerated away from the station. He mumbled some. Candace held her backpack to her chest, watching him. He stood leaning against the traincar wall, his cheek against the cold glass. When the train sped or slowed, he would wobble a little. Candadce imagined that, under his raincoat, delicate legs like a heron's rose from those rough leather boots up to where he teetered with his back hunched.

"Put it on. Twice. And again, never listens." he said to noone.

They pulled into the International District Station and slipped underground. The night-stained blue of Seattle twilight gave way to black. The windows were mirrors, the man's breath a flaring oval of condensation on the glass.

"...on the tracks, shouldn't be long..." said a woman's voice over the intercom. The train slowed then stopped in the tunnel. A few people on the train shifted in their seats. Candace's mother took out her phone, tapping. Candace kept watching the man. He didn't move, but his eyes darted around the train now, and she could see on the glass he was breathing faster.

"What, just 'til morning?" the man said, "He'll be fine." His voice was raised then. Candace's mother lowered her phone and watched the man too.

"Can't have him going home now, Colin. He knows. You fucked it." he said, barking on 'fucked'. "Horace will keep. It's not like he's not used to it. But what are you gonna do, put him on a boat?"

A laugh came from the man, pushed through his mouth in bitter coughs. Candace tried to make out what he could see that he might laugh at, but his eyes were out of focus, swinging a little on the white plastic interior of the car.

Horace couldn't see anything, not even his hands finger-spread across the door of the walk-in freezer. He blinked, and was surprised to be reminded his eyes had been open. His ear stung bitterly from the cold, but he kept it pressed flat against the door. He blinked again, and his eyes, desperate to give any report at all, brought back the last they had seen. The image of the door closing, the collapsing rectangle of light, darkness rushing out from the hinges and across the patterned metal until the thin staple-shaped bead of light running the perimeter of the door was sealed to black.

The conversation on the other side of the door started to fade. Horace slid his hands urgently across the surface of the door then pounded on it. He yelled, not words anymore, but a hoarse yawp. It reverberated for a blistering moment in the small room then abandoned him to the low hum of the freezer fan. Horace slacked, his hands slid away from the wall and he shuffled groping across the plate metal floor. His feet traced crates of frozen sockeye and halibut until he found the one he hadn't started unpacking and sat on it. He bent over, groped across the cold floor for the lid he remembered he'd set down, dragged it to the bottom of his stool, and rested his feet on top of it.

Horace's shirt was wrapped close on his skin under the rubber apron, moist as it was with his sweat. He plucked at it, but it clung fast to him. Stilled, took stock. The fan stirred the air. It became quickly apparent to Horace that that amount of cold and wet is enough to get a person dead. He turned, groping outward along the wall. His fingers found the corner of the last crate he'd opened. He rose, stood over it, and reached in. The fish were packed in too tight to reach past, so he lifted a few out to make room, fin rays scoring his numb flesh. Their bodies landed dully in the dark where he dropped them. He reached in again and grabbed, this time on plastic, and hauled hard. Pack ice granules scattered to the floor. As he lifted, the bag released from the crate with a coarse sucking sound. He lowered the bag to the ground then, holding it tented open with his left hand, reached in with his right.

He met with a lump, approximately square edged and wrapped in what he was sure was duct tape. Horace tossed it aside. It hit a fish on its way to the floor. Then another and another. He emptied the bag. He shook it out. Then he sat back down on his crate and wrapped himself in the plastic bag, tucking his knees up under his chin. But looking down, there was his leg outstretched. His shoe glistened, his foot leaning against the bus's heater vent and the ice encrusting on his laces quickly softening. Some scum from the lakewater showed how high up his leg he had plunged. Horace reached down to untie the laces, but found his hands swinging in the dark of the freezer. He teetered for a moment, then regained his perch. He tightened the plastic sheet around his neck. Snug again, he looked left toward the freezer door. His mother paused there as she always did, glowing alone just before the night. Her face suspended. Horace blinked. Candace was looking back through open train doors at him were he sat slumped.

"Come on, baby." her mother said. She gave herself to her mother's tug, drifting away. The doors slid shut.