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its stern climbed out of the water and began to break the low limbs of the shorelining trees. The stern beat against an old oak until from its crown dropped the two men in prison bluesshackled at the wrists from their hiding place. They fell and rolled awkwardly onto the deck, on their pale frightened faces the set resignation of their addition to the ship’s manifest.
    Flames were up my back and I teetered. Clanking and clattering, shifting gears with a blast of boiler smoke, the small ship headed straight to me on the dock. It seemed to take so long that I wondered if I would get one more chance to pull myself aboard before the heat of the fire would shove me in the creek.
    As I fanned my arms for balance and tried to focus my eyes I went dreamy again. I felt myself fall forward and bathe in coolness. Everything was quiet in my dream. In my dream I saw the bow of the ship splinter the last of the dock I was standing on, and the wheelhouse, shouldering the smashed burning timbers, break open its hatch. I was grabbed by the scruff of my neck and taken in a geography of embrace, sinewy muscles of arms like red clay banks along a river, boulders for teeth in a mouth set like a cave in a silver waterfall, eyes like the first evening stars at the end of the day, the end of a day when the fishhouse burned, the purple bus delivered naked people home, and a truant soft-skulled child sought shelter in the ruins of my cartonated encampment.
    In this true dream the failing sky was lit by a small burning kite.

 
    I
was dead and drowned. I lay on the bottom of the fishhouse creek looking up at the night sky through a low tide. I could make out amber lights of stars and the moon dulled by the peat water of the creek. I was a carcass comfortable in the cool shifting underwater eddies. My bed must have been made of sluice spillage, what the shuckers and the filleters in the cutting shed gutted from the fish and seashells they cut, bowels and bladders for my pillow, ribbons of brain woven with strings of eyes for a blanket. Around me things seemed suspended in front of my badly focused eyes, inner organ things still alive, floating and falling, aborting, bursting and blinded, draping everything everywhere dying and foul.
    And I was dead. And I was thinking how I must have died, and thinking of that I remembered the fishhouse fire and how my butter-turned knife went into Big Miss Magine until my fingers ticked against her heart. Thinking of that I thought I would hold my arm to my face to see if I could see it, being dead, and I stirred.Having made murder I was not surprised when I heard a man’s voice say
Fishboy
.
    Knowing who that was, I thought to myself
Yes, Devil?
    It was like my bed shifted and my covers were thrown off, and for the first time I had the notion that for being dead underwater, my breath was not wet.
    I’m going to set you down now, Fishboy
, the man’s voice said again.
Do you think you can stand up?
    My head rolled as the devil set me down, and I saw that what I thought were fish and seashell guts were red wet tendons and pink bones tipped in yellow fingernail, pulsing in little trembles, and I saw the arms were like clay bars in a river that ran out from a damp khaki shirt. I looked up and there were the long lengths of silver waterfall hair, the hair well brushed and clean, the hair hiding much of the face except the lower part, webs of muscle and fat lathered by the obvious tongue when the man spoke, the tongue slipping over the ivory edges of teeth, bright to the molars when he said
Don’t be frightened, Fishboy, I’m not going to hurt you
.
    Still, I backed away as anybody would, reaching behind me, now not sure if I was in the creek bottom dead or alive somewhere else, and my hands that reached behind me touched a spoked wheel taller than myself, and my eyes focused on the stars I had seen and themoon, and I saw that the stars were the little lights from an electric set of radios and compasses and boxes