Off Larak’s shoal spit

We dropped the Danforth anchor three cables south of Larak’s shoal spit. The echo-sounder had been painting ghost bottoms all afternoon—eighteen meters on the thermal roll, then thirty, then nothing but a suspended drift of ribbonfish scattering under the transducer beam.

The auxiliary diesel never cuts out. It works a low tooth-rattle into the iron bunk frame, the bulkheads, the tin mug beside the parallel rule. Out here the humidity doesn't lift at sundown; it stays on the foredeck like wet burlap over the mouth until the sea breeze turns around two in the morning.

I found the matchbook you slipped into my canvas duffel before I caught the bus out of Shiraz. The paper is warped from salt fog, the red sulfur tips swollen soft. You asked why I couldn't learn to breathe inside four plaster walls. You told me the brick courtyards keep their cool if you hose the tile down at dusk.

I tried to remember the smell of that hose-water on hot brick today while we were hauling the sonar towfish over the stern roller. The steel cable came up fouled with black hydroids and grease. Taher had a cassette running in the wheelhouse—that staggered Minabi drumming, dry goat-hide slapped with bare palms. Between the drum rhythm and the hydraulic winch ticking as it cooled, there wasn't an inch of quiet. But it isn't quiet I come looking for.

On land, when you stop moving, someone always expects you to fill the shape of a room. On this survey grid, we are only depth soundings and a heading corrected for drift every twenty minutes, watching the harbor beacon off the tanker lane flash white twice, then go dark.