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Show 5, Jeffries, Islamorada [Section 4] For company he had the cephalopods, the argonauta, the tiny nautiluses riding below. And he saw the turtle in flight. I was beginning to love this land, he thought. There was the remembered feeling of consanguinity to those little scorpions. And the lanterns. In the moonlight, at Whale Harbor or Cape Florida, the lighthouses, fetching as campaniles. But now so cold. Boreal. From Anthropology, he remembered to chatter 'shivering. . . is a sophisticated mechanism possessed only by the upper vertebrates. . .' He heard the fine a cappella song of the waves. He had a vision. Of all the cold-eyed fishes watching. The adjudication of a sea-jury. And goldfish his barrister. Goldfish would ransom him. And he had never been really that fond of the little fellow. Going right back to the day when he came home in that potato salad carton. He came through a shoal of fish. He hoped that they wouldn't draw blood. Not far off he'd seen sharks, the cosmic hit men. He felt their pilot fish saw him and wanted to tell on him. |