Kids t-shirt
A kids' anglerfish t-shirt, the fish that carries a light on its head because it lives where no sunlight arrives. Wearing it is Naoko Mochizuki, who goes about in a suit and works looking at broken ships, and who is one of the characters in Animal Kinhood, my series of animals who dress and get on with their lives like people.
Foto: Emőke Dénes / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)Melanocetus johnsonii
The light a place already has is never any good. I always bring my own.
Meso and bathypelagic zone of tropical and temperate seas worldwide, usually between 200 and 1,500 meters deep, with occasional records a good deal deeper. Permanent darkness, cold and high pressure.
Her father, Susumu, was a boilermaker at the Numazu harbour repair yard. On the Sundays he was on call he took her along, and she was six the first time. What she remembers from that day is a portable lamp with a rubber grip that her father hooked onto the scaffolding to see inside a tank, and that he put back in the workshop cupboard when he was done. It belonged to the workshop. Nobody took it home.
Two habits stayed with her from her father and she still has them as an adult. One is touching the bulkhead with the back of her hand before going down into a hold and counting to two: if there is water on the other side, the skin knows before the eyes do. The other is never trusting the light a place already has, which is why she takes her own everywhere.
