The prow of the boat faced black water while the divers found their traps in the wet cold, the howl of their lights breaking windy waves. Jim Carter turned west, away from that hum, past the scratchy-roped buoys and into moon-bright waves, to drop the body: its smell like wasted soil, the dead flower scent of rotting water greened with slime.

The doctor’s anxious hairy arms had waved money at Jim like feed for seagulls, frantic. “Take this, take it, take anything.” Why did a doctor, barely breathing, prone to asthma, twitching into an inhaler, want his wife heaved over a boat?

“Just bury her,” Jim had protested, matter-of-factly. “That’s probably the easiest, ground still soft with spring and summer’s warming coming.”

“I can’t,” the doctor mouthed, between the inhales, gaunt as a ghost, breathing white nothing air, his inhaler back to his mouth. He felt Margaret’s stone-fixed eyes, the bony grip of a hand, this wish the sea would swallow her into peace. Hospice hovering in the dim light. Those final breaths, the drift out. They had confirmed the death, filed the report, the death certificate to follow in a few weeks’ time. “It’s what she wanted.”

Then there was the money. How Jim had gotten in business with this man, his cousin asking if he’d do it, knowing Jim was dying anyway, no kids and the back taxes, shack on the water half fallen down and the bugs poking through in moist air, split screens with ravaged edges. They’d probably come after Jim, but he’d done it before. The town clerk would fine him and he wouldn’t be allowed on the water for a few months, maybe a year. What did it matter now?

Jim shook the smell off like heavy drink gone sour with morning as he lifted the body’s sheet-draped form. She was light as a cat, all bone. Now the disposing of the body like a sea ship’s flag, unfurled to the waste of broken masts and anchors. Jim the sailor for the dead. Need a body disposed of? Call Jim: what you do when it’s over.

The thump louder than he thought, the broad backward wave against the boat; but the hum of the other boats masking everything. Jim heard Johnson yelling at his son, hands numb and up from the water in his wet suit, wet hair hitting air. A scream across the water, acknowledging the sting of it. ‘Fuck, that’s cold!’

Then it was done: the motoring back to the mooring by the cabin, the dilapidated dock. In a bag under the floorboards, the $10k. Was it too little to ask, or too much, with a month or so to live? Jim started to pack a bag. Tomorrow: the hot truck in the sun, KMZT playing Keith Urban, or Patsy Cline. Whiskey in the back. And miles of open road.

– A.S. Aubrey