Congratulations Gabby, winner of BWI Pamela Miller Flash Fiction Competition.
RIPPLES
Her father feared many things. Anxieties chittered and scurried through his brain each day and filled each night with dark dreams. But underneath it all, a constant, built into the very foundation of his life, was the greatest fear, the fear of a watery death.
As a young man he’d joined up to defend King and Country. It looked so bold, that brash confidence, volunteering before the call-up became compulsory. But underneath, he knew it was the only way to escape the trap of the cloying family, the passive aggressive dutiful older sister, the brilliant changeling younger brother.
And so a sensitive boy, a vulnerable boy, was sent out on the high grey seas, the mountainous waves of the Atlantic Ocean. Waves like monstrous arms that rose up, threatening to bind him in a suffocating embrace. Water walls that towered over the ship, smashed over the deck, reaching, grabbing, pulling. He was sent out to spend his days and nights peering into mists and horizons, seeking signals, checking codes, sending words into the emptiness. Always alert. Always aware. Captains’ decisions were made or not made depending on what her father saw or related. Telescopes, flags, Morse code. Responsibility.
Loneliness.
His posting was to guard the Atlantic convoys, the merchant ships bringing vital cargo from the United States to the United Kingdom. A ragbag fleet zig zagging across the ocean, protected by destroyers, frigates, and corvettes. The latter were the smallest of the warships, but warships nonetheless; grey metal giants, improbably named after flowers – Cowslip, Hollyhock, Primrose. Her father was a signalman on one such ship, helping keep the convoy safe from submarines and attack.
Until. Until.
Until the night he stood and watched the ship in front, the ship behind, explode and sink. Ships he was duty bound to protect.
The watery death. Men floundering in the oily sea, their thick uniforms dragging them under. Lifeboats hopelessly launched. And worst of all, the screams, the smell of burning, the sea itself on fire. Then the awful, long, long silence. Only the wind and the rain and the engines, and orders barked through to carry on.
Later, on chilly Welsh beaches, he’d help his daughters build sandcastles, always with fantastic moats, turrets, bridges. But when the tide came in, he’d back away, move his deckchair further up the beach, saying he was just going for a smoke.
And as the water flooded the children’s carefully constructed defences and crumbled their kingdoms, he’d call them back, away from the waves.
When he was much older, she asked what kind of funeral he wanted.
‘Anything,’ he said. ‘Anything but burying me at sea.’ His eyes filled with sea fret as he remembered watching the bodies softly, silently sinking into forever.
Gabby Brown
