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On the Shoals
Written for the 'First Day' Drabble Challenge

by Honorat Selonnet
October 5, 2005

He’d been Navy all his life. Well, all of it he cared to remember. Oh, he wasn’t one o’ them fancy career officers fightin’ for England, Harry, and St. George or whatever it was.

But it had been a job. All his days had arranged themselves around the bells that called the larboard watch. He’d always been larboard, never starboard. He felt like larboard belonged to him. It was routine. The pattern into which he fit.

Unlike some, the pressed men especially, he’d never really seriously considered desertin'. No matter how lousy the pay, how brutal the officers, how bad the grub. He’d taken the verbal abuse, even the physical abuse. Kinda felt like home, actually. Sometimes he’d even had decent officers. Those had been good times. He hadn’t minded knockin’ the hardtack on the table to shake out the weevils. After all, it was food and better’n starvin’.

Then there was always the sea. That bitch goddess with her siren smile and her claws that got so damn deep in a man’s soul that he couldn’t lose her for love nor money, though God knows he’d tried both. Couldn’t hear a wind whistle around the eaves on land without needin’ to know how the horizon would look and how the ship would be slidin’ down into the trough of a wave and what sails she’d carry and whether the captain would be tryin’ to outrace the storm or drivin’ into its teeth.

He was Navy—had that roll to his walk, the peculiar cant, the odds and ends of uniform. Even the smell—salt and tar and rum and black powder. People recognized it without his sayin’ a word.

So what was he now that the Royal Navy had discharged him? Spat him out on some godforsaken Caribbean dock—he didn’t even know which one. Drunk and disorderly. Insubordinate.

Well, he’d admit he had a fondness for rum, but so did most the men before the mast. And he didn’t suffer fools in wigs and gold braid any more gladly than the ones with oakum in their fingernails. But to take away a man’s livelihood for that? He’d rather have taken the floggin’. Add a new set of scars to the pattern on his back.

What was he now that he’d lost his anchor to windward? Cracked up on the shoals, that’s what. He didn’t even know if there was anything left to salvage.

His first day back as a civilian. He’d forgotten anything he’d ever known about bein’ a civilian.

~.~

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