Weekly Writing – May 6 2023

Once he’d finally killed the last of them, he climbed back from the hold up onto the flower-strewn deck. The sea was blooming and roiling to every horizon, and the ship swayed on what looked like nothing but heaps of white and blushing pink and golden petals.
Without hands to tack its sails or turn its rudder, it had already started to drift off-course. The petals fluttered like trapped birds where blood clotted them to the deck.
The sky blossomed with every colour of the sea. The ship wandered and heaved through that watercolour spill of disembowelled sunset; could there be beauty enough that a man needed to be the only witness to it, like a jealous lover, and did whatever it took to make sure there was no other?
Could that be what happened when beauty drove a man mad? Or maybe it was just something in the pollen, sea of fertile gold that would soon mirror the stars. Any reason he could guess at, any excuse he came up with, would be just for himself. The ship tilted towards no port, and he would never have the chance to explain himself to anyone else.