It's Still Life

A Spar and Rigging

Some days he wanted to stay. Other days he just stared at the bridge. Portree could do that to you.

Summer turned it oddly condensed with holidaymakers. They filled every table and every bed. July. August. Like a restless meridian. He compared it to living underwater. An aquarium. And God disowned the winters; they were a delirium of ice. Colour turned deathly white. Cold, so cold, that he dreamed heaven was in flame.

But that morning as the harbour gleamed like a strange constellation, and the tide pulled away from the shore, he untied a red dingy with a split spar. It wasn’t his. He didn’t care. Today, he’d leave it all behind. Today, he just wanted to be a captain.