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Drowning (non-graphic); brief use of homophobic language.edited by Ziv Wities
The waves crested with foam as thick as fish eggs. Jim Walsh would have paid good money to stay indoors that evening with his feet up, tea in hand, listening to the wind rattle the window panes. But that wouldn’t have helped pay the wedge of overdue bills he could now barely stuff in his letter rack, so Jim put the thought of tea out of his mind, pulled on his thickest oilskins, and climbed down the pier ladder into his boat.
There was a lot wrong about that evening, but the worst thing, the absolute worst thing of all, was that Eamon hadn’t shown up. Eamon was supposed to be Jim’s fishing partner, but he’d taken a part-time job working a computer for the county council and was staying late again. It was as if the social housing register meant more to Eamon than friendship.
Waves slopped over the gunwale as Jim motored out into the bay. He came alongside the first buoy and hauled up the line until an empty lobster pot rattled onto the deck. Jim launched into a fit of passionate and creative swearing. The season had been awful so far, and he was still behind on his bills from last year. A few days ago, the postman had left an envelope marked “Last Notice” sticking halfway out of his letter box for anyone to see. He felt the shame of it like a tightness around his neck.
He calmed himself with gulps of sea air. Then he stuffed a rotten mackerel into the pot and set about hauling up the next one in the chain.
It took twenty minutes to haul and rebait the entire chain of pots, and all Jim had to show for it in the end was a single prepubescent lobster and a backache. He sat on the thwart with his head in his hands, his fingers in his thinning hair. He thought about Eamon, warm and dry, drinking the fancy coffee granules Jim’s taxes would have paid for—if he’d paid any. He tried to be angry, but it was difficult. Money trouble was a big part of why Eamon’s wife had left him years ago, so Jim understood why he preferred to have a job on the side when the fishing was this bad. What really bothered him was that he would never, ever have let Eamon down by not showing up for fishing; he cared about the man too much. Eamon had never felt that way about Jim, and that’s what really stung.
Jim channeled his frustration into hauling up the next chain of pots. The line felt heavy, and he allowed himself to hope; just one more lobster would get the electric company off his back, at least. He pulled, hand over hand, until he saw something snagged on the line.
He paused, staring, while his brain caught up with his eyes.
He was looking at four pale fingers, each one curled around the line for all the world like they were holding on. Jim peered down into the water. An old man stared sightlessly up from beneath the surface, his skin cracked like old seaweed and tinged green with algae, his gray beard moving in the swell like a living thing.
Jim hadn’t been to church in years, not even for the drop of wine, but he crossed himself anyway. It was only by the grace of God that it wasn’t his body, or Eamon’s, snagged on a lobster line. It didn’t matter how experienced you were or how well you swam or who you prayed to; at sea, it took one mistake, and only one.
Thoughts of lobster ebbed away.
When Jim had collected himself, he hunted around for a rope so he could tow the poor devil ashore. He looped one end around the man’s torso and was thinking about where to fix the other end when something caught his eye: one of the old man’s hands was slowly rising towards the surface.
Jim told himself it was probably just a build-up of gasses, probably, and that was giving the appearance of—
The hand seized Jim and dragged him onto the gunwale. He screamed. The boat pitched. He tried to regain his balance, but it was too late. The waves rolled the boat on top of him, and Jim and the old man sank together into the sea.
***
At first, Jim was too shocked to react. He gazed stupidly up at the surface, where his upturned boat was bucking in the waves. Then, somehow, he heard the old man speak, his voice gravelly like the sigh of a wave drawing backwards over a stone beach. “Breathe,” he said. “Breathe, you porpoise-faced swab!”
That was when Jim panicked. He tried desperately to pry the old man’s fingers from the collar of his oilskins, but they wouldn’t budge. His lungs began to burn. He pumped his arms and legs, desperate to get back to the surface, but it was no use. Pins and needles swept his skin, his vision began to darken, and just as he was about to pass out, his body betrayed him and sucked the deep cold of the sea down into his lungs.
And it felt… okay.
Not great, not as good as air—air is king as far as breathing goes—but it was okay. In fact, it was kind of cool and refreshing, like a congealment of sea fog. His lungs stopped burning; the pins and needles disappeared. His vision cleared, too, and he realized he was lying on the sea floor with the old man standing over him.
“You struck me in the mouth,” the man said, massaging his jaw. He was wearing a tattered blue jacket, voluminous shorts, stockings and cloth shoes. Around his neck was a thin red scarf that drifted to one side in the current.
“I… I’m sorry,” said Jim, and paused, surprised he could speak underwater, more or less normally. “I thought you were trying to drown me.”
“That’s no excuse for discomposure, man.”
Jim rose shakily from the sand. He thought maybe it was best to keep the old man talking while he figured out what to do. “Do… do you have a name?” he asked.
“People down here call me Davy.”
Jim could only see thirty yards around, because the water had little shreds of seaweed in it, and silt, and tiny wriggling things. There were some rocks with kelp fronds stuck to them, but no people.
“Wait,” he said. “Are you Davy Jones?”
“The same,” said the old man, drawing himself up to his full, unimpressive height.
“The fellow that runs around at the bottom of the sea?”
Davy scowled. “He that presides over all the evil spirits of the deep.”
“Of course, sorry.”
Davy folded his arms. “We should be on our way. We have a long journey ahead of us, and we’re losing light.”
“That sounds nice, Mr Jones,” said Jim, taking a few steps backwards. “But I’d better get back on land—see a doctor about this water in my lungs.”
“Nonsense,” said Davy. “There’s nothing wrong with a little water in—”
Jim made a break for it. He set off run/swimming as fast as he could in the direction of the shore. His boots shifted on the sand and he was unsure what to do with his arms, but he pushed forward as quickly as he could anyway.
Behind him, Davy began to whistle an odd tune.
Jim focused on what was in front of him. The slope towards the surface, the beach, the town, Eamon’s office, Eamon at his desk waiting for the text to say Jim got in safely. He wasn’t going to get that text, and soon Eamon would be out on the pier working himself into a flap.
Jim was on the verge of exhaustion by the time he spotted the pier through the gloom. Davy’s whistling had ceased, and Jim had the feeling of waking from a nightmare as he scrambled up the ladder towards the slop and foam of the waves. He could feel the last of the sunlight on his skin as he neared the top of the ladder, and he was just about to taste air again when his face squashed flat against the surface of the water like he’d run into a glass door.
With his neck bent backwards and his cheek smushed impossibly against the air, Jim clung to the ladder until the trough of a wave reached down to dislodge him, its underside oddly rough—more like stone than water—as it slammed into his head and sent him drifting back down into the silt.
Davy was there, grinning. “Never gets old,” he said.
For the second time that night, Jim pulled himself off the sea floor, this time with an angry lump on his temple.
“This makes no sense,” said Jim. “I can’t be trapped down here.” He turned to Davy. “Tell me I’m not trapped.”
“You’ll never go back on dry land, if that’s what you mean.”
“Of course that’s what I mean!” Jim was shouting now, not only angry but possibly concussed. He clutched the rungs of the ladder and peered up through the waves again, looking for a flash of dirty orange oilies, or a pair of dirty blue eyes beneath a dishevelment of thin hair. Facing eternity beneath the waves, all he could think of was Eamon, the overweight straight man whose main achievement in life was perfecting the fried breakfast. Who would mind Eamon’s spare key for when he locked himself out once a week? And who’d talk sense into him when he refused to see the doctor because “they’re always trying to get you on antibiotics”?
“There must be a way back,” Jim said. “Tell me there’s something I can do.”
“I did make it back once, long, long ago,” said Davy, “disgorged from the belly of a giant fish.” He looked up like he expected to see the silhouette of the creature hovering above him. “Still ended up back here, though.”
“Well, that’s no use to me, then, is it?” said Jim, through clenched teeth. “Look, maybe we can make a deal.”
Davy frowned.
“We’re the same,” he continued. “You’re like a lobsterman; the sea is your lobster pot.”
“I am not like a blasted lobsterman.”
“If I get a lobster who’s too small in one of my pots, I’ll throw him back in. It’s not his time, you see?”
“I have no truck with lobsters.”
“What I’m saying is—forget the lobsters—you should let me go. I’m a good person. I always put my change in the lifeboat box.”
“First you call me a lobsterman, and now you’re asking for a favor. Damn my eyes but you’re a strange sort of man. You are drowned, and cannot be undrowned.”
“There must be something you want. Why did you take me in the first place?”
“I’ve been known to remove the odd rotten plank from humanity.”
Jim blinked. “You’re calling me a rotten plank?”
“A man who owes money, that kind of thing,” said Davy, with a shrug. “A rotten plank.”
Jim felt heat in his face even in the cold water. “How the hell do you know that?” he asked.
Davy wrinkled his nose, looking out into the murk. “These things just come to me on the currents, like bad smells. The smell of a debtor is like damp plaster. Much worse, like a beam rotted through, is the smell of a man who loves but is not loved in turn.”
Jim opened his mouth to protest, then closed it again. He did love Eamon, of course, but what was wrong with that? Would all those greasy breakfasts have been better eaten alone in stodgy silence, instead of in the company of the most guileless and open man he’d ever met; a man Jim could provoke into peals of laughter so great they would register on a seismometer?
Okay, maybe it was true that he could have looked for love elsewhere, seeing as Eamon was incapable of returning those feelings. And maybe Jim had somewhat cherished the pain of wanting an impossible thing.
Like a keel, clinging to the water that rots it. God. Maybe he was a rotten plank.
Jim sat down on a broken lobster pot. What if Davy was right, and the bottom of the sea was where he belonged—a just punishment for a wasted life, and for wasted love?
Davy had wandered off to inspect a hole in the pier, his wisps of gray hair stirring in the current. He didn’t seem like a king of demons, just an old man who’d been alive for too long.
“How long have you been down here?” Jim asked.
“Longer than I can remember. Hundreds of years, maybe thousands. I don’t know.”
Jim shuddered. “And I’ll be like you, wandering around down here for eternity?”
“Oh, no. I’ll take you to Fiddler’s Green. It’s filled with good people and good music.” He took a few steps towards Jim and raised an eyebrow, looking almost comically earnest. “Do you play a fiddle?”
“No. I do a bit of guitar.”
Davy bowed his head. “A pity. There’s no call for guitar in Fiddler’s Green.”
Davy was interrupted by the sound of an outboard motor, its propeller carving a white trail across the surface of the water.
Davy’s voice crackled, “Blood and thunder, these new jolly boats make a racket.”
“They’re looking for me,” said Jim, jumping from his lobster pot and moving towards the noise. “Eamon has raised the alarm.” Jim waved his arms in a distress signal, and immediately felt silly. Nobody looks for survivors at the bottom of the sea.
“Don’t worry about them,” said Davy. “You’re going to Fiddler’s Green where all your drowned shipmates have been having a merry time for centuries. And these boys know how to party, mark me.”
Jim remembered a party with sailors once, in his twenties. He’d drunk too much with some navy boys and kissed one of them, which was nice, but then the guy’s boyfriend had punched Jim so hard he blacked out. Eamon had carried him down a flight of stairs to get him out of there.
“That doesn’t sound like my cup of tea,” said Jim.
“Now don’t be that way. There’s plenty of your sort there, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Jim crossed his arms. “And what would ‘my sort’ be, according to you?”
“Ah, y’know,” said Davy, scratching his head. “An abomination.”
Jim couldn’t help laughing. The last time he’d heard that word was when the butcher offered Eamon a vegetarian sausage.
Davy tugged at his beard. “Whatever you want to call it, I’m trying to tell you you’ll be in good company. You might even find someone you like, someone who likes you back, though that’s none of my business.”
Another pair of engines came steaming out from the slipway; Jim getting himself drowned was now inconveniencing the lifeboat lads. By the slipway, torch beams slanted down into the sea, and all along the shore dozens more swept side to side in the dusk. “Wow,” he said, “so many people turned out to look for me.”
Davy grunted. “Aye, they’ll do that.”
Jim watched with a lump in his throat until Davy lost patience. “Enough of this blasted melancholy!” he said, pulling at his jacket which, if it had had any buttons left, would have lost a few. “We ought to have been on our way hours ago.”
Jim ignored him. He wondered if Eamon was in one of the boats, or if he was on the shore. He had no doubt it was Eamon who’d roused half the town to search for him. There was love between them; it was a musty, ill-fitting, mismatched sort of love, but it was there, and it was important.
“I need to say goodbye,” said Jim.
“Aye,” said Davy, “and I suppose you need to turn off the gas and feed the cat while you’re at it.” Water swirled around him, sweeping the sand at his feet into little tornado shapes. “You need to come with me.”
“I need to say goodbye,” Jim repeated. His brain was stuck on it.
“You mule of a man. How could you possibly say goodbye to a soul from down here?”
Jim shut his eyes. He thought of mornings with Eamon, chatting over bacon, eggs and mackerel; of long evenings drinking stout beside fireplaces; of long hours of daylight side by side in that tiny boat hauling pot after pot.
Jim opened his eyes wide, smiled wide, and said to Davy Jones, “I know how. And you’re going to help.”
***
Eamon, alone in the middle of the bay, was free to cry. His eyes spilled salt water into the sea as he hauled up the first of the lobster pots. The loud weather had passed, and the flat water around him was trying to reflect the world like dirty glass.
When the pot came over the side, Eamon gasped and fell backwards into the oily pool at the stern of the boat. Inside the pot were fourteen lobsters, all jammed together with no room to move, snipping at each other and looking generally put out. Eamon got to his feet and circled the pot, wondering how on earth so many could have gotten in there.
He went about his rounds that day pulling up pot after pot stuffed with lobsters, and when he came ashore he was laughing so hard that tears rolled down his cheeks.
The whole town heard about it. People were quiet as they took their walks around the harbor, and took their drinks looking out over the bay. They thought about lobsters scuttling about on the ocean floor. And they thought about Jim.
© 2026 by Daire McNally
2970 words
Author’s Note: Growing up, I spent a lot of time sailing in a bay off the east coast of Ireland. On the headland overlooking that bay is a memorial to those who have lost their lives in those waters, ringed by plaques engraved with hundreds of names. A respect of the sea is ingrained in those who live with its power, and I think the legend of Davy Jones was a way for sailors to attribute some intelligence and reason to that power. I first imagined Davy as a collector of drowned souls when two young men lost their lives attending their lobster pots in the bay. The story grew from there.
Wherever those young men are now, I hope they’re in good company.
Daire McNally is from County Dublin, Ireland. He lives in London, UK, with his wife and two little boys. His mainstream short fiction has twice won the New Irish Writing prize, but this is his first speculative fiction piece to see either print or pixel.
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