I’ve counted my crew before every dredge for fourteen years. Tonight the count was wrong.

I’m the senior deckhand on a sixty-eight foot trawler called the Margaret Ann. I have worked this boat for fourteen years. The crew is six. Captain Hal, first mate Donny, engineer Pete, and three deckhands. Me, Manny, and Reuben.

Six.

Hold onto that number while I tell you the rest of this.

I do the headcount before every dredge. That’s my job as senior deckhand. Before we lower the trawl, before we haul it back, before we open the codend, I count. Six men, accounted for, all in their right positions. It’s a safety thing. The codend can swing when it comes up full, and if we’re missing a man we don’t know about, he could be in the water.

I have done this headcount on this boat for fourteen years. The number has always been six. I want you to remember that I am the one who knows.

Three days into the trip, we set the trawl over a section of bottom Hal had marked on the chart. Eight hundred feet. The kind of depth where the haul takes nearly an hour and the cable hums under the load.

We started bringing it up around 2 AM. Hal called down asking what we had, and Donny said the sonar was reading a mass that wasn’t fish. Just a single dense object in the codend, big as a small car.

Manny said it was probably a container. Lost cargo from a freighter. We’ve pulled up tires, refrigerators, an entire fiberglass dinghy once. Whatever it was, we couldn’t dump it back. The net was tangled around it and the cable was straining.

We winched it onto the deck.

The codend hit the planks with a sound I had heard before.

Eleven years ago I worked recovery on a ferry that capsized in fog. We pulled fourteen people out of the water that week. They all sounded like that when we set them down on the deck. Not a thud. A wet weight. The way a body sounds when it has been in cold water long enough to take some of the cold with it.

I had not heard that sound in eleven years. I was hearing it now.

We did not open the net.

Hal came down from the bridge. He looked at the codend for a long time. He told us to lash it down where it sat, leave it under the tarp, and not open it until daylight. He said he wanted Pete to look at it first.

I did the headcount. Six. Hal back on the bridge. Donny on the bridge with Hal. Pete coming up from the engine room. Manny lashing the tarp. Reuben holding the spotlight. Me at the rail.

We went to bed.

In the morning, we opened the net.

There was nothing inside.

The codend was empty. Not “the catch fell out” empty. Empty. The cinch line was tied. The mesh had a gap.

It was a small gap. Right at the seam where the cinch meets the body of the net. The cordage was unravelled, not torn. It had come apart. Like fingers had worked at the knots from the inside until the seam gave.

I stood looking at the gap for a long time before Hal called me over to help with the deck.

I did the headcount. Six.

We started cleaning up. I was coiling the lazy line when I saw it.

There was a handprint on the deck where the codend had been resting.

Five fingers, palm flat, the heel of the hand pressed into the planks. The size of a man’s hand. Already drying in the morning sun.

The wood around the fingers was wrong. The grain was raised, splintered slightly, lifted away from the surface. Not pressed down. Pulled. The handprint hadn’t been left by something resting its weight on the deck. It had been left by something dragging itself across the deck, fingers digging in for purchase, the wood resisting and giving way in small fibers.

I scrubbed the print with a deck brush before anyone else came back to that side of the boat.

I don’t know why I did that.

We kept fishing.

The next day, the catch was thin. We dragged the same bottom and pulled up almost nothing. Hal said we had spooked the fish. He moved us thirty miles east.

That night, around 1 AM, I came up from the bunk to use the head and Reuben was sitting at the galley table.

Reuben does not work the late watch. Reuben should have been asleep. Reuben works the morning watch with me; we both come up at 4 AM.

He was sitting at the galley table with his back to me. He was not eating anything. He was not on his phone. The galley was dark except for the small light over the stove.

I said his name.

He turned around.

It was Reuben. His face. His shape. But he was looking at me like he didn’t know who I was, and his eyes weren’t focusing on mine. They were focusing somewhere about six inches behind my head.

I said, “What are you doing up?”

His mouth moved. The shape of his mouth made the words. I’m hungry.

The sound came a half second later. The voice was Reuben’s voice, but it arrived after his lips had already finished the sentence and gone still. As if the words had to travel from somewhere else to reach me.

There was nothing in front of him. No food. No plate. No cup.

I stood there for a few seconds. He turned back around and faced the dark wall again.

I went to the head.

When I came back through the galley, he was gone. The chair he had been sitting in was still pulled out from the table, not pushed back in. I put my hand on the seat. The wood was warm. Body warm.

I went down to the bunkroom. Reuben was in his bunk, asleep, snoring the way he always snores. I checked. I shook his shoulder. He woke up enough to swear at me and then went back to sleep.

I stood in the bunkroom and counted.

Hal in the captain’s cabin. Donny in his bunk. Pete in his bunk. Manny in his bunk. Reuben in his bunk. Me, standing.

Six.

I went back up through the galley. The chair was still pulled out. I put my hand on it again.

Still warm.

I went to bed.

I came up at 4 AM for my watch. I walked through the galley on the way to the deck. The chair was still pulled out. I put my hand on it.

Still warm. Same temperature it had been at 1 AM. Body warm. The chair had been warm for three hours, and the wood was old, and the galley was cold, and nothing should have stayed warm that long.

Whatever had been sitting in that chair was warming it from inside the wood.

I worked my watch. I came back through the galley around 6 AM. The chair was still pulled out. The wood was cool now.

Whatever had been sitting there was finished.

The next day Reuben did not remember being in the galley. I asked him. He said he had slept through the night.

I asked Manny if he had heard me come up. Manny said he had not heard anything.

I started counting more often. Every time I came up on deck. Every time I went down to the bunkroom. Every time I passed someone in the corridor. The count stayed at six. The count was always six. I am writing that down because I want it on the record that the count was six right up until it wasn’t.

Day six of the trip, Hal called everyone to the wheelhouse for a quick meeting about the route home. We stood in a half circle around the chart table.

I counted heads. Six.

Hal talked for about three minutes. He told us the bottom east of here had been dead, and we were going to pack it in early and run back to port a day ahead of schedule. Then he told us to get back to work. We started filing out of the wheelhouse.

The rest of the day I worked the deck. We were stowing gear, breaking down the trawl, washing salt off the winches. I counted three times that afternoon. Each time I came up at the same number.

Five.

I did not register that the number had changed. I want to be precise about this. I counted five, and I wrote five in my head, and I did not feel the count was wrong. I just kept working.

It was sometime around dinner that I realized I had been counting five for hours, and that an hour ago I had been counting six, and that no one had left the boat. We were a hundred and fifty miles from shore. No one could have left.

I went to Hal and asked him who else was on the boat.

Hal looked at me for a long moment. He said, “What do you mean?”

I said, “How many of us are there?”

He said, “Five. Always been five. You feeling okay?”

I went back to my station. I did not finish the evening’s work. I sat with my back against the rail and tried to remember the name of the sixth man.

The name would not come.

I have worked with him for fourteen years. I should know his name the way I know my own. But when I tried to think of him, I could only think of his place at the rail. His hands on the cinch line. The way he laughed at one of Hal’s jokes once, on a calm day, four trips ago.

I could see the place where he should be. I could not see him.

I went down to the bunkroom. There were five bunks. I had never noticed there were only five bunks. I would have sworn there were six. The space where the sixth bunk should have been was wall. The wall was old. The wood matched the rest of the bunkroom. There was no seam, no hinge, no evidence anything had ever been there.

I am writing this from my bunk. I have been here for about an hour. The crew is treating me normally. They keep asking if I’m feeling okay. They think I’m having a breakdown.

I just got up and looked at myself in the small mirror over the sink in the head.

It is my face. Every detail is right. The scar above my left eyebrow from the winch cable in 2019. The way my hair grows in two directions at the crown. The chip in my front tooth from a fight in 2014.

I stood and watched the face for a long time, looking for what was wrong.

The face was breathing slightly behind me.

When I inhaled, the reflection inhaled a quarter-second after. When I exhaled, the reflection exhaled a quarter-second after. The chest rose late. The chest fell late.

I held my breath. The reflection held its breath. I tried to catch it not breathing when I wasn’t breathing. I couldn’t.

But the timing was wrong.

I came back to my bunk. I sat down. I was looking at my hands.

They were my hands. The scar across the right knuckle from the winch accident in 2019 was there. The ring of paler skin on the left finger from where I’d worn a wedding ring for the four years before the divorce. The small permanent stain of net tar on the right thumb that no soap has ever fully cleaned off.

The hands looked right.

I pinched the back of my left hand with my right hand. Pinched hard, the way you would to wake yourself from a dream.

I felt the pressure but no pain.

I pinched harder. I twisted the skin between my fingernails. I watched the skin redden and crease.

Nothing.

I bit the side of my hand. I bit hard enough that I should have broken the skin. The skin did not break. My teeth pressed into something that gave like meat but did not bleed and did not hurt.

The hands look right.

But whatever they are made of is starting to forget what hands are made of.

I took out my phone. I have a photo from before we left port. The crew standing in front of the boat at the dock. I keep it as my phone background.

I opened the photo.

There were five men in the photo. Hal, Donny, Pete, Manny, Reuben. I counted them three times.

Five.

I have been looking at this photo for eight days. I know this photo. I was at the dock that morning. I remember Hal making a joke about the weather. I remember Manny’s mother dropping him off. I remember standing on the left side of the group, between the cooler and the bollard, with my hand on Reuben’s shoulder.

I am not in the photo.

The cooler is there. The bollard is there. Reuben’s shoulder is there, and there is no hand on it.

I have been at the dock. I have been on this boat. I have been at this rail and this wheel and these winches for fourteen years.

I am being unmade.

The thing we pulled up from eight hundred feet did not come onto the boat to live here. It came onto the boat to take my place. It worked the knots in the codend from the inside until the seam gave. It dragged itself across the deck on its hands. It sat in my chair in the galley and warmed the wood from the inside. It wore Reuben’s face for a few seconds at 1 AM to see how a face was worn.

It is wearing my place now. Hal does not see me anymore. Hal sees five men, and one of them is in my spot, doing my job, with my hands on the lazy line. Hal is concerned about the man who keeps asking strange questions, but Hal does not know that man’s name, and tomorrow Hal will not see him at all.

I have been trying to remember my own name. I had a name an hour ago. I was using it in my head, like a word you wear. I just tried to write it down and the letters would not come. I tried to write the name of my mother. I tried to write the name of the town where I grew up. I tried to write the name of my first dog.

The shapes are slipping.

Hal. Donny. Pete. Manny. Reuben.

I know those names. I have known those names for fourteen years.

One of those names was my friend.

One of those names called my name across the deck on the morning the photo was taken.

I do not know which.

The trip ends in two days. There will be five men walking off the boat in port. They will not be missing anyone, because by then there will be no one to miss.

If you are reading this and you remember me –

Please.

Tell me my name.