Fresh Sea Air

A Stream of Consciousness exercise using the prompt words: Sail Fish Pew

With thanks to

Edith Bow

for running the show and

Keith Long

for the prompt words which immediately conjured up a scene, but I just had to guess where to end it

989 words - all done in one sitting One hour 36 minutes and a plate of ratatouille roasted gnocchi with goats cheese on the side. typo edits and some of the worst punctuation corrected but not all of it.

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How do you get men to strive this hard to meet their own doom?

Fish - that's how ya does it. Ya tell them there’s going to be fish; all the fish they could ever ‘ope to catch. Every glass eyed and grey skinned pinked gilled and gasping sea dweller they can get their hooks into will be theirs - morning noon and night…breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Of course, they gots to know what a fish is, in the first place, and some of them don’t, they just heard the tall tales, but tall tales spread quick. It just takes but one old timer to know about fish. One old bristle-tipped survivor to harbour, past the sandbanks of his dog-tired mind, a memory of just how damned good a piece of fried white fish can be. That’s all it takes.

And then they gots to be hungry. Damned hungry. Worn down and soul fucked almost to oblivion but with a marmalade thin shred of strength left to haul their life back up out of their abyss and get on this hulk o’ nails and barnacle beards. It takes that and hunger for a good feed to get ‘em to grab an oar and chance to row the roilin’ oily towards that beacon o’ hope.

That’s what you have to do. And that’s my job, to light up the beacons of hope and get them to where I gots to get ’em. They wouldn't come no other way; not willingly, and we aint got the irons for that no more, not since the unfortunate incident. But mental chains can be stronger, and more effective.

So there they sit and here I stand, their captain anew, and them before me, sitting on the rowing benches, like they was at church and I was a preacher, preachin all of them to glory.

“Row, boys row, and hold your spew! Keep your strength for the crossing, for heavin on the oars of your salvation!”

You have to keep stroking that hope, see? Get at them all nice as ninepence; let ‘em smell the fish, breathe in that fresh sea air, feel that green grass o’ the Island beneath their leathery feet that aint fell nothin’ but stone.

And the tongueless eyeless clueless boy, fat as a toad with the drum that he beats like a broken toy with a rhythm he knows in his bones and his soul keeps the time for the lines - for the dirt thick lines - of the sinewed backs with the clean sweat tracks in the filth and grime and in the dark their eyes a-shine as they strain and grunt and keep to the time with the hope like a rope they can pull and climb to the light - the light - that is in their minds but the light is a lie and the lie is all mine.

Salt and sweat and stink hang like mist over their heads in the ray shot darkness of my domain. The mast in their midst, black with blood from past lashings, ringing with chains and circled with bands of iron and pitch. It rises up like the base of the cross and they’re worshipping, making holy, moving like they’re kneeling and praying and rocking as they row to the beat of the fat boy’s drum. But they never see what is hanging from the top of that cross. They never gets up on deck.

“Heave ho me hearties!” that’s what they used to say. I read it somewhere, and it puts us all in the boat together somehow. It feels like freedom, but it aint. I’m the capn, and I knows my boat. Back and forth and back and forth again. Load them up and load them out.

“Hear that boys?”

The gulls start to call when we gets near to land, see? Clean white, but dirty as hell those damned birds. Follow the stink o’ shit that trails out from the back of us but I tells the boys a different tale.

“That’s the sound of seabirds…and seabirds means land ho! Seabirds means fish! Put your best backs on boys, we’re nearly there!”

Takes most of a day to make the strait. Sail power’s not enough, you need the backs of a good hundred men to make it ‘gainst the wicked current, and that’s what’s sittin afore me, my congregation, my holy hundred. Blood blistered and hot with thirst, all the same, after hours at it, so we got two monkeys drop up and down with buckets of water for them and bowls of broth. It’s vital we make it across, you see, keep the machinery workin’ as it should.

“Table service, boys, place your orders,” I cackle at ‘em; some of them even crack a smile back, like they believe it’s true. But you know what they says about things being far too good?

Anyways with a grind o’ gravel the hulk hits the dock. There’s shouts from the quay and the thick ropes thud above us. Then like heaven’s gate, the trap slams outwards and down and the boys are marched quick as quick into the light, two by two, and dazzled some, there's nowhere much else they can go save where we leads ‘em. There, or into the waves. There’s never been even so much as one of them looks back. In their minds they ain't never going back. That’s not quite the truth of it.

Up and away they go, up the cliff path, but here I stays. There's another hundred boys boxed in, on the deck, see? First class, you might say. But truth is, them's the ones which aint got the brawn for rowing. They’ve got another use, another freedom awaits them, once their job’s done. And, when the engine room boys are out of sight, that's when I get’s these wastrels off. And then it's back I go, another turn of the cog. Back to the shore with a fat load of bully beef and salt fish. No needs for oars - I’m with the currents now, and the sail is set.

Smell that sea air.