the deep abyss

I’d meant to fetch it, sir, but it has gone, sure as the sun rises. It was, however, there upon my inspection this morning, and... Martin had said something else, wiping down the counter. He’d set his captain’s tea down with a clank.

Corrigan had a feeling.

He’d allowed her aboard half an hour ago. Uninhibited, that mischievous little smile, a look that said she knew more than she was letting on... Ramona. Corrigan must have known what he was getting himself into, because the moment he lumbered past the low door frame of the storage room and inhaled a lungful of dust, seeing her face past the shadows, he was not surprised. A bottle sat on a crate beside her. Sir Shackleton's Irish Whiskey. 

He almost had to squint to read the label.

Corrigan –

Despite being a courier by name and trade, I don’t think I’ve ever written a letter myself. Isn’t much reason to write anyone when you purposely pull your roots out every time you feel stuck. It took a while to find a good type writer because holding a pen isn’t easy.

I hope the boys who made it back with you are doing as well as they can. I still regret not having more hands to have helped them with, or at least ones that don’t shake as much. Still in Boston as of writing this, surprise surprise. A few months ago I met a man I wanted to wander down the coast with eventually, but he left one day and I wonder if I ever made other men feel the way I did that morning. I don’t like to dwell on it but I can’t help but do so. Now I’m having a problem figuring which direction to go in next for the first in a long time.

It seems we’re both at a loss. You feel foreign in your own land, and I have the need to wander and feel like I’ve run out of it. The rails don’t tell me anything here, but I suppose they will when it’s time. I’m beginning to think we aren’t the type of men allowed to finish out their lives sitting on a porch with a pipe and a strong bottle of whatever’s available. That being said, I have settled (for now) and begun to try and grow a few plants I brought from the west. Hopefully in time this place will have some actual god-damned potatoes.

Yours, Keaton

My dear Keaton,

There are those who require more than a night of shared comforts... Myself among them. Did he leave Keaton? Without final farewells?

I had been married for a time... In that regard I have an order for your eyes Alone: follow in whichever way the leads open & you would have sailed beyond where you are, now. You will move & you will find another no doubt… perhaps you may never even know it.

How do you fare Keaton? 

You may count me among your kind. 

The men are well which you saw fit to make happen. Some are newly-wed others soon with families of their own. The Admiralty has seen me Knighted altho you will forgive it of me --- I had wanted to have a row with them. They requested Edmund make sail again --- and I was removed for causing a Scene... He may agree. And now my wife would see me once more as well. I am at a loss and have never wanted any-thing as little as I want this now...

I would hear more of you Keaton --- of your home & what you are now growing... If you might have a companion... All of it, and believe me to be

collection of prompts / sentence starters (accepting) 

His cheek twitched. It had been sixty days now. Sixty days of death and sickness… of men who would shoot them dead for their ripped gloves and stranded ship… Corrigan breathed and could feel exhaustion root deep in his bones, and he forced himself to look into the faces of his boys. They were there, huddled for warmth. He watched them fish out lumps of biscuits from their water, the chunks finally soft enough to eat. 

Skinny, bruised-eyed, their skin white as snow. 

He could not doubt in front of them.

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“And as to whom this may have belonged – Miss Reed or the dog" — he waved vaguely at her blanket — “I may never hear of it.” 

“It had been shared, in fact.”

Edmund grinned, his teeth charmingly crooked. “This friend of yours, Christ forbid we be made to endure a conversation — a single word — beyond that of a library, my word.”

“If it is within the page she finds comfort, Edmund, she’s welcome to it.”

It was sloppy, this. This new familiarity. A bottle of whisky, still open, sat over the rickety table, and Edmund was two shots deep on an empty stomach, his cheeks blotchy pink and his coat spread open. Corrigan smiled back, feeling floaty, and his eyes roamed slowly to a strand of fur stuck to his sleeve…

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“I am not half the judge I think I am.“

Across the room, the stove popped. Edmund’s form did not stir. “I beg your pardon.”

“Keaton,” he murmured.

Snow fell beyond the window. He could see it, the fat, white flakes, how they stuck mercilessly onto the shingles of the neighbor’s leaking roof, powder-fresh and frozen. Edmund had turned in the space beside him, his body all angles and knobby limbs. An elbow was poking into his side.

“I had thought him pitiless,” Andrew rumbled. “I see now, that he is utterly lonely.”

Edmund took a high-long breath, tired and contemplative. He felt it through his shirt. “A man like that– He… is alone by choice, Andrew, and cannot see his life as one to be shared.”

“Are you certain?”

Nothing this time.

“It was unfair of me, Edmund, to look upon him and to judge… I had mistaken his silence for heartlessness, and his solitude as a means to conspire,” he whispered as though someone was listening in, as though this was a secret they had to keep and not the fact that they warmed a bed together every night, woke just the same way. “He is kind,“ Andrew said, "and would see no reward for it.”

Corrigan could make out every part of him: his eyes bleary and half-open from an unsuspected nap, his mouth set into a line with a hundred innumerable questions. Their feet bumped over the covers, clammy cold, where they stayed. 

‘Nerd’ isn’t any one of Corrigan’s alignments.

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“Penny for your thoughts?”

He could still smell her. Something sweet in the air: cocoa, cinnamon. The door had just slid shut. “Of Miss Espinosa?” 

“The very one.”

“You know me to think poorly, Edmund,” he grumbled. “It would be unsuited to your ears.”

Edmund smiled. “Treated as a child. Never, in all my years.”

The clock struck ten. Subconsciously, however, he knew it to be fifteen minutes behind, the lag in time another permanent fixture of failure, a reminder of things gone wrong. Edmund was seated at his desk leafing through a tea-stained newspaper — Publick Occurences — and Corrigan could not help but to stare at this man with his long, skinny limbs and severely pointed nose. He pried his eyes away, drowsily content, and sat beside him to light a candle.

“I believe she is to be trusted,” he said. Then, quietly, “She is a mother, Edmund.”

A moment dripped between them. His second lifted his head, quiet and unprodding. 

“I can feel it. The pain of a lost child, no more healed than it was a year last. Taken, of all things…“ His old vision blurred at a line on the paper. He did not have to read it to know what it read. “Yet of all her grievances, and of all her hardships, she would come to us in search of a woman she has never known,” he said. “To see her returned.”

Edmund closed his eyes. He looked older this way, the creases on his forehead deeper and the shadows pooled heavy in the hollow of his cheeks. The chair creaked from under him and he thumbed absently at the edge of the paper. “A child does not make one trusted — or even a good mother,” he said. “She would say what one likes to hear, and withhold the rest.”

“With reason of her own.”

“What we see… it is merely the surface,” he searched for the word, waving his hand. “What she would have us see.”

“As did you, by the by.” 

He stalled. Andrew could hear the candle flicker — the soft crackle of it, the low hush in his ear — and reached out to squeeze softly at Edmund’s knee. The scant ghost of his whisper laid between them.

it feels as though her heart is in her throat as ainsworth explains the procedure, voice hushed as though to keep the men from overhearing what gore lay ahead for them. a part of her admires his compassion for the sick, how emotional he grew while asking the ship’s captain to remain for morale. perhaps she’ll commend him on it once they’re not in a room lined with the stench of decay.

Keep reading

His hands are lukewarm, still damp from the cloth he used to wipe Thomas’ brow. Thomas, sleeping. The worn edges of his exhausted mind have withered away, and he hardly hears it.

“Are you alright?” 

Corrigan turns to the woman, the stranger with the weary look and kind, heavy eyes. He thinks he sees blood caked in the lines of her nails and wonders how often she has done this. “I would have done well," he starts, "to have asked the same of you.”

“Captain.”

It was Ainsworth.

“What else will you require of us?”

“Only-- Rest now, sir. They require rest. For how long, I cannot say, but...” The doctor wipes his hands over his apron. Red, yellow, brown, the blood has dried tacky stiff and his throat bobs with hesitation. “Might I suggest you the same? And the lady? If she wishes?”

The ship creaks just as a candle flickers. He looks at her when it does. “You may be right.”

Dear Nate

To think it a year past. We have returned now --- every man to the last --- and I am to assign credit where it is due... I speak of you.

We had shared parting words upon Bar Harbour. The snow had been thick and I had wondered then as I do now. Are you well? Well within safe waters? As I've no way of knowing you have receeved this I must make do to Wonder

Home is as I expect if you must know. A grand party was thrown in full honours but never was I less deserving than I am now and un-fit as it were for a waltz. I am to appear before the Admiralty as is the thing to do for Lost ships, and perhaps be Knighted. Am I wrong? To see myself still set upon Mass. Bay? Yet it is where I belong there upon the shallows. Perhaps I will be made to return on some later date. 

Tell me you are well, safe and well and know me to remain

your faithful servant