Mug
An anglerfish mug, white on the outside with a black interior and handle, carrying the portrait of Naoko Mochizuki. The anglerfish is the fish of the abyss that goes around with a small light burning over its head. Naoko works as a marine claims surveyor and appears in Animal Kinhood, my series of animals who wear clothes 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.
She gets to the branch office before anyone else, blind still down and coffee beside the mouse. That is the hour when she goes back over what she signed yesterday. She has one habit that has not left her in twenty years: repeating under her breath the last figure she has been given before writing it down, and she does it when there is nobody there to confirm it either.
Everyone at the office consults her. They pass her the files that have turned awkward, they ask her about the order of the annexes and they take her word for it. And in twenty years nobody has sat at the next desk for more than a season. If you ask anyone at the branch why, they shrug. To her it seems the ordinary state of things and she has never remarked on it.
