In the blackest hour of morning, a storm rakes the coast. A clap of thunder rips through some hidden fabric, startling the old man awake, and he flinches in the dark, cracking a single eye. Through the window, a white flash summons ghastly shapes—a bone-colored shore, the foam-tipped summits of breakers, and, overhead, a colossal silhouette as of a chasm gouged from the sky. Then the seascape is swallowed into the void again, and the window becomes an ebon square, only to flash silver, seconds later.

Wind moans just beyond the walls, another waypoint along its haphazard course over hillocks, through tufts of beach grass and stone crags, causing the old man to shiver and curl up beneath his blankets, though he can't feel the wind directly. His is a different kind of chill, beginning in his bones and spreading through his tendons and his capillaries. His is the hollowness of a wooden doll, of a flute.

Another crack in the sky. Another rupture. The old man starts again, because he slipped into the shallows of sleep and was hovering just above the precipice before the cruel hook line yanked him toward the surface.

Morning: gray like cinder. The sun doesn't rise; the sky turns a brighter shade of slate. The old man is on the water again, tossing the cast-net over the waves. He sits, removes a lump of basswood from his left pocket, then a knife, then he resumes whittling, shaving-off a jagged corner here, a bulging contour there. The totem is beginning to take shape. See the corners protracted into arched limbs--they are the wings. See the zenith, the triangular point--that is the beak. A gust rips past, shaves-off a cloud of spray. The old man draws his catch, pulling the cast-rope taut and dragging it over the swells.

Today is different. Today, the herring spill into the icebox along with something else. Something long and pink and opalescent. At first, the old man believes he exhumed the entrails of a whale carcass. Thick, rubbery strands wind through the silver-bodied heap, converging somewhere out of sight, beneath the glassy eyes and flapping maws. But the sight also prods something curious inside of him. A feeling of recognition. Of portents spoken in a forgotten dream.

The old man dredges through the pile with trembling hands, scattering fish all over the floor. He reaches inside. His fingers slip along something like a watermelon--smooth, ovular, much larger than a herring, and he inserts another hand and pulls, heart pounding. The stray fish slap back and forth in witless panic, scattering everywhere as the object rips free, and the old man holds it out infront of him, arms extended, puzzling at the smoothness of its contours and strangeness of its color. It's an oblong sphere, almost a foot in diameter, encased in a gelatinous rind--sticky, supple, like the surface of a frog's egg. He cannot tell if the outer layer is translucent or if it simply refracts the daylight into iridescent shades of pink.

A slight turn, and the colors shift, becoming coral then ruby then lavender then sapphire, all of them purling together like marble ribbons and vanishing and shifting again. From the base of the sphere cascade long tendrils composed of the same rubber substance, a whole nest of them. They snake over his legs and coil over the floor, jellied, lifeless. The creature is dead. Has been dead for a long time.

Delicately, the old man leans the round body against the mound of entrails. Then he turns the rig around and rows back toward shore. His mind is humming with feverish excitement, for he's heard the stories of schooner fishermen and sailors who venture into the deep waters rimming the Cape, stories of drag nets towing-up monsters--giant squid, jellyfish, isopods larger than men, fish with goblin faces and transparent scales. But, to his knowledge, no-one yet has found a creature fitting this description.

All the journey back, he keeps glancing beneath the thwart at it. The pink oval gleaming against the ashen daylight like some sort of talisman. Like a liquid pearl. And a strange thought begins flickering at the base of the old man's mind. He could cart the creature into town, yes, and bring it before the mayor and the city council, but they would more than likely snatch it away and award him a paltry sum or nothing at all. And what good is money with nothing to buy?

Furthermore, he experiences a horrible sinking feeling at the thought of the creature becoming exposed, all those weird eyes scrutinizing it with detached interest, eyes belonging to others. Eyes not his. Better if he alone knows. Better if it remains his secret.

Once aground, the old man stuffs all of it—the shimmering body, the pink tendrils—into a sack and totes the sack up the wharf. And once at home, he places it upon the table by the window and sits and studies it for hours, until the window darkens and all the shack is suffused with shadow.