It's Still Life

Dead Men Don’t Drown: Episode #4

(catch-up with all episodes here)

No. 4, Dead Men Don’t Drown: The Antique Shop on Rope Walk

I walk into town for bread, milk and a box of wooden matches for the coal fire; inheriting a cottage means inheriting an endless list of small errands.

Halfway home, a fleck of gilt light stops me in front of the antique shop’s window; among the brassware and china stands a pair of Staffordshire earthenware spaniels, their glaze uncracked and their ears sharply pricked, as though nobody had ever told them their work was finished.

Curiosity draws me inside where I pick up the brass telescope, polished so often that the metal shines brighter than the view it was built to find — and there they are: the dogs, their eyes fixed somewhere beyond the weather-etched window. They seem less interested in the shop than what lies outside it.

“They be Love Dogs,” the shopkeeper says, her reflection filling the glass before her voice reaches me, and when I tell her I have a pair exactly like them on my windowsill, also facing the harbour, she pauses over a china plate and says, “’Tis a heavy cross to bear, missus, that he be took.”

I carry the bread, milk, and matches home beneath a sky hanging over Rye Harbour like a damp cloth, wondering why a stranger might hear loss in the direction a pair of dogs faced, and how ceramic dogs could possibly know the difference between waiting and abandonment.

Written for Denise’s Six Sentence Story including the word “fire”.  Some images created with Midjourney; all writing is authentically my own original work.©Misky 2006-2026.