Salvage
By the third year, the sun had sorted the Japanese bottles from the Chinese ones. Kana went first, then the Chinese characters, then the English, the ink lifting off in that order every time.
Under it, the plastic held its shape, white as the day it was poured. American brands arrived crushed. I sorted them into the skiff by nation. Out here a man invents a bureaucracy before he invents a god.
My name is Keola. It means life. My mother stopped using it. Eventually.
Two days after her funeral I took my uncle’s skiff out of Hilo with six gallons of gas and a daughter asleep inland. I ran it out at the edge of the shipping lane. The rest was current.
The gyre gathers what is lost overboard, cigarette lighters, toothbrushes, me, and holds it all in the middle of the middle of the sea. People imagine an island you can walk on. It is a galaxy.
Water between everything, the debris spread thin, then a knot, a mat of net and lid and crate, and under every mat a crowd of fish in the shade. Mahi Mahi under a refrigerator door. Triggerfish in the shadow of a bath toy. The open ocean is a desert, and the garbage is the only tree.
I made my living off a ghost net, a drowned green mile, crabs and gooseneck barnacles, hooks braided through the mesh. I ate the crabs raw. I jigged the mats with a lure cut from a detergent cap and caught fish every day for four years.
Every gut I opened held a confetti of colour.
I ate around it. Then I ate it.
Thirst had three answers.
Rain first. The patch is a warehouse of empty bottles, and the nations were aisles. At every squall I filled the soundest, and stood them in rows along the thwart.
Fish second. You wring the flesh through a shirt and drink the cloudy pressings. You suck the eyes. You snap the spine and set your tongue in the notch where the sweet water sits. It tastes of a nosebleed.
After a while, the throat learns.
And the third answer, I made myself. I rigged greenhouse film off a pallet over a blue drum, brine in the bottom, a cup at the center, a bolt to weight the cone, and all day the sun took the water up and left the salt, one swallow an hour.
In the second year a child’s rubber slipper rode against the hull, left foot, size ten, pink, sunbleached.
Ashley Mangtani is a slipstream writer whose work explores ecological and social collapse, and the roles people inhabit in moments of crisis. Drawing on an M.Sc. in Environmental Science and experience as a longform fiction reader for Ploughshares, his work appears or is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Litro, Washington Square Review, Boudin, Expat Press, Thieving Magpie, Flash Fiction Online, HAWKEYE, Neon Dystopia, Apocalypse Confidential, and others. Read more at ashleymangtani.com