Sinking Ship (standard:fantasy, 6015 words)
Author: Lilly Plume	Added: Aug 27 2007	Views/Reads: 4726/2327	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
A short story about a girls life and her quest to find what she has lost.

Sinking Ship. 

I sit on top of a headland, in a sunken dolmen. The bracken pressed in
around the dolmen's ancient walls, with gorse flowers breaking through. 
The flowers are as yellow as butter, slightly downy and waxy. My hair 
is vaguely lifting from my neck, the cool but forceful sea breeze is 
blowing over the top of the sunken pit. The sun is high in the sky, I 
can feel midday approaching. The smell of the sea is rich in my 
nostrils, the gulls' cries overhead ring in my ears. I gently swirl my 
fingers in the soft sand that lines the earth floor. My fingers touch a 
small, warm, hard thing. Without looking I immediately know what it is. 
As the memories come pouring in like a giant ocean emptying its 
contents directly into my head, I feel like crying. Everything I had 
tried so hard to cover, everything I had tried to forget, everything I 
had pushed down to the bottom of my mind to stay there forever, comes 
rushing back to the surface. Loss, pity, anxiety, desperation and 
depression swells inside me like a ferocious storm, threatening to 
break the tiny wooden boat that is me. I thought I had buried it, at 
least one foot down and covered over properly, so you couldn't tell 
that it was there. It was true what they said, it would never let me 
go. I sit, with the small stone and listen. I can hear the waves 
crashing on the rocks below. I can hear the barman whistling as he 
collects kegs of beer from his van. I can hear the sails flapping on 
the last boat at the slip. I can even hear the waves scraping the 
tinkling shells back from the sand and flinging them mercilessly into 
its murky depths. It is all so normal, as if nothing has happened, as 
if no one has changed. But I have, I have changed so much since then. 
I'm not innocent, or young, or understanding. I can physically feel the 
deception rotting my soul. I can feel myself slipping away from all of 
them, like the Spanish ship wrecked on the very reef below the headland 
where I sit, doomed to drown as the locals watched and pretended not to 
care. 

My birthday always was a happy day. Grandma Cam and Grandpa Michael
always crept in during the night and left three presents on the end of 
my bed. The brightly coloured wrapping paper always stood out against 
my plain white duvet. My bed was right up next to the wall in my small 
bedroom, allowing me to look out of the window and down onto the beach 
without even getting out of bed. The walls were covered in plain 
wallpaper, only broken by the few prints I had managed to get from a 
car-boot sale. They were of beaches and sand dunes, but my favourite 
was an old Jersey one of a shire horse pulling a happily married couple 
along the beach in a wooden carriage. It reminded me of how I thought 
of my parents. They had got married in the church up the road when they 
were very young. According to Grandma Cam, the wedding was the most 
beautiful she had ever seen. There were flowers everywhere and my 
mother looked radiant, all in white with seed pearls sewn on her dress 
in clusters and on her veil like snow. My father looked as grand as a 
duke. While he stood smiling as my mother walked up the aisle towards 
him everyone thought they were a beautiful couple. Grandma Cam had 
promptly begun to cry as they said their vows, which I had thought was 
completely out of character, I didn't realise that she was hurting 
inside so much when I was growing up that she couldn't bare to let 
anyone see how she was really feeling, now I understand. Grandpa 
Michael had been so proud of my mother standing there as if she had 
been preparing all her life for it. He beamed at everyone and anyone, 
almost saying, ‘that's my daughter up there, that's my beautiful 
daughter standing there'. At the end of the ceremony, my mother and 
father had driven away from the church in a carriage pulled by a 
massive shire horse. Grandma Cam didn't know if they had ridden it on 
the beach, but in my mind I knew they had. Grandma Cam didn't see them 
for a long time after that. They went on honeymoon to somewhere hot. 
When they came back, they brought me with them. At this point in the 
story Grandma Cam always began to look out of the window, to make sure 
I couldn't see the anger on her face. She didn't know I could see her 
face reflected back in the glass. 

That year my present from Grandma Cam was a detailed book on the birds
that lived in our bay, so that I didn't need to ask to borrow her bird 
watching book from when she was a child. The book was new, unlike so 
much in our house, and I could smell the newness on its pages. The 
pictures were amazing, so realistic that I could have believed that 
they could fly off the pages and into my bedroom. Grandpa Michael gave 
me an amazingly exotic bag, with a pair of dangly earrings in it. The 
bag was a yellow orange colour, with beads and coloured threads on it. 


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