Ghost Ship
I have long been fascinated by ghost ships. Not that I have researched them or even read about them, and only now did I learn about the fateful voyage of the Mary Celeste when I decided to Google the term. Nonetheless, something about ghost ships captured my imagination long ago, and I have often felt spooked by them. In fact, I think I dreamt about a ghost ship once, or created a story about one and now I think it was a dream when in fact it was a fantasy. Regardless, the dream involved a ship quarantine and I have none of the storyline, only the setting and a residual feeling of overwhelming dread.
Here is how I see it; passengers and crew members alike - imprisoned on board, sick and tormented. Far from their loved ones, far from their homes. They lay below deck in swinging hammocks or on hard, unforgiving cots. The air is wet and thick with flu. Beads of sickly expiration collect on the surfaces and turn a ghastly yellowish brown. There is no nurse or doctor to attend to them, because the nurse or doctor already succumbed and was hastily wrapped in cloth and weighted with bricks and dropped overboard. Food and water are scarce.
The air is becalmed. The sails sag listlessly. The day yawns hot and heavy and the sun already burns, even though it is not yet 7:00am. But there is no one to record the weather in the ship log because all of the crew are too sick to hold a pen. No one serves as captain, no one marks the ship’s location. No one drops anchor. The ship is adrift, carried forward and backward with the push of the seas. Rolling from side to side in swells that bring it slowly closer to nowhere.
The signal flag called the “Yellow Jack” hangs from the stern. It’s garish checkered pattern of wasp-like yellow and black alert a passing vessel to take a wide berth. Sailors aboard the passing vessel study the quarantined ship through their binoculars and shake their heads. One of the deck hands holds a wet finger to the wind, praying with all his might that they are safely upwind. And they are, thank god. But the breeze is weak. Better take to the oars and cover more distance.
Back on the sickly ship, we’ll call her the Ruth Anne, a young man slowly turns his head and gazes through a water-spotted porthole. He can see the blue ocean, still and silent. See the streaks of sunrise – swirls of clementine and blood orange - pushing up toward the domed sky. And far off he spies a vessel, turning about. He used to sit up in his cot when he would discern another boat through the porthole, but now he just watches its retreat in quiet abnegation. He doesn’t even raise an alarm with a throaty, bubbly cry. Instead, he slowly closes his eyes and adjusts his head on his pillow - dank and humid with a syrupy, death-like sweetness. He can sense that the child on the neighboring cot is dead now. He hasn’t heard her rasping cough or mother-sick cry for a few hours at least, and the energy emanating from her cot is no longer restless and forsaken, but still and hollow.
His lips pucker into a wordless “Oh.” A tear, salty and hot, slips from his eye and seeps into his mouth. He can feel a tingle rising in his chest and knows that, in a moment, he will erupt into a spluttering spasm of blood and clotted mucous. It is his life force, leaving him in fits and starts. He braces himself.
Up on deck, an albatross alights on the rigging and cocks its head. It’s eyes dart from port to starboard, bow to stern. It extends its wings, pumps them twice and then is airborne again. The halyards clank – a ghostlike, eerie sound - and the Ruth Anne dips and sways in measure with the long and slow Pacific that comes in relentless, downy swells.