SCAVENGER'S DAUGHTER.

         Historically, shipwreck architecture has its roots off the coast of Eastern Amphitrite, in the Second Adolescent Era, where accumulations of sunk wood and softer saline were common.  As no permanent chemical reactions such as mortar oxidation or phosphor foundering were necessary, a simple settlement could be erected from suitable wood within a matter of weeks. 
          In the early centuries of Amphitrite, the population of aquatic settlers increased rapidly.  This meant that shipwrecks were in short supply, and many villages were established upon less fertile foundations. From around the Ocean of Nowhere onwards, the climate became harsher, as a period sometimes called the "Vital Ice Age" began. Villages situated on exposed wood or upon clay vales where the silt became waterlogged bore the brunt of the changes. Eventually, crop failures forced many such settlements to be abandoned.
          By the end of the Second Adolescent Era, shipwrecks were not only used to construct domestic houses, barns, and other outbuildings but to create elaborate tower structures as well.  Using reinforced salvage skeletons, the hulls of hundred of vessels could be notched and laid horizontally overtop each other to construct wrecktowers of enormous height and complexity. Often, the inclined silhouettes of these structures were all that remained after tidal currents or corrosion lead to the abandonment of a city.  Perhaps the most well known of these deserted settlements is Scavenger’s Daughter, in which an outline of points past exhaustion was preserved in a near perfect state.

 1. It was a scar chart stacked into a skyline, it was shipwrecks of soot and shipwrecks of skin and shipwrecks of everything after.  I called it a home, I called it the shadow of a scavenger’s daughter.          The entirety was risen to scale.  A city of replaced components, perfect complements, a test of compressions to become.          If we knew each other at all, you knew it as a torture device too.

2. We crashed there in halves, cratered and splinter-limbed and salvage remaining.  Tired and torn open by turnover lungs.    

          Underwater was what was left, most of us had sunk by then.

          You tried to make an echo of who to remember or how.  Every face was a makeshift civil war, a blackout from your vocal cords.  There was never a word or workaround for when.

          We were starved by instincts they already saw coming.  Soon they would be hunting us on their own. 3. They hid in small circles, with teeth behind teeth.  True predators who knew the trauma well.

          I heard them whispering a sharpened language, syllables scripted from salt, accents serrated by remains of air.  It wasn’t long before they were breathing water like it was a weight that had always belonged in them.          Born again by drowning wrong, they were becoming natives there.

         I watch them stalk down shadow lives and whole silhouettes, changing only where to swallow them.  Their territories were open conversation, oncoming current, decomposition.

         They carried away clouds like they were a kind of critical illness, with a sky lost to conclusion, the rest was their hunting hypothesis.
4. Our volcanic arc, or a couple overriding things to know.          You told me there was drowning and there was dissolving, the only difference was the distance to tell.  You told me once and then you told me again.          It wasn’t a lie.  I was almost a fit there at first, my face either fatally or seriously injured, sustaining damage or structural failure, saving up splinters as a replacement for home.          Some truths change and some never do.  You asked me what I was waiting for.

5. Here is most of what I felt.           I was terrified.  Completely. 

                  I spent each continent suspending excuses to my neck, scarring fabric over any confession to come.  In all honesty, two eyes were still too many to know.          I was a half-life, a host for dead reckoning and daily symptoms.  Separated from a skin to witness, the shape of it meant nothing to me as my own.          Make a fraud of yourself long enough and the fault lines do what they want to you.          Often without an afterlife to fulfill.

          It didn’t feel like being worn inside the wrong body, or wearing too many bodies to tell, it felt like trying to fit inside a ghost.  Trapped wasn’t the only word either.  I became a willing part of it.          They never say exactly what shame takes away from you, the landscape of anatomy that gets subtracted entirely.  They don’t tell you how quickly a pulse can turn back to gunpowder, how you become a casualty of postponement and then the explosives appear.          It wasn’t going to stop.  Those fractures weren’t there by accident, I would have to learn to carve a capture out of them. 6. A scavenger’s daughter saves anything mauled, crushed, torn or cut.  A scavenger’s daughter sees through the camouflage of force and impact.  A scavenger’s daughter knows what secrets the slope of bone can show.          A scavenger’s daughter survives on the start and end of them.

7. Their city crowded upward, towers of shipwrecks like points in a crown, a circle of salvaged facades and vacant spires, an architecture of apologies that should have never left.          Acts of corrosion separated from acts of coincidence separated from acts of exhaustion.  All of it scattered into stacks and heaps, mast beams raised by state of preservation and staked by severity of storm.          Like solid blocks of abandoned warfare, a border of barricades built by the undertow. 8. We lived in a list of dislocated nights.  Like spare pieces of an ongoing eclipse, each one picked apart and ready for a disappearance to come.  Our defense mechanisms were late clocks or outright avoidance, we carried sackfuls of of splints and needles and knives.          We came to see the scaffolding of a near survival.  We talked in trench codes, over telegraph wires, without control of depth or expression.          You wore black ice under each eyelid, closed your landscape alone.  Every reflection was a rift to make, or else a warning they were on their way.          Yes, I heard them every night.  Somehow, you called it honesty. 9. They followed us as crows or ghosts or wolves.  Mostly fanged, sometimes in flight, occasionally invisible.  A constant feeding was their only common form.          We tracked them from a slab window, traced each inaccuracy of migration.  From the height of a shipwreck they could almost pass for a shuddering pack, close to starvation, a step or less away.  Their pacing was a well protected lie.          If only that had been their strategy, if it had just been a cry for help that way. 10. You told me even blind spots could be living things, and I believed you.          We left our rooms only during hours of colorless dissolve.  You lived within a cavity method, gave in to calling it a conditional response.  I tried on gray contacts and clear glass, uneven tactics of concealment and mimicry.          A knot came loose.  I had to keep telling myself, it was important to remember what kind of breakwater, what kind of collision, what kind of target practice.          Or what is meant to to define catastrophe by closest relative or cause of family. 11. By the anniversary of our attack, I was back to six bones missing again.  Two orbital, two nasal, and two made of tooth.  More receivers of the wreck, less a surprise than shrapnel still making sense of what it meant.          Even if we were driftwood blind, even if it had all been hidden just to kill me, it wouldn’t have mattered, it was already.  Twenty-eight edges of an eclipse, a herd of red and empty irises, that was more than enough to understand.          You told me there were ways to trust it would end, a scavenger may pray to surviving gods too. 12. Shipwrecker’s Paradox.          Whether a shipwreck which is restored by replacing each and every one of its wooden parts is still the same shipwreck.          Whether the portions remain the same if the chosen prey is entirely replaced, piece by piece, pulse by pulse. Whether a paradox is the opposite of a coping strategy. 13. That many years since.  It could have been the slowest flood, how or where it started.  I was sheltering it still.  Like a bad dream built us both an abyss to breathe.         We tried to go over it together, make sense of what we could: knock over effects, road damage, changes in the character of soil, strandlines, destruction of terrestrial vegetation, our history of litter and debris.         Every shrunken hour was a shortcoming of habitat.  I had no control of how they came to recognize us later, what secondhand absences they would use to find you.         It didn’t matter which came first or last, memory loss was a progressive remedy.
14. Hunt went on so long we couldn’t remember anything else and then it was over instead.          They strapped my head to a metal rack, tied my hands at the midpoint, forced my knees and legs into a folded position.  The blood in my face was brick heavy and bright blue.          It felt like being pinned to a concussion site.  There was a splitting at the base of my spine, a window ripped open, an incision to stop the shivering.  They punctured once to pick their portions, and then helped themselves to instinct.          The act of predation can be broken down into a maximum of four stages: Detection of prey, attack, capture and finally consumption.          Everything slowed down immediately.  Completely. 15. A scavenger’s daughter does not age.  A scavenger’s daughter will starve a shadow until it stays in its place.  A scavenger’s daughter will sacrifice a corpse until it starts over awake.           A scavenger's daughter survives by trespassing upon the totality of each mistake. 16. Woke up without a ghost for the first time.           Like a drowning in reverse, a suffocation surrendered on it’s own.  Sheets of skin severed from me and I trusted what had been erased by them.           Forgot a hunt for good. Forgot a face for good. Forgot an exile of remains. Lied there naked and nearly breathing, bare enough to believe I couldn't ever be that alone again.           You asked me if it was worth it. All those those shipwrecks saved like scavenger's tells, a city to resurrect which scars to rent and which ones to own. And yes, I said yes. Pick a carcass, any carcass. Pick your predator, pick your prey. I would never stop circling yes.