the sea-creatures he dispatches against the side of his double-ender, and though we call him to rush them or find his old flintlock and shoot through the bursting windows, we know he will not. He is not an evil man, though that is just what he fears himself to be.
We laughed with our mother that he never seemed to draw as many fibers from his mouth as the rest of us when we ate these cattail bottoms, and that his gut must be a tangle where they slowly braid together to form a rope bound to emerge from one end or the other.
Somehow, we must have been right in this. When the door and the walls are all aflame, a brighter blue-tipped fire ignites in him, starting in his middle and lighting him up from stem to stern. We shriek beneath the water and the cove rushes into our throats. He stands and runs across the house to throw himself in a direction that is blocked from our sight, but where we know our mother lies, as yet unburnt, on the table. The table burns now with them, the last piece of the ship that the wreckers drew on the rocks with their false signals, the last piece of the ship that cast our mother adrift on this island. We push the sea up from our stomachs and lungs, past throats, and back between our teeth out into the cove. And we watch in silence as the flames rise from all the pieces of our home. ♦
Mike Petrik | 37