The sun hates us. It burns our skin, drives the wet from our mouths. I close my eyes and it still beats down. I've had my sailor's legs for a while now, but the sea is turning me sick, and it's all the sun's fault. Screw my eyes shut, and still it asks me to throw my guts out.

"We should just get it over with." That's Robertson. He was first mate when it meant anything. "Before we lose our strength."

Says the carpenter, Freeman: "We ain't animals." He sits hunched into himself, glaring up at Robertson.

Says Robertson: "We're all hungry."

I drive my palms into my eyes, contorting into a smaller ball. My stomach grinds on itself, coursing pain through my body like I could do anything.

Chimes in Silvernail: "I could do with some meat." He was a topman. He'd wave at me from the sails, back when there were sails, back when I was swabbing the deck til it shined.

They talk, come to an agreement. It's the custom of the sea, and we'll all draw lots, and whoever gets the short straw gets eaten because everyone else needs to live.

Says Robertson: "Boy."

There's a foot in my side. I don't want to open my eyes. If I do, it's all real. If I do, I'll be sick everywhere.

"Boy."

Another foot, maybe the same foot, and I force my lids apart. The sky is a cloudless blue above us. There's nothing in my stomach, hasn't been for days, but still that nothing wants to come out.

Says I: "I know. Just had my eyes closed."

We hunch in a circle, perched on mouldering wood and smacking our dry lips. We don't have any straw, so we use Silvernail's long, thick hairs instead. Robertson turns his back to us as he makes one short.

Six, in all, on this lifeboat. If we'd had an oar, we could've kept with the others, but as is, we're adrift. Sometimes hands sink into the water. Robertson says the ship foundered near Chile. They're probably used to saving people, he said with a laugh, since it's so close to Drake's passage.

Used to saving people, maybe, but they haven't saved us.

Six: Jones and Silvernail, both Topmen, sitting abreast on the starboard side. Freeman and Doe, carpenter and carpenter's mate respectively, on portside. I, in the stern, and, across from me, big old Robertson with his sad eyes, crouched aft.

He moves forward, letting us all pick our hairs. Jones and Silvernail both draw long, same for Freeman and Doe. All that's left are two thick black hairs sticking out of Robertson's fist, one of them mine and one of them his. The odds are grim, so I lick at my lips and lie. "I have a girl back home. She stopped being regular, so-" One of Freeman's big hands beats against my back.

"We all have someone back home."

And what am I supposed to say? I lean forward, looking at Robertson's pale fist. Two hairs, drifting in the brackish breeze. They look about the same. I grab the one I hope is longer.

It isn't.

I could throw it to the wind, maybe. But they all see. If not the shortness, the horror in my eyes.

Robertson opens his palm. Another long hair.

Says I: "We had a name picked out." An albatross screams overhead. I watch it coast above us. More meat. It should be the beast. I wish I could fly, wish I could leap to wring its feathery neck and drag it down to us and-"We had a name picked out," I repeat. "If it's a boy... Fitzwilliam. Her grandpappy's name."

Robertson looks at me with dead eyes.

"Isabella if it's a girl. For a queen, she says." I don't think my words come out. Robertson's stood now, boat rocking as he moves closer.

Says he: "Sorry, lad."

I think I've pissed myself. There is some source of wet, of warmth in my pants, and I press my back against the bulwark as I make up words, as I beg: "She has the bluest eyes you ever seen, bluer than the sea, than the heavens above."

Doe's always been quiet, but he does something queer with his neck, he jerks it to the side like he's readying himself for a fight.

"Listen!" Says Robertson: "Boy. How'd you like to die?"

"They're the bluest eyes I ever seen."

Says Jones: "Strangulation's the most humane. It's how they do the criminals."

"And real pretty lashes around them."

Robertson is closer now. Our little lifeboat rocks with his steps. I go back but there isn't anywhere behind for me to go, just the open water. I think about diving in. Only Jones can swim, but maybe I could learn fast.

"It's what has to be done, you know. It's only fair. You pulled the short one."

I'm thinking about diving in, but Robertson dives forward first, dives forward and his thick fingers are around my neck and pressing into my throat and the girl's made up sure but the life on land isn't and I try to twist but I can't so I bite and he lets go. I lunge towards the water. A hand grabs my ankle, pulls me in, in, back onto splintering wood, and I know they want me dead so I twist again and claw with the stubs of nails I have left. My fingers find an eye and it bleeds down onto me. I kick and someone gasps. A hand finds my hair and raises my head, and my head is suddenly connecting with the wood and the world is sparks and I am fighting to get away and there are even more sparks, and I am clawing and the sparks don't stop coming and my head is wet and hot and oh Jesus if you can hear me and the world is black and there are fingers on my throat again and I can't breathe. I fight with the fingers but my own hands fail. I try to say something the black mass above me but my lips fail. It's not a gentle way to go. Certainly not fast. Everything aches and sobs.

Everything goes limp.

There's silence in the little boat.

Robertson drops my throat. "He's dead."

More silence.

At least I put up a good fight. The imagined girl with the blue eyes haunts them more than she ever would've me. Jones fiddles with a loose splinter. "Strangulation's humane," he repeats weakly.

It was Doe's eye I got, and his swears as he presses his rags of shirt against the oozing hole are almost lost in the wind. Freeman's on him fast, ripping canvas from his own shirt to make a makeshift eyepatch. Says he as he quells the bleeding: "Boy fought, I'll give him that,"

Robertson's still over me, panting. Says he: "Christ almighty," and he crosses himself. Of us all, he's got the softest fingers, and those soft fingers touch my lids and close my eyes, but I see in other ways now and so it does nothing.

Says Silvernail, eyeing my body: "Thighs and buttocks have the most meat."

"And no face." Robertson forces a swallow like he's already imagining my blood in his dry, dry throat.

Silvernail's the first to pull a knife out, since Silvernail was the only one to think to bring one in the chaos of it all. Robertson mumbles something about how it would've been nice to have before, moments before, that the Boy didn't need to go out that way, but Silvernail won't have it and says he'd have used it if it all hadn't gone so fast, if the Boy hadn't tried to run. They pull my slops off, make disgruntled sounds about the smell of piss but that doesn't stop them.

Robertson's the one to dip them in the water to make them a little less fragrant, then he ties them around my head, over my already-closed eyes. "So we don't have to look at his face."

Says Jones as he looks up and down the length of my bare legs: "Christ, the Boy was small." Then: "How long'll he last before-"

Says Robertson: "We'll be saved by then."

It's Silvernail that makes the first cut. He never said anything about having worked as a butcher, but it's clean nonetheless. Maybe he was a frontiersman before he went to work on a ship. The knife slips through my skin, separating my muscles and gliding through tendon until it rings against my thighbone. He removes the first piece of me, leaving my precious wet parts exposed to the sun, the sea air. A small blessing that I'm dead, else it might sting.

Robertson's the first to take it, a blackness on his face despite the unrelenting sun. Robertson bites into me. My blood runs into his matted beard, mixing with salt and sweat. He chews, he swallows, he gags, but I make it down.

The taboo is broken.

The feast begins.

Silvernail chews as he slices, his tongue working to dislodge a thick artery stuck between a real and a wooden tooth in the back of his mouth. As the next highest ranking, Freeman's next, getting a real fatty piece of me, and he's none too pleased to be eating me but still he bites in, and once there's meat in his mouth he can't stop. Red tears seep from under Doe's bandage, but his undamaged eye remains dry. He laps the blood up from his hands first, something to wet his mouth, before he sets into me, not bothering to chew, only to tear away mouthfuls and send them down. Lastly's Jones. Jones is weeping. So small, he keeps saying. Should've been one of us grown folk. He prays over me before he begins.

There isn't long before I am in all of them, before all my left leg's bones dry in the sunlight, and a good portion of my right's too. All their bodies shake, spasming in odd ways and contorting in pain as all my blood makes them strong again and I fill their stomachs, cramping them and making them bloat. The sun begins to set, chilling me colder than I've ever been before. All inside I'm like a cathedral, cool and still and worshipped.

They don't rest in the night. Instead, filled with me, they sink their hands into the water and begin to paddle once more, to paddle East, towards Chile. They've all got reckonings, all exchange theories about air currents and water currents, birds and lack of birds, clouds and the position of the stars. Twenty miles from shore, Jones reckons. Jones won't look at me. Jones doesn't like to be near me, even though I am inescapable, even though I am inside him, breaking down in his stomach and traveling towards his watery bowels. Others think we're farther. Robertson's lips, crusted red, tighten when Silvernail proposes we've been drifting away from land these past few days, that we're a hundred miles from anywhere and anyone. It's Silvernail that decides my foot could be a paddle, and so it's Silvernail that begins working at my knee joint, cutting until he has his trophy. My foot waggles ridiculously as he holds it up. They all keep their mouths shut.

The callouses on his hands scrape against my bone as he adjusts, as he plunges my foot into the cold water. The currents play between my toes; curious plankton investigate the broken lines on my sole.

Dawn comes, but the shore does not. Five hungry men consider me once more.

Says Robertson: "We ought to ration food out, make it last. If we eat him too fast, make the wrong decisions, the Boy will have died in vain."

Says Silvernail: "He'll spoil in this heat."

Says Freeman: "The water's cool. If we keep him in the ocean, he won't rot as fast."

Says Silvernail: "And chum for sharks?"

It's Jones that quietly suggests they cure me with salt from the water, but the logistics don't work.

The conversation turns, leaving me heaped and blindfolded, stewing in bilgewater and leaking, turning the bottom of the boat black and murky. The bigger parts of me are just about out of their bodies; a few of them have shat me out over the side of the boat already, but I've found my way into other parts, into their blood. I pump through their bodies, and they're none the wiser. I'm in their brains now, darting through synapses as they fire. Jones frets on my girl, my made-up girl, wonders if he'll ever see his own boy, about my age, be married. Silvernail can't wait for more of me, wonders who will be next. Robertson is certain there's no hope, but he's first mate, and so it's his lot to lead until we're all just bodies. Says he: "We ought to save our energy. Suppose we overly exert ourselves on the way back to shore, and only then a ship comes by. How are we meant to draw their attention, to signal we need help? We have an idea of where we are, but it's not precise enough to be helpful."

Says Silvernail: "Maybe Freeman was onto something. I say we use his meat as chum, turn his bones into spears, and kill whatever comes up to take a bite."

Robertson ignores the man cradling my stripped leg. "We wait, we save our energy. The Pacific is full of islands. God willing, we'll find one."

Freeman and Doe have been quietly conversing, and it's Freeman that says, "Bill's eye is burning up, and it seems to be from infection. We're all weak from living like this. Without a surgeon or medical supplies soon..."

Silvernail whistles a dirge into the wind.

"Christ's sake, man." Robertson's voice rasps.

Says Jones, thoughts still lingering on a son with a face like mine: "We've not seen ship nor land in days, why would that change now? We must be close, paddling all night."

"If you're so confident, swim to shore and get us help." It's Silvernail that says this. He doesn't look at Jones, instead sharpening the knee-end of my bone with his knife.

"I can't swim that far." Jones's voice cracks.

"Then float."

Says Robertson, voice gone lower: "No one's floating anywhere."

"And why not? One man'll be faster than this boat full of dead weight, and Jones's the only one can swim. He could get people to come back'n look for us."

Says Jones: "But supposing we all paddled together, we might-"

"Might nothing. Where are the shore birds? It'll take so much strength, we might as well start another raffle now to know who'll be the next to fuel it."

"Enough of that!" Robertson stands, and the boat quakes beneath his feet.

Jones works through thoughts. He spares another glance at me, weathered hands toying with each other. "Floating ain't too hard."

"Jones."

"Only...well, supposing I don't come back, and a boat does find you all-make sure they know what happened."

Robertson's none too pleased, though his ire lies less with Jones and more with the man turning my bone to a spear. Doing the math, it's one less mouth to feed, and they all know it.

The start of bloat is seeded within me, though it's none too obvious yet; the teeming hungry things inside me fill my gut with foul air. They remark on that swelling as they turn me over to slice away a few lean pieces of my buttocks. Robertson watches Silvernail as he cuts, whistling into the wind once more.

Jones's hands shake as he clutches onto my bloody pieces, as I dribble down his shirt to join my other, older liquids down his front. He's past the point of sickness. It's an offering to the dead, left so that they can trick themselves into the thought that the ghosts they once loved are eating well.

He doesn't look back as he lowers himself into the brackish blue. He lays me on his stomach like a motherly otter and begins to kick. I roast in the sun on his pleasantly bobbing body, growing farther from where the most of me lies.

Jones continues for an admirable time, longer than all the others thought he would. As the burning sun dips low, he eats the first piece of me, keeps going. The stars turn over the two of us. The albatross is back, briefly blocking out the stars, screaming and soaring in the same direction that we swim.

"Towards land." Jones's lips, stained red with me, contort into a smile.

The sun rises, and he eats the next piece.

His energy wanes. A bit of ass would never have been enough to get him all the way there. By the time it's gone entirely, he's already gone, lost in a dreamlike delirium that has convinced him this is all a dream, and that he shall wake in his hammock and eat a spare breakfast and go up to the main deck and shout something up to Silvernail about the queer things he saw last night. He imagines the exact verbeage, and his fingers tighten around the single uneaten piece of me as the water slowly envelops us.

If it was a dream, the first lungful of water wakes him. His end is not gentle. The meat in his stomach drags him down as he claws towards the water above, towards a murky sun growing more and more distant. By the time it's gone, he's as still as me.

#

As the crabs set in on both of us, my majority still basks in the sun. In his absence, they cut into me a little more. Both my legs are barren now, though the foot that is not a paddle has been further broken into. Says Silvernail: "Marrow's just as healthy for a body." He cracks open the little, easy bones and scrapes the brown from within, licking it off his knife. None accept his offer when he extends the fatty treat to them.

My meat hasn't helped Doe. He's grown a fever now, and with no shade to keep him cool his body burns from without and within. Freeman tends to him, dipping rags into the ocean to dab at his forehead like a concerned housewife. When the brine drips into the pus-rich wound, Doe moans and shifts. Sometimes he asks for water. "How far you think Jones made it?" Freeman asks, his big dark back to us as he fiddles worries over Doe.

"My money's on he's already dead."

Groans Doe, shifting on his bench: "We're all dead."

Robertson keeps his lips tight. His eyes rarely leave the horizon now. "He's still swimming. He'll make it."

Silvernail laughs.

The water laps at the sides of the boat, thirsty for more blood. Jones did not sate it.

Doe burns to death. In his final moments, I curdle in his stomach. He sees something against the sun as the last parts of his brain do a desperate dance of energy and light, and he raises a spasming hand to point, to point, to gasp and say something.

The hand collapses and he is gone. Freeman is the only one to weep.

#

Their lips crack, and the blood that seeps forth mingles with me. Their stomachs are distended with hunger, mine with rot. I'm going bad, but still they carve little pieces from me to suck on.

Robertson's stopped making his show of staring out at the horizon.

Silvernail's taken to staring at the sun.

Freeman stops them both from butchering Doe's body, but even he finds himself looking, finds what little moisture is left in his body pooling up in his mouth as he thinks of the dead blood inside his friend.

In the night, he says he'll take watch. No one sleeps, not anymore, but the other two lay down their heads and close their eyes and drift between places, always tethered to this world by hunger and cramps. Freeman sits across the boat from me, Doe propped up next to him. His gaze flits between us and his stained and broken lips are curled in disgust. His tan palm has slipped into Doe's.

He tries to swallow, but there's nothing left. His mouth is dry, every sound it produces brittle. Another lingering glance. He turns his gaze outwards, towards the vast expanse of glittering water beneath the clear night sky. A breeze drifts through his hair.

Rasps he to Doe: "Water, water, everywhere."

He slips a hand into the sea and lifts it, cupped, watching it dribble from between his fingers.

He remembers the taste of water with the same distant reverence as his mother's face.

Could madness set in with a single sip? Would the relief be worth it?

He frowns across the boat at me, as if I'll tell on him, but beneath the pants still tied over my head my tongue has bloated out my mouth and I am rendered voiceless.

He turns his back on all of us and dips both hands in. He lifts them, cupped and full of crystalline water. The stars reflect back up at him, the heavy moon. The decision's already made. He drinks his fill until he vomits, the liquid just as clear going out as it was coming in, but he doesn't stop, he keeps drinking, leaning over the edge of the boat to greedily slurp up the whole ocean.

He sees me for the first time as the sun breaks behind my head. He crawls to me on hands and knees, splashing through the festering bilgewater. With shaking hands, he unties my slops from around my head. My eyes bulge, are dull from so much water lost. His thick face is close to mine, rancid saltbreath thick around me.

"You've been watching, you bastard."

Robertson stirs, squints towards us, towards the sunlight. "Freeman? What're you doing?"

Freeman licks at his lips. "He never stopped watching."

Silvernail sits up. "He's dead, Freeman."

"Doesn't matter. Look at his eyes. Listen. He's there, he's here, we're full of him."

Mutters Silvernail to Robertson: "He's lost it now."

Robertson puts himself between the two men, reaching back to lower my sharpened leg that the topman brandishes defensively.

"Freeman, what d'you mean by all that?"

Freeman gestures helplessly at me, as if it's right there for them all to see. "Look! Look! How'd he do it?" Then, lower and afraid: "Do you see what happens next?" He takes a fistful of my hair and shakes my head. One shriveled eye falls out, dangling on its cord, bouncing against my sunken cheek. "How do we get out of here?"

Robertson is slow and soft as he pads behind Freeman. All their hands are shaking, not from fear but from dying. His hand hovers over Freeman's broad shoulder. "Boy's got no secrets to give, Freeman."

Freeman wrenches out a fistful of hair as he twists around. "How can't you feel him? He's pounding in our veins, Robertson!" He begins to weep, collapses to the deck. "We're more dead child than we are ourselves. He'll never know peace. Even if a boat comes." His face is a mask of horror, brought from the land of his ancestors. "He'll follow us wherever." He looks past both Silvernail and Robertson now, staring at Doe on the other side of the boat, still propped in a sitting position, head lulling one way, then the other, as the waves gently rock us all.

Asks Silvernail: "And?"

Freeman looks with unseeing eyes. "And we'll never be alone. A boat won't save us. Land won't save us." He staggers forward, past both the still-standing men. "We were dead from the first bite." He grabs up Doe by the back of the shirt. I am in his stomach, but I am still. We're both at peace within him. In his blood, I pulse slowly.

We're gone before they can stop us. One bare foot up on the side, and then we're falling, and he's dragging Doe with us. Silvernail swears and dives, grabbing at Doe as he slips over the edge. He is unsuccessful.

I'm in both of them as they slip into the depths, as Freeman clutches Doe and Doe clutches Freeman, as he says something that comes out in bubbles. I'm in both of them as they gently crunch into the ocean floor, still save for the currents that catch their clothes. I'm in both of them as all the creatures of the darkness set in.

#

In the dead silence that has fallen between Silvernail and Robertson, the albatross screams overhead. "Shut up!" Silvernail throws one of my hands up at the creature. It doesn't come close to hitting, and instead I plop in the nearby water and float there.

Robertson's given up on his show of looking. He sits curled into himself, eyes screwed shut and palms pressed into the lids as he rocks back and forth and whispers incoherent prayers.

"I bet Jones's on his way back." Silvernail has retained my other hand, and he amuses himself by peeling it carefully, trying to keep the skin as one whole piece as a child might with an orange. "I bet Jones's on his way back with a ship full of booze and whores, and the good Lord himself perched on the bowsprit, with the whole host of heaven shining above him."

Robertson can neither weep nor sweat. His eyes itch. His tongue moves around his mouth and finds only sandpaper.

Silvernail tries to whistle, but his lips are too dry, and so instead he hums a dragging version of Amazing Grace as he carefully works around my thumbnail. He takes a break to say: "Bet Jones is coming back with the whole navy, and the holy grail, so we can bring back the boy, and everyone will say, ‘what a good strong leader Robertson was, how level-headed and brave.' And you'll be made captain."

The world is a soft buzz around him, and Silvernail just a mosquito.

"And we'll all be sainted, Robertson. You want to be sainted?"

Says Robertson to the reeking water around our ankles: "I wish you'd pulled the short hair."

"Pardon?"

Conversationally: "You're a skeevy bastard with no sense of decorum that should have died, and you're the last person I'll ever talk with, and instead of talking about home or trying to be companionable you're just-you're just-" The burst of language makes him cough.

"That's no way for an officer to talk. I'll have you court martialled for that."

"You think you'll see the light of heaven when all's done?"

"I hear the fires of hell burn just as bright. You'll have to let me know."

Robertson has not stood for a great while now, but he stands now, shakily, almost falling, using a hand to prop up his waning body.

The wind blows between them.

Silvernail senses the lunge before it happens. He scrambles for my leg, hoists it up as Robertson rams into him, pinning the topman's wiry body against the bulwark. The sudden movement rocks the little craft, splashing fresh water in. Robertson would like to think, but the pieces of his brain that still work are sluggish, and so he screams as he takes Silvernail by the shoulders and slams him, over and over, against the slick and molding wood. The sharpened bone in his side does not stop him, even as it's wrenched out and shoved in again, this time puncturing his side. His screams are laced with blood now, splattering onto Silvernail's contorted face, and his hands are moving for the neck. His knuckles whiten as he tightens his grip and continues to bash.

I wait, patiently, on the other side of the boat.

Silvernail stops twitching.

Robertson rolls off of him. Despite all the sun his face has seen, the blisters on his cheeks, his face is pale and growing paler until it's as white as the bone spear sticking out of his side.

"Christ almighty." Blood gurgles out his lips. He tries to look at me, but his head won't lift, so he lets the world spin as he lies in the rancid bilgewater and tries to find a soft image to focus on. His wife is there, but she shifts into my made up girl with the dark hair and the lashes and the eyes as blue as the sky that's swallowing him whole. He thinks we both left the same thing behind, and that comforts him as the world fades away.

#

The boat is still for a long while before the albatross decides to land.

She first inspects the Silvernail, then Robertson, before she turns her attention to me. She hops over. Starting with my exposed muscle, already cut into, she begins to eat. Small pieces of me are torn away, making the quick journey into the burning pit of her stomach. She enjoys the parts of me no one else would have, finding joy in my stomach, my intestines, my heart. After she's finished with my eyes, she sleeps a while, perched on the edge so as not to stain her luminous feathers.

With a good meal and a good rest in her body, she begins to flap her massive white wings. She catches a current and soars, and I with her. I've never flown before. It's heady and splendid, and soon we are above the clouds, white and clumped like drifts of pristine snow, extending in every direction and vanishing on the horizon.