If Triton wasn’t the father, then that left Alto. He floated in his tank, listless and belly-up, his merrow smile now a sutured gash across his face. He was always so passive, drifting aimlessly in his tank. Was it this same passivity that had angered Astra? Had she taken his refusal to protect the egg as a betrayal? Perhaps Alto had always known he was the father and still he’d relinquished his offspring to us.
We debated the reasons for Alto’s lack of paternal enthusiasm until someone proposed a theory: Alto and Triton had bonded when they were merlings. They used to be kissing pals. Perhaps Alto had always wanted Triton as a mate until Astra, an established alpha female, claimed Triton as her own.
To test this theory, we lifted the door separating his sea pen from Triton’s. Triton, who had almost fully transitioned into a female, rubbed against Alto for comfort. But Alto shuddered. He swerved sharply. He continued to dodge Triton’s attempts to communicate.
“He’s a deviant,”[32] Rodney said. “He won’t mate with females.”
That evening we released Triton and Alto into the ocean. Alto dove under the waves without a backward look. Eddie snapped a blurred picture, Grade 3 in quality, a final glimpse of Alto’s scarred shoulders, crimson in the setting sun. We’d counted more than thirty bites around his neck and shoulders. The majority of his scars were puckered white and old. Astra had been sinking her teeth into him for years.
Rodney gave a despairing laugh. “An infertile alpha and a homosexual beta—Astra truly picked the best!”
Astra must have inflicted injuries on Alto with an increasing desperation every time he tried to refuse her. But why hadn’t she simply abandoned her mates?[33] Why would she try to mate with Alto to the point of inflicting bites that went beyond mouthing behaviors?
This is where we split into factions. Some of us believe Astra had known all along. After four years of failure, she must have realized Triton was infertile, she must have sensed Alto’s covert desire for Triton. The rest of the pod would have chased them out for their deficiencies. And yet Astra had laughed and accepted them with a helpless fondness.
The other faction has accused us of projecting human qualities onto Astra. We were trying to make her into something that she wasn’t. Had we not done this already? We’d always told Astra she was meant to be a mother. We’d called her so many things. Our star, our queen. We’d promised she’d be the grandmother of the ocean, we’d caged her with promises she had to uphold, and still she’d tried to embrace us, her poor, unfortunate fools.
Case#: 15-1831
MMSC-15-117
Species: Merrow
Verified by: Dr. Laura Ravasi
Breed: Eastern Black
Verified on: 12/10/11
Sex: Female
Date Administered: 12/10/11
Date Reported: 02/22/12
Test: Gross Pathology
Specimen Collected on: 12/08/11
Animal ID: MMSC-15-117
Test: postmortem
Specimen: whole body dead
Result: gross pathology
Comments: A necropsy is performed on December 10, 2011. The body is that of an 82kg adult female merrow (Nereida niger) found stranded on Shiretoko Beach in Japan. The body length measures 285cm and has severely depleted adipose deposits in postmortem condition. All organs not described are within normal limits.
GROSS DIAGNOSES
Body as a whole: Emaciated, severe.
Lung: Pneumonia, granulomatous, chronic, multifocal, mild.
Thorax and abdomen: Effusion, serous to serosanguineous, mild.
Stomach: Ulceration, chronic, multifocal, mild, forestomach (nonglandular gastric compartment) full of marine garbage such as garbage bags, sacks of raffia, ropes, pieces of nets and plastic bottles, etc.
The manner of death is undetermined.
Theodore McCombs
SIX HANGINGS IN THE LAND OF UNKILLABLE WOMEN
1899, Jan 20th.
Sidney Lewis MILL, 36 (Vengeance)
Mill—a charmer and a rake of no respectable talent whatever—insinuated himself into the home of the widow Annie Holcomb and her seventeen-year-old daughter, Alice. But Mrs. Holcomb turned him out once she realized he’d been gallanting Alice as much as her. Mill spent the next four nights chanting obscene tirades under her window and left a dead rat in the mail slot on the fifth. Night patrols chased him off park benches; friends robbed him. Sleepless and humiliated, he broke into the house and strangled Mrs. Holcomb with her tin necklace and, when it snapped, with a pajama cord—and when that failed, he dragged a kitchen knife over her throat—and when the knife chipped and the shard cut Mill’s eye, Mrs. Holcomb ran into the street calling for help, towing her bewildered daughter by the wrist.
Mill pled guilty. Alice Holcomb wept profligately through his sentencing. On the scaffold, Mill’s last words were, “Finally—finally.”
It was a muggy, yellowed May morning on Willow Street, Boston, the light tawny and thick with heat and soot. Edith Smylie’s husband, Gerald Smylie, superintendent of the Police Department’s Bureau of Homicides and Homicide Attempts, having finished breakfast, sat bothered at the window, watching two blackbirds harass and chase a hawk over the rooftops. Edith cleared the plates and ran a crumb catcher over the tablecloth, thoughtlessly at first, and then, when she saw how it irritated him, with a perverse little violence, scraping at the fabric so that it sent a thin, linen whistle needling into his ear.
“Look, do you mind!” Gerry snapped, and Edith stopped at once.
She was a lean, dry woman of stiff and careful movements, auburn-bunned, tending to gauntness, and in her high-collared brown wool dress , she looked like a telegraph pole. “It’s the Barrow girl bothering you, isn’t it?” Edith said.
Edith came round and settled by her husband. He sat with his shoulders pushed forward in his sack coat, the way he did, Edith had observed before, when he felt the world had skipped off its rails. She knew which case had kept him sleepless so many nights . She knew, and resented that he hadn’t asked for her advice.
It had been all over the papers, inevitably: Liza Barrow, of North End, having reared alone her five-year-old son, that winter had starved the boy to death, keeping him tied to his bed with nautical rope. It was an outrage; it was a hanging offense. The jury would have rioted had the judge ordered any lesser sentence. What the papers didn’t know—what Edith had suspected, and what Gerald now confirmed to her—was that Miss Barrow refused to hang.
The rope broke, the first time. The second time, the noose wouldn’t even tie , but squirmed and shrank from the frantic hangman like a centipede wriggling out of a child’s clumsy fingers. They’d tried a firing squad , and the bullets never turned up, not in Miss Barrow nor in the wall behind her. They’d tried the chair, and she’d sat patiently in a blue halo of St. Elmo’s fire, grinning like a perfect demon, teeth crackling. Since the emergence of the Protection, there had been some small number of women killers like Miss Barrow, and discreet committees of lawyers and churchmen had convened to litigate the metaphysics of an execution. If the crime were very bad, surely. If she were immured in a tomb with no air, surely. They never found an exception, and Massachusetts’s prisons hadn’t either. Gerry had sworn his officers to secrecy, but sooner or later, he admitted, the public would realize, like Miss Barrow had realized, that her sentence couldn’t be carried out.
32
Homosexual behavior in merrows is not uncommon in social play, but a male’s rejection of a female’s advances was unheard of within the marine science community in 2011. Later studies have disproved this misconception.
33
Merrows often do mate for life, but this is seen as an evolutionary strategy for maximizing the number of merlings they can raise. Monogamy only comes after the successful conception of a fertile egg. Alpha females are known for discarding males who are incapacitated in any way that prevents copulation.