Stories
Salt in The Blood
A (long) short story
Click image to read
Click image to read
A friend of mine once told me a story
As the sun went down on the night of the seventeenth of February, he took a boat, a fishing trawler, and set out to cross the ocean from Ireland to Cornwall.
He did not know how to sail and he was alone.
He told me that he was no longer in control of his own destiny, that something else guided him that night and that he no longer cared if he lived or died.
While he was at sea, he claimed to have been visited by a woman whose presence, though it soothed him, gave him no rest.
Nobody but he ever knew for sure what happened that night on the ocean, but afterwards, when I visited the boat, I listened while he told me his tale.
Years later, I wrote this story. It is my memory of his memory. And now it is finished I finally understand that the woman in the story was me.
But I did not steer the ship that day.
He did.
As the sun went down on the night of the seventeenth of February, he took a boat, a fishing trawler, and set out to cross the ocean from Ireland to Cornwall.
He did not know how to sail and he was alone.
He told me that he was no longer in control of his own destiny, that something else guided him that night and that he no longer cared if he lived or died.
While he was at sea, he claimed to have been visited by a woman whose presence, though it soothed him, gave him no rest.
Nobody but he ever knew for sure what happened that night on the ocean, but afterwards, when I visited the boat, I listened while he told me his tale.
Years later, I wrote this story. It is my memory of his memory. And now it is finished I finally understand that the woman in the story was me.
But I did not steer the ship that day.
He did.
