"What do I do now?"

Lou advised first: "Follow the instructions; it is the only way."

"It seems rather gruesome to me," Gabe cringed.

"Just get her bones, and make sure you're not late to the appointed hour," Sandy warned.

Gabe rose at 4:00am, as was his usual routine. Sensing the need to cast out the shadows, he rolled the patio doors open and searched vainly for Ana's reflection in the glass as the sun rose. But no reassurance could be found.

He set up the fan to blow the moldy scent from the fresh earth that still clung to the carpet. Eliminate the stink that appeared to be putrefaction. He took a breather and watched the sun rise over the bay and questioned what it was that he was about to do.

What sense did this make?

It all led back to the cook.

Lou, Sandy and Gabe were crossing the equator at the helm of the USS Hornet at the exact moment when the normally quiet and unassuming cook spoke up. They were all on deck, waiting for the word that they had crossed the equator, its boundary line to have some marker of distinction. It was V-Day.

"When all the flesh is gone, it's only the bones that are left to treasure," the cook spoke.

"Good God, man, where has your mind gone to? Hitting too much of the dishwashing liquid?" Lou was incredulous at the comment from the cook Brandon, but softened in seeing the lack of effect on this man, who stood on the deck with them. Brandon just continued staring into the reflection of late afternoon sun on the heaving ocean.

We all looked at him differently from that moment onward, Gabe recalled. Brandon had been an officer on the carrier through the war, but he suddenly went crazy in the past two months of deep ocean crossing, but not dangerously enough to send him to the brig. So they demoted him to a cook. Reason given was that he was a better cook than officer.

There had been a burial at sea a few days earlier - the last fatality in World War II - and his death was mysterious. "Jared died in his sleep" was the official word.

"Such artificial dividing lines man has created. What did you expect crossing over the equator? The world to change?"

Lou sunk it in, as was his bullying mode: "Like when your buddy was dumped into the ocean."

They couldn't help but snicker.

Brandon was unaffected, stating flatly, "Now I see him all the time".

"Yea, you two must've been close, it appeared, since you brawled like a baby at his funeral," Sandy breathlessly tried to keep up with Lou biting sarcasm.

"These boundaries are so fake, just like the droppings left to figure out where we are."

"Equator my ass, nothing is different, what the hell did we expect," Lou spat out.

"I miss him every minute, you know, but there are ways to keep hold."

Well, grief has brought him to a very strange place, Gabe thought, and felt an extreme sudden disorientation at the edge of the carrier.

Gabe always counted on the carrier's solid feel, bolts meshed immovably into steel. But now the welding seemed to become jelly, and he felt at the "mercy" of the ocean sway.

"Boundaries are not crossed lightly, you know," Brandon said, flinging the stub of a cigarette into the dark ocean. He spoke with an odd inflection, measuring every word, as if a scholar.

"But once a loved one dies, they can be kept back if you want."

Lou had to chuckle at that one, and exclaim, "What kind of creepiness is this? It's lunacy. I hope that what your are taking doesn't get mixed in with our food."

The cook turned to Lou and said with an evenness that contrasted to his crazy implications. "This will come in handy for you one day."

The he saw Gabe looking at his wedding day photo and asked how he would feel when Ana passed on. Gabe told him that he wanted to die before her, or best at the same time.

The reflected sunset took the cook's features from the pale color of his skin to a darkening shade, finally to barely visible features in the dusk.

He suddenly got all choked up.

"When you love someone for such a long time, you want them to stay with you so you can go together."

"For most people a photo album would just be fine, I'd think," wiseass Lou spoke first.

"No, no," Brandon insisted, starting hard at Gabe. "Especially if they are your only source of happiness and the hedge against you succumbing to the worst parts of yourself. Because they will come after you to steal them away."

"After death?" Sandy croaked.

"Yes, they come, and they try to tear them away. Bad enough they are already dead, but they want to take all traces of them from your soul. So you must ward them off the only way I know how. Bones scraping against bone, the sound that they detest."

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