From The Closest Possible Union

FROM THE CLOSEST POSSIBLE UNION / Joanna Scott HOW MANY SPECIES? Surely as many as there are stars in the heavens, from lice glued onto a strand of hair to powerful gnats which can pierce a man's boot, from aphid cows enslaved by ants to weevils napping comfortably inside curled poplar leaves. The library contains information on the most mysterious varieties, I shall not be bored. I doubt the captain has leisure to study his books—he is as tireless, as attentive as the harpy, our figurehead, that hideous, slack-breasted, bearded old maid who guides our ship. My brother has asked me to bring him an ivory tooth,which, he explained, must with my own hands be torn from a live elephant's jaw because, he said, at the instant of the animal's death a brown mucus is secreted, the ivory forever marred. I am not sure how it is to be done; I will have a native help me. My sister has asked for gold. My dear mother wants only an honest account of my voyage day by day. She has met the captain herself, and she considers him a gentle, sophisticated man, despite his reputation. She said I would learn much from him if I applied myself. I expect I will be full-grown four months from now, when we've completed the voyage. The men think they have signed for a three-year whaling cruise. Only the captain, the chief mate, the surgeon, and myself know the truth. Though I am the youngest on board, I have been privileged both with the secret of our actual purpose and with a private berth directly across from the stateroom. I suppose it couldn't have been otherwise, since my father is the Charles Beauchamp's primary financier. Papa has instructed the captain to make me into a sailor, to spare nothing. The captain is an admirable man with a handsome beard and forbidding eyebrows which meet at a sharp diagonal, indeed, which seem a pair of locust wings implanted on his forehead. He takes his brandy at every meal, including breakfast. I am sure I shall like him very much. That I was on an American Guineaman I knew, but whether I would ever wake from it I could not tell, so I struggled both to free myself from this confusion and to shake my shoulders loose from the talons of the harpy, that vile wooden bird studded with snails and barnacles. She tried to pry me from my mother's arms, I heard my The Missouri Review · 9 father's voice: "It wiU be light soon." When I thrashed off my blanket I sUpped further into the unyielding dark, time itself meant to torment, dangling me between yesterday and tomorrow. My body has not yet adjusted to the dreadful rolling. I managed to set my feet upon the floor and stumbled through the galley, up the companionway ladder to the deck, but once there I did not reach the rail in time, midway across I threw my arm around the ship's beU, coUapsed to my knees, and retched whUe we sUd over the quivering, aspic sweUs. I expected to find the pink Uning of my stomach crumpled in a heap upon the planks. I hope it does not take long to earn favor with this element. I wiped my lips with my nightshirt cuff, then I leaned over the raU, invited the velvet wind to caress me, searched for constellations but there were none in the black-plated ceiling, looked for land and was comforted by a brownish crag windward, which I first mistook for my continent's shoreline but was, I realized, nothing but the cloud of a loitering squall. In a sty lodged beneath the forecastle head half a dozen grunts complained of their discomfort. The halyard rings clanked against the masts, the canvas snapped and fluttered, and I tried to flatten the lumpy waters with a determined wish—Zie still!—but of course I had no influence. So I peeled off my nightdress, and on my knees, with the smock wadded in my hands, the chiU wind prickling my arms, I wiped...