Hope

This flash fiction piece was written as a story companion to the day 10 drawing prompt Hope from the 2020 Inktober prompt list. Click here to see the drawing.

I wish you were here, she whispered to the night sky.

Of course you do, the memory of him whispered back.

Don’t be like that. Not when you’re so far away.

It was like she could feel his hand on her face, his thumb brushing gently over the cheekbone that so many tears dedicated to him had fallen across.

I know, sweets. And I’m sorry, his memory echoed back.

In his absence, the stars had replaced him as her constant companion and her closest confidant. Not that she had been so open with him when he was there. Not that he had been either.

After he’d set sail, she noticed the pull. Out to sea, out to the middle of a vast ocean of silence and endless distance, where his boat sat, somewhere. Where he sat, among the other sailors. Sailing was a good job, for a young man. As long as he didn’t get shipwrecked, or boarded by pirates and killed — or worse, enticed to join them.

It may have been good work, but one way or another, it meant that she had lost him. Memories of his bright white uniform and its blue trim danced in front of her eyes from the moment she woke to the moment she laid her head against the hay-stuffed pillow. She was glad, happy for him, truly, to get out of this nowhere fishing village. God forbid he’d become a fisherman and ended up drinking himself to death in the tavern like so many did when they came home without a catch to their name.

Then again, he was out at sea, just like the fisherman, so was it really that different?

At least he wasn’t alone. When she thought of him, alone, as he had been for so many years before … her mouth tasted of copper. If only she’d known he needed a companion. Once she realized how his heart was broken, she did her level best to mend it. Trouble was, a damaged heart needs a whole one to mend it, and hers was just as broken, if not worse. Even so, their short time together had been sweet, if somewhat bitter, being colored by the date he would ship out looming on the calendar in the postman’s office.

“You can write me,” he’d said.

“Boats don’t get mail.”

“Send them to the ports we’ll dock at.”

She looked down at their joined hands, her thumbs rubbing nervous circles against the calloused skin. How she loved his hands.

“You said they won’t tell you in advance what ports they’ll be.”

His hopeful face fell, then. She couldn’t tell if he’d truly forgotten that detail, or if he’d just put it out of his mind so far he’d hoped it became untrue. It made her stomach warm, to think he wished so dearly to hear from her, no matter their distance.

“I can read them when I get back,” He’d said it while looking at the horizon, where the sun was setting over the water, streaking the sky with yellow and purple and pink.

She chuckled, sadly. What a consolation. A packet of letters, surely hundreds by the time he returned, filled with the pathetic longings and wistful notions of all the days gone by since his departure. If I wrote them, I would want to burn them, she thought, but didn’t tell him.

In the end, she knew she would write. She knew she wouldn’t be able to help it. But she also knew it wouldn’t matter, because he wouldn’t be coming back. It was too much to hope for. He would be swallowed, either by the sea, or by a new life in a better place, or by another woman at every port. Or … the worst option of all … by one woman, at one port, where he would stay.

Each night, she looked up at the night sky and dreamed, and wished, and hoped for things that would surely never come to pass, as she scribbled what were surely pointless thoughts on parchment. Before bed, she let the pages flutter over the dock and into the water. Why keep them?

Day by day, the echo of his voice grew more and more faint, and the feeling of his fingertips brushing against her grew softer and lighter. One day, she assumed, she wouldn’t feel them any more, and she could let go. Maybe then she would move on and find someone who was born without wretched sea legs.

Watching the stars twinkle over the sea, she hoped for other things, too. Things so secret she couldn’t say out loud, couldn’t write down even to throw them away, things she couldn’t even bear to think clearly in her own mind, because of how much she wanted them, and how little hope they had to come true.