a

The Edge of the World

by Katy
August 16, 2005

James believes.

--

James dreams of hurricanes, ripping, destroying, obliterating.

He wakes with a shudder each time, heart racing against clammy skin.

His hurricanes are always named Elizabeth.

--

Elizabeth Swann is all elbows and bony knees; going on sixteen, she feels piracy is the way to go (gentility be damned). She tells this to James when he visits her father to discuss his recent skirmish with a Spanish privateer three days out from Tortuga.

“And what, Miss Swann, would I do upon catching you?” He asks her mock seriously, surveying her as she tries to wriggle her stays loose.

“Oh, but you wouldn’t.” She replies, eyes dark as the bogs James remembers from his childhood. “I’d sail the fastest ship in the Caribbean, and no one would ever catch me.”

She ducks away before he can blink an eye, skirts swirling around her too-brown ankles. He cannot help but feel her statement is naught but truth.

--

James watches the stars at night during his watch, comfortable in the dark. He sighs and turns to watch the ocean stretching before him, endless, until it disappears over the edge of the horizon.

He wonders what is beyond the horizon.

Sometimes he thinks if he knew that answer he would understand Elizabeth truly.

--

“Father says I’d have been better off a boy.” Elizabeth says with an air of confidence, sitting down beside James and startling him from his maps.

“Your father says many things.” James says noncommittally-- between Elizabeth and her father, he’ll choose Scylla and Charybdis gladly.

Elizabeth rolls her eyes and replies, “Yes, but this time I actually agree with him.” She grins at his expression and continues with a brazen air, “Imagine. I could be a sailor, or a pirate, or whatever I choose to be. I’d do what I pleased, and not be forced to wear these silly dresses!”

James snorts, and sets down his map to look at her. “Miss Swann, if you were a boy you would cease to be you and become someone else entirely.”

Elizabeth laughs. “That’s the entire point.”

--

Elizabeth stops talking to James a few days after her seventeen birthday.

He pretends it is because her father deems their talks unseemly, because he is too old and she is too young-- any reason but the truth. He watches with shadowed eyes as Elizabeth grins at Will Turner, eyes seeing naught but him. She greets James with a cool nod when they meet at dinner parties, run across each other after church.

James wonders if this is what the eye of the storm is like, deathly calm and utterly unbearable.

--

James prays once, exhausted and unable to sleep. He asks for an end to his troubles; God, in all his glory, gives a scrap of a girl a dusty gold coin.

Elizabeth disappears in the middle of the night four months after she stops talking to James. Taken by pirates-- you never could do your job properly could you, Norrington-- and she’ll not be back- the townspeople whisper behind their hands, eyes accusatory.

James surveys his maps. He thinks this is the beginning of the hurricane.

--

With Elizabeth’s disappearance comes Jack Sparrow, and with Jack Sparrow comes the answer.

The Black Pearl. Sparrow’s lost ship, Elizabeth’s glimpse of freedom (or is it her prison?- James can‘t decide), his chance to find reason in all the madness.

James sets sail for the horizon.

--

James discovers that beyond the horizon there is only more ocean, calm and deadly.

He finds his answer-- Elizabeth does, too, though it is not the right answer-- and he is not calmed by it.

She comes to him after everything is said and done-- Sparrow escaped, Turner sleeping sound in the knowledge that he is not his father, she betrayed in the end by the freedom she so longed for.

“Did you expect anything else from me?” She asks, face white against the dark of James’ cabin.

James is struck by how young she looks, rail thin and shivering in her gown. “No.” He says, finally, and does not move when she climbs into his bed.

James is not comforted by the knowledge that he has discovered the edge of the world in Elizabeth.

--

Centuries before, men had faith. God existed, and the edge of the world was a dangerous and unknown place. James has no faith; only knowledge earned by mistake.

The world ends when Elizabeth smiles again at him, and he dances on the edge of something unknown.

She says, “We’re off the edge of the map.”

And James (there is no faith, no belief, no comfort for him now) wonders if it is they who are the monsters.

~.~

All our authors thrive on feedback. Email the Webmaster to have comments forwarded to the author.

Back to One-Shots Menu