Boundless Deep, and Other Stories by Gen Del Raye

Author:Gen Del Raye [Del Raye, Gen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC019000 FICTION / Literary, FIC029000 FICTION / Short Stories (single author)
Publisher: Nebraska

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It started early, in the spring of her first year of grad school, ten months into the program. It was June and she was already in the field, on a “cruise,” we called it, a research trip, six days on a ship the size of an apartment building turned on its side, pulling jellied creatures out of deep-towed nets and examining them for ten hours a day. She was too excited to sleep, too anxious to sit, too seasick to work, until she learned to work with a bucket of sick at her feet for instant relief that did not require running onto the deck and casting around to find the leeward rail. She was doing real work, she thought, she was adding her little marks into the scientific record in that windowless wet lab hunched over a dissecting microscope trained on a whole world dragged up from deeper than light in the ocean (viperfish, arrow worms, barreleyes, bristlemouths, snipe eels silvered and mangled and fantastical in metal dissecting trays and petri dishes and sample jars and loose Tupperware containers on the bench and all around her on the floor), she was finding her sea legs, she was blasting Rachmaninov into her earbuds to ward off the nausea, and she was standing at the rail after dinner and a shower, feeling the wind in her fingers, looking up at the city of the ship, the huge arc of the crane, the spinning antennae, and her advisor in his work vest, putting a palm on the wrong part of her shirt and asking if there was somewhere they could go. The sea was at her back. Her boots were unlaced and heavy on her ankles. She could hear people talking. She thought this couldn’t be happening. It did, and it did.

She made an appointment with the liaison, who was listed on the university website. The liaison was not a mandatory reporter. She advised against going to the police or talking to anyone outside the department. Much later, Kerri said, she realized this liaison was not on her side.

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