'Dead Reckoning' by Marie Gethins

Let’s say it’s a holiday break. One of those times when your workflow ebbs and there’s nothing new to stream on TV.

Let’s say we float from room to room, maybe you nod in passing, phone screen swimming in your eyes. One of those times when the floorboards creak more than normal. The air hot and stale from that uncontrollable boiler or a spring heatwave.

Let’s say I push up the sunroom sash. Sea winds whip the net curtain into a dervish dance. Cold gusts wash over us both. Let’s say you and I look beyond the deck, railing, lawn, past the cliff edge to an endless dazzle of white caps rippling the bay.

Perhaps the storm clouds will disperse, widening into rivers of blue sky.

Let’s say hours drift into night, the ocean calms. Let’s say you and I remain to watch stars emerge anew. I mention our meeting in the Louvre, decades ago, standing side-by-side just like this, considering Vermeer’s The Astronomer. You tell me again about seventeenth-century celestial globes, star charts, astrolabes, heavenly bodies. How a ship in the doldrums, its sails limp, can still move forward.

Perhaps, you’ll take my hands, whisper how something which may appear dead may form a fresh reckoning. 

 

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Marie Gethins lives in Cork, Ireland, splashing about in the Atlantic on a regular basis.  Her work has been selected for BIFFY50, Best Microfictions, and Best Small Fictions. She is the flash fiction editor for Banshee, a co-editor of Splonk and critiques for the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize.