Threnody by an Amateur Oceanographer for His Father the Biologist

Simon's father was drowned by a sea monster. It first flashed an open-mouthed grin, folding and unfolding its big, pink tongue harmlessly. But then it closed its jaws around the man's body until little more was visible than one leg, which hung almost comically from its mouth. It pulled away from dry land until they were both submerged, father still caught between its little rows of uniform teeth. As it dove, it left behind a trail of blood, uncurling through the water like red smoke.

Simon's mother let him carry the urn holding all that had been recovered of his father's remains when they went to scatter them at sea. The container wasn't meant for display—a simple bullet thermos pressed between his hands like a large, black bishop. The dead biologist's coworkers took them out in a schooner on a calm and sunny day, and no one spoke but the boat as it sighed and trembled against the push of the wind. Simon imagined that he might somehow lose his grip on the urn before it was time, and that the wind would carry it up and away from him, over the side of the boat and into the water. With the lid still tightly on, his father would be forever trapped inside the urn, locked away from the sea and incomplete.

He thought the ashes would be fine and smooth like gray sand, but they were instead gravelly, with little rough rocks that Simon would later realize were bits of bone. His mother bent down beside him until she was closer to his height, and she held his waist as he reached to pour the ashes down along the side of the boat and into the water. They didn't fall in a steady, gray stream but puffed out a bit into a whitish cloud, and it was all very simple and final and un-miraculous. Everyone waved farewell.

After that, something shifted inside Simon, who had spent all of his life in a house by the sea. When the surface of the ocean glittered, he now imagined that it was because the light was reflecting off his father's particles. It was pretty, looking down on the water's surface from above, but underneath there was a boneyard for dead and lost things, and Simon understood that there were dangerous creatures in the ocean.

He used to love the ocean's creatures. When he was very small, he had a nightlight that projected blue ripples and colorful fish onto his walls, and that lulled him to sleep. He knelt in the wet sand by the ocean and pressed his fingers into the mud, searching for white Emerita and fearlessly letting them scuttle along his arms. His father, the biologist, taught him the names for aquatic things. Years before Simon had any reason to be afraid of killer whales, the biologist held Simon's hand up to the nose of a captive orca. Its skin was harder than it looked like it would be, rubbery like a wet inner tube. The whale pulsed against his palm and snorted in the soft, deep voice of a horse. The year before Simon's father died, he brought the family with him on a trip to Puerto Rico, and Simon swam in the gentle waves of a bioluminescent bay, incandescent flecks of blue plankton all around him, and his parents' dark and hazy ghosts on the shore.

________

The summer after his father's death, Simon avoided walking down to the beach for the very first time in his life. He could hear the hushed breathing of the ocean from any room in his house. He tried not to look at it. With his curtains drawn, he spent most days in his bedroom playing computer games. At night, he dreamt of people he knew drowning and of a great, big jawbone stretched over the earth where the sky should be, teeth like menacing stalactites.

In July, the tourists came to town, and the family—father, mother, and two...