Weekly Writing – June 15 2024

Every brave fisher or traveller waved away from the harbour and never seen again was a question unanswered. A prayer on their loved ones’ lips late at night. Promising anything, promising everything, if only they could know for sure.
But when those fishers and travellers started walking back up out of the sea, there were no cries of tearful relief among the families and forsaken lovers they’d left behind. No prayers of thanks. Those lost at sea came seeping it from their silent, swollen throats and the hollow gapes that fish or rot had eaten in their guts. With salt-blind eyes and bodies held together less by bloated, noisome flesh than by whatever will or ill-thought-out prayers had carried them home.
The lucky ones couldn’t recognize the answers to their questions among those faces slack as melted tallow on the bone or eaten away. Was the dredged-up grief and anguish of the unlucky ones the price they paid for filling the sea with plaintive, impossible prayers? Or was the cost of their answered cries still to come?