It's Still Life

Dead Men Don’t Drown: #6

(catch-up with all episodes here)

The next morning I take the spaniels’ silence in hand to the local history room above the museum, not because I have never heard of Love Dogs, but because family knowledge is a slippery thing and I want paper beneath it.

A volunteer with hair the colour of washed foil, cotton gloves, and spectacles on a chain listens without interrupting, then unlocks a plain chest and brings out a folder labelled Mariners’ Customs in a hand so neat it seems capable of judging St Peter.

Inside are photographs of cottage windows from Rye Harbour, Hastings, Newhaven, and places farther north, each with a pair of Staffordshire earthenware spaniels staring either towards the water or back into the room.

“Outward for away, inward for home,” she says, tapping one photograph with a pencil, “though women have always had their own weather for such things.”

I bend closer to a faded print of a fisherman’s cottage, where two white-and-gold spaniels face the sea with the same bright, unblinking patience as my grandmother’s.

Then the volunteer turns the photograph over, reads the pencilled name on the back, and asks how I came to have a pair of Jacob Macleod’s dogs.

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

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