here's a creepy story about scallop fishing in my hometown that's supposed to be true [written by an old friend who has since gone on to use his education and become an accomplished writer]-
"The bottom of the ocean is dark and cold and roamed by Pleistocene fish that science has forgotten. One night Steve and I were culling through what had emptied from the tailbag - scallops, fish, ballast stones, sand - and something jumped up and ran to the rail, and I'm glad someone else saw it. It looked like a hairless monkey with webbing between its arms and body. It hopped up on the rail and turned its head to us and hissed like a cat through cartilage-looking teeth. It had been a strange trip already. A submarine, spooked by our fathoms of cable strung behind us, had surfaced in a football field of foam the previous night; the ocean erupted beside us and from deep below you could see this pulsing yellow light that signaled Everything Must Yield. The submarine leapt up like a fish, snorting foam, and its bow wave nearly rolled us. We'd been taking little white pills that flapped shrouds in the edges of the deck lights already. The boiled-looking furless monkey hissed at us on the rail again before diving overboard. No one would have believed us if we had told about the monkey thing, but there was a guy on board who said he had seen worse. He couldn't talk about it without tears welling up in his eyes. That's the kind of thing you find at the bottom of the ocean..."
it sounds like a heroin dream to me, but he swears it's true. plus, he's too much of a pussy to do smack, so... i guess i belive him. FYI: the whole story was originally published in harpers magazine, 5/2003.
