Originally appeared in

Morpheus Tales

#8, April 2010.Empty Vessels by Aaron PolsonBefore the flood brought the dead to his door, Elroy Jantz lived alone.Each evening, he spent at least an hour tinkering with his boat. It was an older center console model, but Elroy loved it like a child. He waxed the hull, applied oily cleanser to thevinyl seats, adjusted sparkplugs and carbonator, and poked endlessly at the motor and propeller to ensure a smooth running ship. During the good years, he and his boat worked on contract for the shrimp companies; in the lean years the boat at least helped him fill his frying pan.The rains started in April, usually a good season for rain, but soon the river crested itslevees and sent brown murk into fields and towns, forcing a migration north. The delta sank under the swell. The government sent men in green jackets to the bayou on wide barges. Theycame for Elroy in mid-May, hoisting his small boat onto their flat barge. He winced at the roughtreatment and worried about scratches on the hull as his only child came down on the larger craft.

Polson / Empty Vessels / 2There were other men on the barge, other enlistees with little boats that they worried over and coddled like infants. Elroy wondered about those men, whether they led lonely lives andcared for their boats like children. None of them talked; none had any words to fill the grim task before them. They stood on the deck and listened as a mustached man with a bullhorn barkedorders. A few of the men coughed; others shuffled their feet. Elroy tucked his hands inside his bib overalls and squinted toward the horizon, the vanishing point where sky and land shouldmeet, but now was a gray plane with no clear break.On the first night, Elroy was fooled three times. When the men in green jackets initiallylowered his boat into the water, he was sure they missed their mark, overshot the submergeddelta, and drifted too far into the gulf. One of the men in green laughed, shook his head, andhanded Elroy a long pole with a hook at one end.Elroy’s mind wandered as he scanned the rolling water; he remembered a girl, years ago,Mary Ann Nolan, who he had hoped to marry. When they were young, he would take her for slow, midnight cruises, just as far as he was comfortable in the dark—just as far as he knew the personality of the river. He was in strange waters that first night, and the river was gone.The barge searchlights caught a glittering island, a dark mass in the twilit gloom. Elroysteered his little craft toward the island and was fooled a second time; it was only the top of amassive tree filled with snakes. Their tiny eyes sparked in the beam of the searchlights. He spedaway as one serpent dropped toward the boat, landed in the milky-murk, and slipped into thedepths as a fading black scribble like a trail of smoke.The dark water rolled with fresh rain, a new onslaught that caught the surface of the floodin a mass of boiling welts. Elroy was fooled a third time by the sound under his boat, the tappingand scraping blending together. Surely the tops of trees, he thought, and he worried about the

Polson / Empty Vessels / 3damage done to the hull. He didn’t recognize that the two sounds came at separate intervals; both the trees and the dead reached for his small craft with their outstretched fingers.On the second night, Elroy found the bodies. The first was a bloated man bobbing facedown along the lip of the water. Elroy pulled the corpse close with the hooked pole thegovernment men supplied; he caught the bile in his mouth and spat over the bow of his boatwhen the man’s skin slipped and skidded over his bones like a loose glove.Some were caught in fences, barbed wire clinging like tiny hands. One woman was a puzzle: a rope tied around her wrist trailed into the depths. With his long pole, Elroy hauled her sodden corpse into the boat and yanked at the rope. He dropped on his haunches when the ropetugged back. Surely my imagination, he thought, and pulled again, gradually reeling the cord outof the dark water. The dead woman accused him in silence when the tiny loop at the other endrose above the water. His heart caught in his throat, and the tapping returned: tiny knocks beaton the underside of the hull, almost a signal—the lost child calling to the woman who rodesilently in Elroy’s boat.He remembered another child, Mary Ann’s child, and how it broke him to learn it wasn’this. Her father forced her away, held a shotgun to Elroy’s chest and sneered.

It ain’t yours boy

Something inside Elroy withered then, and he looked at long years ahead, alone.On the third night the dead spoke to Elroy Jantz.By that night, a sizeable mound of stiff corpses lay at the bow of the barge, a compositionof bodies stacked together like a cord of wood—hollow, drained vessels. The men in greenuniforms sprinkled the pile with lime from large drums to control the smell, the rotten stench of moisture and skin that slipped too easily, the reek of spoiled flesh and sludge.