October 23rd – John Lindqvist – ‘Itsy Bitsy’ (2011) – Read it here. Catch up with the challenge list here.
The title evoked the spider nursery rhyme before I started reading it, and I guess the futility of climbing into the bushes every day with your camera to get a shot you can’t take is definitely evocative of the itsy bitsy spider’s Sysphean drainpipe climb – plus, the water as the spider’s nemesis.
However, as I read it, I realised it’s meant to be evoking the title of the song, Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini, and then I just felt silly.
BUT I reckon there’s room for both interpretations!
I really enjoyed this modern take on Nordic shapeshifting water spirits, which I think is what is going on here, as much as it is about the psychological descent of an obsessed and desperate photographer looking for his money shot.
It kind of reminded me of Русалка. Озеро мертвых / The Mermaid: Lake of the Dead (2018) dir. Svyatoslav Podgaevsky.
(This is the same director behind Пиковая дама: Черный обряд / Queen of Spades: The Dark Rite (2015) which is meant to be based on the Gogol story but really isn’t at all, it’s a Russian take on Bloody Mary, and also Яга. Кошмар тёмного леса / Baba Yaga: Terror of the Dark Forest (2020). So if you’ve seen either of those, you’ll know what you’re getting into.)
This naturally sent me down a fun little rabbit hole about Nordic merfolk. I didn’t know much about them, except Hans Christian Anderson’s tragic pining gay man allegory, but I learned some cool bits and pieces about the Havsrå and the näcken.
In Wales, we have mythical figures connected to the sea, like Gwenhidw, and mermaids who appear in local folktales, like this one from Pembrokeshire. We also have the morganed, also known as morgen, morgan, and mari-morgans, who are common to us and our cousins in Brittany. Our Cornish cousins call them morvoren.
I thought I’d do a short piece with the hardshell merfolk again for this one! Love those little guys. If you are wondering what I’m talking about, you can read a piece on them here, and one on someone being trapped in their cave and turned into a living egg sac for their young here.
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The Last Lobster Pot
Big Ben had been minding the pots for a long time, out in the Solent. It was rough work on bad nights, but the payoff was worth it. Nobody checked lobster pots for anything but lobsters, and nobody thought much of it when boats came and went at odd times of the night.
By day, Big Ben ran a sandwich bar on the strand. By night, he took his boat out to the pots, and picked up the packages in the pots. Kilos of snow, wrapped tight in their waterproof bags, and occasionally a few actual crustaceans.
This was a good night for it – clear and calm, with a good moon to see by. He took out his boat, the Green Jenny, and headed for the buoys.
Big Ben had never liked the sea. He had never wanted to be a lobster man like his uncles, and he didn’t enjoy sailing. This was a means to an end, like most work, and he had never expressed his dislike of it to another living soul. He kept it to himself, a sullen lump of distaste lodged firmly in his gullet whenever the hard-shelled things swivelled their stalk-eyes at him, their tails like woodlouse armour, the crawling insects of the seabed.
Tonight, he picked up the drop without much bother, and checked the other pots for their contents. The snow went into the false bottom of the crate with a bit of MDF and tarpaulin on top, and the lobsters went in on top of that, so it looked like lobster all the way down.
It was coming up to three in the morning when he brought the last pot to the surface. It was hard work bringing it up – he thought perhaps it had snagged on something, or something heavy had gotten entangled with the line. Big Ben heaved, sweat standing out on his brow, until the pot finally came up, and he saw the biggest lobster he had ever seen. It was so big, it had smashed through the wicker sides and was wearing the pot around its midsection, like a strange folk costume.
Ben turned the pot around, and two human eyes looked back at him from either side of the lobster’s head. Behind the glaze of the protective, transparent rostrum, the pupils widened all the way into twin black holes, and a thin circle of blue around each one. The orbs were otherwise white, not black, and crazed with pale blue blood vessels.
He dropped the pot on the deck, and it smashed apart.
The creature unfolded itself. Ben wasn’t great with animals, but it was only the size of a small-ish dog, nothing he couldn’t handle.
Its carapace was the stomach-churning blotched grey of spoiled salmon. Its antennules sprouted from a hooded face, pinched and pointed, but horribly human, even with the eyes bulging on either side. It had claws instead of hands, as a lobster does, but then he saw the other legs were ended with weird, splayed, flexible-jointed things, that looked uncomfortably like spindly six-fingered hands.
Big Ben grabbed an oar to smack the thing back into the sea, but it reared up, balancing on its tail. It had a full plate of armour on its underside, and this was a feverish pink, oozing with an unhealthy secretion that stank like a fishmonger’s wares in the sun. Sea-lice scuttled away into crevices on its body.
Ben brandished the oar, palms sweating and about to throw up. The lump of distaste he had for the sea and all the crawling things beneath it had turned into a churning witch’s brew of revulsion and fear, crawling up his throat.
It was ridiculous, he thought, to be menaced by something this size.
The boat gave a violent shudder that threw him off-balance, and the creature snapped its claws at him as he hit the deck hard. Pain lanced through his shoulder. The boat rocked from side to side, and as he thrashed about for something to right himself, the sound of the waves was drowned out by a chittering and clicking.
The sound of large bodies dropping to the deck and scuttling across it made Ben struggle to his feet, but there were hundreds of them now. The boat rocked again, nearly capsizing, and Ben was flung against the rails and smacked his head. Dazed and pained, he struggled to keep his footing.
Something ran up his leg. It was as big as a cat, but twice as heavy. He flung it over the side, and his hands came away smeared with something sticky and vile-smelling.
The deck was heaving with shapes, and Ben couldn’t see where one body stopped and another began.
Something snipped through his achilles tendon, and he went down screaming.
His scream was cut short as something burrowed into his open mouth. It tasted like burial at sea.
–
Nothing was found of Big Ben except his boat, Green Jenny, and half a dozen lobster shells, picked completely clean. Authorities found the cocaine haul in the false bottom of the crate, and concluded that this was a deal gone bad.
An environmental expert was called upon for their opinion about the effect of drug-smuggling on the local marine ecosystem, and the County Press ran a quote as the headline: “COCAINE IN THE WATER IS A PROBLEM OUR LOBSTERS JUST DON’T NEED”.
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