Tag: microfiction

“I would not go out to sea today. No, no, no….”

“You’re mad, old man.”

“Aye, mad. Mad, and alive, boyo.”

The young captain snorted and turned his back to the old timer, but as he lashed his gear on deck, he cast a wary eye up at the clouds for signs of trouble. No one paid attention to the old coot who haunted the docks for as long as any could remember, but the young captain was as superstitious as any who plied the seas. It did not do to ignore any warning entirely. He snorted again at the clouds, tiny and dispersing. There was no sign of storm in the sky, and no portent of any in the offing. The young captain turned back toward the senile old man, unable to resist taunting his elder, “I fear no tempest this day.”

The old man was shuffling about with his back half-turned, collecting trash left over from the meals of gulls and fishermen alike. He just shook his head and replied, “Nay, no foul gale today, boyo. Yet I would not go to sea today, not through that firth. No, no, no….”

“What’s wrong with the firth then?”

“There’s a fuath in the firth, and it’s no friend to sailors. Not today.”

“A fua… Hells take you, you crazy old bastard! You try to jinx me with ancient spirits? There’s no such thing as fuaths! Be gone and let me work!” The young man of the sea spat and gestured rudely, watching the lunatic wander down the pier before returning to the task at hand. He wanted to beat the tide , and could little afford delays, mystical or otherwise. Yet, even as he worked feverishly, the captain cast a glance every few minutes at the wandering form of the muttering madman, and another glance at the opening to the ocean beyond the bay.

There were old stories about the firth, older than any could remember. Old tales told by old men in older taverns when the winds were howling and the shingles shuddering, over bitter ales in the fluttering candle light of the deep night. He had heard these tales, growing up in the village, but had grown up and grown wary. Even had he still believed in faerie stories, he had never heard tell of a fuath in the firth. It seemed such a silly reason to stay in port.

His preparations at last done and his two crewmen arrived and on board, the young captain cast off and set sail, with one final sneer at the old man still rambling about on the dock. For some reason no one could explain later, the young captain never noticed his was the only ship setting out that day.

The old man no one knew well stood up and put another piece of garbage in his sack, muttering to no one in particular, his eyes flickering a little strangely, “I would not go to sea today. No, no, no…”

Wisps of ash floated down from the growing cloud of smoke. There was no breeze, but the heat of the flames buffeted the smoldering flakes of wood and cloth, gently guiding the delicate remnants of the blaze away from the still raging fire even from a distance. Even without a wind to tear them apart, the flakes were gossamer thin, fragile, vulnerable, often disintegrating into dust before they could reach the ground. Every so often there was a sharp pop from the inferno, and a shower of white hot cinders shot out into the darkness of the night, a spray of short-lived flares, melting snow wherever they came to rest. The cabin burned for hours, sputtering and dying only when the timbers had burned well below the snowbanks, extinguishing only when the still frozen ground would allow the conflagration to go no further.

Between the low lying storm clouds, gathering strength to unleash another torrent of snow the next day, and the thick obscuring smoke from the blaze, the inferno was almost invisible even at full strength, vanishing entirely from view any further than a few yards by the time the last few guttering flames gave out at last and all that remained were quickly cooling embers. The blizzard that broke the next day lasted for a week, dumping layer after layer of fresh snow upon the land, burying all sign there had ever been a fire or home for many months after. When the spring came, later that year than any on record, the gathered snows melted slowly, clumps and drifts lingering over any depression and against any protrusion that could be used for cover. What had once been a cabin offered little shelter for the retreating snows, but it was enough to mask all signs that life had ever dwelt there for a few weeks longer. The days were turning toward the simmering, sweltering summer season before anyone happened upon the ruin.

A small child, enjoying the first weekend the weather had allowed him to ride his new bicycle, stopped in front of the blackened outlines in the ground of what had once been a house. He was far from his own home, far from any neighbors he knew, and far from the paths and roads he normally played along. This deep into the wild, down the badly maintained dirt road, he had not expected to find anything. The weeds and brambles had already started reasserting their natural right over the narrow road, adding to the illusion that no one had lived here for longer than was true. The child wondered about what he found, but made no note of it. There was nothing special about charred debris in the deep woods, and his were not the worries of the grown up world. Laughing away whatever fears or worries the oddity aroused, the child pedalled away toward home, leaving the last testament to what had once been a home behind, to be overgrown, not to be seen again.