Bottom Dweller

Bottom Dweller

 

You are a bottom dweller of the deepest kind,

hidden away behind dark glass, scales and eyes,

where the air hugs your skin in balmy gloom.

This is black Atlantis in a basement room:

flickering jeweled bodies under secret light and

your love swimming with them amid hollow castles

and breaths of air that rise to the surface as pearls.

 

And I am no fisherman, but you are the trophy-fish of lore,

the dream that ancient Ahab could not stop searching for,

ghostly beautiful but battle-scarred, slipping slow

between veins of algae and mud-slicked stones.

Living somewhere between deep silence and earth,

because those are the biggest parts of you.

What else is there?

 

Oh, if you would surface, I would show you the sun

so it would peel away your slimed olive skin,

and you would breathe the air again.

And somewhere there would be what is real,

the father I know you used to be,

who held a little girl’s hand because she was afraid

to follow you into that monstrous myth, the silent sea.

Never eat a banana on a boat…

Because apparently, it spells D-I-S-A-S-T-E-R.

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am terrified of boats (mainly because of sea monsters.  Yes, for real).  Unfortunately, my brother is getting married on a cruise come August, so I have no choice but to attend the ceremony…I’m tempted to just say “Screw you,” and run away, but apparently being present at your brother’s wedding kind of a big deal, so I’m putting my life in danger, instead.  At least I’ll have a room without a window so I can’t look out and see the giant tentacles trying to tear the ship apart.

We can't say we weren't warned...

Anyway, it’s important for me to know what superstitions sea-faring folk believe in, because I can’t make any mistakes on this trip.  So I read up on them a bit, and found some of the usual ones…a woman on a fishing trip is bad luck (unless she’s naked.  Then she’s actually good to have around), dolphins are good omens, never start a voyage on a Friday or you’re doomed, never kill an albatross…you know, the normal stuff everyone knows.

Then I read this title in a book:  “The Evil of the Banana.”

That's a lot of evil.

Apparently having bananas on a ship has been a big NO since the early 1700s.  This was when Spain’s South Atlantic and Caribbean trading empire was big, and “nearly every ship that disappeared at sea was carrying a cargo of bananas” (Pg. 195 of Breverton’s Phantasmagoria).  It was also thought that bananas on slave ships would ferment below deck and give of methane gas, killing anyone who breathed it in.  The scariest reason (for those with arachnophobia), is that a certain poisonous spider would nest in the bananas.  If a sailor was killed by a spider bite while bananas were on board, all of those bananas might be thrown to the sea because of the bad omen.

So the next time you’re on a cruise, tanning on deck and about to enjoy that strawberry-banana smoothie…think about the danger you’re putting yourself in.

If you’re interested in reading other sea superstitions and making yourself too paranoid to ever step on a boat again, click here.