Bécassotte à la mer

A corpulent manager in a striped bathing suit drags the perpetually bewildered Bécassotte—her limbs as angular as driftwood, her spectacles fogged by salt—to the blistering boardwalk of Trou-sur-Mer, a nowhere Atlantic resort where paint peels off shutters like sunburned skin. While parasols spin like roulette wheels and gramophones wheeze out cracked tangos, our heroine plants herself on a wicker chair, steel needles clacking, producing an endless scarf that unspools across the pier like a woolly anaconda. Madame Painrassis, bosom straining against sailor-striped jersey, mocks this land-locked spinster: “The ocean is free, why knit yourself a cage?” Bécassotte, cheeks the color of boiled shrimp, waddles down the ladder; the water closes over her head with a gelatinous sigh. A dappled shark—its skin a living mosaic of bottle-green and bruise-violet—glides up, jaws hinged in a bureaucratic smile, and swallows her whole, cardigan and all. Inside the beast’s cathedral of cartilage she floats past half-digested sardines, still hearing the faint click of her own needles. At dawn a booze-creased sailor hauls the predator aboard, slits it open like a mail envelope, and out tumbles Bécassotte, knitwear intact but soul singed by abyssal darkness. Back on the pier she knots the soggy scarf around her neck, eyes glassy as sea-polished marbles, and pronounces, voice hoarse with brine, a vow of terrestrial fidelity: never again shall her skin meet the horizon’s liquid mercury.