It's Still Life

Dead Men Don’t Drown: #7

(catch-up with all episodes here)

Dead Men Don’t Drown

When I tell the volunteer that Jacob Macleod was my grandfather, her face changes by the smallest degree, not surprise exactly, but the expression of a woman who has just heard a floorboard answer back.

She does not ask whether I am sure; instead she lays out the accident report, a copy of the SOS logged at Hastings, two witness statements from the rescued deck hands, and the court-ordered nod that made my grandmother a widow a few months after the Channel took her husband without troubling to return his body.

The papers are thin, official, and faintly blue at the edges, as though the sea has already had its fingers on them.

By the time I leave the museum, Jacob Macleod has become less a drowned man than a stack of careful language: fouled nets, cargo propeller, no fault, missing presumed dead.

At dusk I take a wreath of rosemary and white roses down to the beach and throw it as far as I can into the waves, feeling foolish, solemn, and twelve years old all at once.

The tide catches it, turns it once like a thought reconsidered, and brings it straight back to the shingle at my feet.

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

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