Changing of the Tides

[Caira Ayryn]

I grit my teeth, torment bearing down on my with the very gravity I fought with to stand. Salt splashed my wounds prodding my brain, foggy in the wake of grog. The pain was tangible, alive and stampeding my body with every debilitating stab.

It wasn’t so bad, I was alive, right? But just what had saved me?

Or who?

Warren Walsh is my name and here I lay. I’m a mortal human nothin’ special, nothin’ important, a bastard child, living more or less, a pirate’s life. My eyelashes batted away the sand and I found myself collapsing on my side yet again, wincing and waiting for the pain to subside, though I knew it wouldn’t any time soon.

The shackles… They were still binding my wrists and heavy chains dangled into the sand, the last fallen chain link appeared to have been broken off by something sharp and forceful, meanwhile the ones on my ankles were completely gone. That was one less weight for me to carry. I lifted my head once more from the pillow of shore I lay on and looked at the long sprawling beach. Palm trees sprouted, mounds of coconuts and macadamias piled at the base of the trunks in disarray.

I used my forearms, boosted myself up, a series of painful groans flowing forth from my lips. “Tch,” escaped my lips when I took a deep breath, “Ah, shhit,” when I felt my broken ribs poke through the bruised skin of my side, while cramping my lungs.

“Ouch, shit, at least I’m…” I huff in a slow breath, waiting and bracing for the sudden throbbing pain, I determined I could only breathe half as deep as usual, my voice was faded and weak,  “Still alive...”

I force a determined smile, which burrowed its way into my numbed swollen face. If only my mother could see me now. I focused on her heavenly voice, humming in my memories, as my muscles tensed and forced my body to a hunched, agonizing stand.

What a handsome little man you’re growing into, promise me that you’ll use your charm for good, and never evil. She’d wink, in that quaint, youthful smile of hers, telling me how politeness was a superpower. Of course it wasn’t, and when she died, my superpower left me homeless. No one cared about another orphan on the streets. I had to redefine myself, every aspect of my being. Morals didn’t help you to survive, they merely improved quality of life, and I had lost mine.

Still, my ma was great to me when she was around, sure, we struggled, but that was the state of the world. Unless you were a direct member of the bourgoise, you suffered and that was just the way the status pyramid had been stacked, I’d been born in the mud and never risen from it. I worried I’d failed my mother, that when she looked down at me, she’d feel disappointment, but whenever I thought about her, I felt only compassion smiling back at me, from the memories, from the thought of her.

I had to keep going. One step at a time.

For the freedom she had tried to grant me in my life. To make meaning where it fell flat.

My bare feet dodged a sharp thorn of seashell only to skim upon a sea-smoothed rock. I staggered, callouses on my feet sunk into the soft sand and I pardoned my painful momentum in order to reach down at a wide looking stick. It was nearly as tall as I was, and I immediately used it as a crutched third leg. I was barely standing, even with the extra support dragging in the sand now. The edges of my eyes were getting hazy with fatigue and to be frank, I wasn’t even sure where the edge of the shoreline would take me, if this island was even inhabited, but now that I’d been granted a second chance, there was no way in Hell I was going to just lay down and die.