The apparition materializes again in the back alley between Golden Horse Nightclub and Swanky Joe's. The girl is dressed in the same faded gown and trousers patched at the knees. She is on her haunches watching a spot in the concrete as keenly as a black kite tracks a fish in the water.

Traffic is light at this time of the night, but even when a truck thunders past, booming as it hits a rut in the asphalt, the girl doesn't look up; she doesn't notice at all.

After some time, she begins to twirl her hands around each other as if coiling an imaginary ball of twine, slowly at first, then quickening. Suddenly she stands. She turns in the direction where there is nothing but an overflowing dumpster, her eyes wide with excitement.

And then, as always, her smile turns to sadness and she vanishes again.


#


Before there was a back alley; before earth was dumped and compressed into the shoreline to make new land for night clubs like Golden Horse, Swanky Joe's, and numerous other establishments that have come and gone, there had been a rocky shoal here where cuttlefish scoured the seabed.

Bobbing above this shoal, on the surface of the jet black water, is an aging sampan.

The girl crouches at the edge of the bow. The moon is behind a thick veil of clouds, so she must focus on the water. In her hand is a wooden spool from which a fishing line extends. She tests the line: nothing yet.

The sea on one side is lit by the soft orange glow of gas lamps along the waterfront. She has always wondered what it would be like to bed down on dry land, not having the rhythmic churning of the sea to lull her to sleep. She remembers the typhoon that raged for three days: even when the water was like an angry god they chose to stay aboard, lashing their boat to the pier.

No, her home will always be here.

Her father lies sprawled beneath a green tarp at the back of the boat, amongst netting and rope and all of their worldly things, his neck propped at an angle, his eyes glazed, mind swirling. He swills from a bottle. The bottle clinks against the deck.

She feels a tug on her finger: something has taken the bait. The line goes taut. She responds with a snap of her wrist and begins to coil, hand over hand, slowly at first, then, feeling the pull in the line, she doubles her efforts.

She remembers the seasons before the sea turned barren: her mother, under the tarp, stir-frying their bounty over a roaring fire, the line of hungry dockworkers waiting at the pier; before her mother climbed ashore forever; before her father spent more time with the bottle than the net.

The cuttlefish rises out of the water, its skin pale and slick.

"Look!" she says, turning around and dangling her catch. "Baba, we got one!"

The cuttlefish is lean, but she beams because it's the first this season and she knows that every catch counts.

Her father eyes it, grunts, turns over.

A swell jostles the sampan and her weight shifts.

She feels herself falling backward into the open sea, and in that moment of weightlessness, before slipping into murky oblivion in a tangle of rope and fishing line, a thought enters her mind: if only it had been bigger.


#


The girl appears again in the back alley. Her fists coil in the air, she stands, she turns, she offers something with her hands. She hopes her father will see the magnificent cuttlefish on the line.

He never does; she never stops trying.


.