Sea Change
Longlisted for the Edinburgh Award for Flash Fiction 2023.
Her father was dead.
She had pushed the creaking door open and seen how light had illuminated not him but a corpse, the first she had ever seen. The sun had risen, but he had not, and never would again. Though the physical matter that made the body – skin, bones, blood – remained, the vessel was suddenly as dry as the desert.
Word spread, and men knocked on the door. They would come again tomorrow, they said.
That day was the longest she had ever lived. She sat by him until nightfall. He seemed peaceful, but she saw the toil, how the salty seas had stretched his leathery skin tautly over his cheekbones. She felt an urge to reach out and lift his eyelids, so that she could see the color of his irises one more time. Those eyes had always been blue and light even when the water was hard and dark.
When faint light began shimmering above the water, she knew that the time had come. Soon they would be there with saws and hammers. Tradition was as eternal as the waves they sailed upon, and when an old fisherman died, their house was demolished and the wooden boards transformed into a new boat. Then the body was put inside, and the tide would take the vessel and its lone sailor out - returned to the thundering cold waters where everything had begun.
She squeezed the inanimate hand only once. Then she walked out the door.
Short story submitted to the Dig It! Flash Fiction 2022 contest.
Though I Left No Visible Mark, I Was Still There
The storm that came upon us at Christmas was bitterly cold.
We were no strangers to snows that swirl and slip inside your collar to clasp the warm and beating pulse in your neck, but this sudden onslaught had ambushed us out in the boundless open. There was no easy shelter to turn to on this treeless island. Like rowing the oak oars on our great ships, we persistently heaved against the steadfast stone door. We groaned when we saw the carpet of brittle bones on the ground slowly emerging from the blackness within.
In torchlight we sat among the nameless dead from long ago. The old and worn slumbered – no doubt dreaming of sailing towards more fruitful lands where they could be buried in warm soil that never froze. But young men easily become thoughtless when bored, and soon they began amusing themselves, carving with axes crosses and their names, along with obscenities, into the beautifully fashioned wall.
I confess that I wanted to join them – I wanted to feel sinful and powerful as the old stone fell away beneath my blade and the irreversible hollows boldly formed my womanly and unassuming name – another ship sailing this story onwards. But I only wearily watched them roar and guffaw and listened to the winds howling in grief at us and our desecration.
At dawn the company shuffled out into the pristine whiteness. I silently mouthed an apology to the hapless bones and thanked them for their saving shelter. We set off again.