It’s the muddy hours of an April dusk, and Unty Jinna herds three little girls to a high point up above Roanhaven, skybound and windblown. It overlooks the curve of coast where the boats leave for the shoals. They say Jinna comes here to remember the laughing man who loved her, who set off in his boat one night and never came home.

Salt stings our eyes when we lift our faces from the nest of our woollen shawls. Liza grizzles until Unty Jinna pulls from her pocket a piece of dulse. Kitta glances at me, a slight raise of a brow. Liza will cry at the least thing, and loudest when her mother has a pocketful of dulse.

From our place above, we can see the Lily Maud and the other boats jerking at anchor in the shallows. And then come the fishermen, weighted down with lines, the womenfolk behind them, staggering in the onrush of wind from the sea. A watery procession blurring in our eyes.

A sleety wind lashes us from the sea, flattens our skirts against our knees. Kitta and I pull at the wool with our mittened hands but it sticks to our legs like wet sails. Our eyes are raw from the howling wind. When we look down again to the boatie shore a vapour has risen from the sea, swirling skyward in shrouds of white. We gasp, Kitta and I. We canna breathe. And when our breath returns we shriek and shriek like a pair of hooked gulls. For there below us, lurching about in the shallows, are two-headed monster-people, hunchbacked and many-limbed.

The sea is full of beasts.

What nonsense is this! Unty Jinna slaps our cheeks. And when we huff out the terrible words, Jinna slaps us once more, exasperated. Beasts? There be no beasts! she tells us again and again.

But there were, and for a long time I would carry them in my head. It was all the more terrifying because Kitta, older and cleverer than me, had seen it, too. After that, Kitta and I would speak quietly to each other of The Beasts that Go Down to the Sea—even though by then we knew it was a thing of the everyday we had seen: Ma and the other wifies rolling off their stockings, hitching up their skirts, ferrying the men on their backs from the shore to the boats. ‘Floating’ the men and their gear.

Ma was puzzled when we told her about the beasts, and talked to us as though to a pair of simpletons, spelling it out for us slow and plain.

The men must be kept fit for work, quinies. They must keep their seaboots dry for the spell at sea. No fish, no money, see? No fish, no food!