The Launch of the Annabel Lee

The Launch of the Annabel Lee

He’d built the little skiff that first blissful summer on the island using strong new wood painted with bright colors. How her face had lit up when she’d seen it finished, sail fluttering in the warm summer breeze. She’d laughed and clapped and danced in the sand.

Now the wind was cold and fierce and pelted him with grains of sharp sand and ice as he crouched on the shore. His beard and eyebrows were rimed with frost. His coarse hands were cracked and raw. He examined the weathered planks the sea had spat back at him, silver-gray and worn smooth. The first pieces had been large, recognizable. The keel and curved ribs had rolled in the surf like the skeleton of a long-dead whale. As time moved on the scraps were small, salt-saturated shards. He recognized each one as he laid them out on the beach.

He joined cracked and splintered planks like jigsaw puzzle pieces, fitting them to the bones. He planed and sanded the joins smooth, the wood sighing with sadness at every pass. He breathed in time with his strokes, sighing back.

When he perceived a movement from the corner of his eye as he worked, he did not turn to look. Once, he had caught a glimpse of her. Her misty figure had dissolved as he recognized her. Salt had stung his eyes as she faded.

She appeared clearly in his dreams–always just out of reach. Her translucent figure sitting by the fire knitting or drinking tea. Sometimes, he fancied he saw a faint smile on her face. He would feel the warmth that once filled the cottage. When he reached out in his sleep, his hands grasped nothing but cold air.

So, he spent his days alone on the beach, splashed and splattered by the salty sea, rebuilding, and restoring. When the weak light faded, he placed his tools in their box and trudged up the beach, away from the sighing sea.

The cottage was dark and cold. The electricity had been shut off long ago. He’d run out of batteries, then candles. His one concession to the dark was buying kerosene for the stove and hurricane lamps on his rare trips to what passed as a town on the island. He started a fire with dry seaweed and driftwood and sank into a worn chair. He heard her laugh as the kindling crackled and saw her face in the flames as he drifted off.

He jolted upright, blinking. A dream. A damned dream, he cursed.

In the dark kitchen, he lit the stove and dumped a can of soup into a dirty, scorched pot. He stared out the window seeing only his reflection in the blackness. “I am so old!” he said aloud, startling himself. “When did I get so old?” He waved his hands at his reflection to dismiss it, and his reflection dismissed him likewise.

The soup had scorched; he’d left it too long. As he carried it towards his chair, he stopped, frozen. The bowl fell from his hands. He didn’t hear it hit the floor with a wet splash.

She stood in front of him. A pale, watery light shimmered around her. She smiled. He blinked away the salt tears in his eyes. He reached out and stepped forward, his heart hammering in his chest. All he could see was her beaming smile.

Another step forward…

His foot fell on the mess on the floor, and he stumbled.

Later, in bed, he stared into the blackness. He looked towards the beach where he spent his days working on the skiff. Through the grimy window he saw… he thought he saw… a faint blue glimmer in the distance. He strained to see more as the light faded in and out of the darkness. He shook his head. “Phosphorescence,” he scolded himself.

His dream was a memory of warm, sunny days spent on the beach, and in the fens. Pretending to be castaways, they picked through the grasses, chasing the speedy fiddler crabs, and filling buckets with clams. They laid on their bellies over rock pools, teasing anemones back into their own fleshy mouths and watching starfish creep across the rocks. He dreamed of a fair wind and a following sea; of the breeze in his face and wind in the sail of the little skiff speeding across the bay.

A dolphin swam alongside them for a while. “Watch the birds,” she taught him. They watched together as the gulls gathered, the water began to boil, and huge jaws, crusted with barnacles rose from the dark water.

“Make a wish,” he told her when the mighty humpback breached.

“I wish I could stay here forever,” she said. He knew it was bad luck to make wishes out loud, but he laughed with her and felt so alive he could hardly bear it.

He woke, his heart singing. But the room was dark and cold. The whales moaned and cried far away, under the waves. His heart screamed with pain. He sank, mercifully, into a deep and dreamless sleep.

In the early morning light, he returned to the beach. Thick, rubbery strands of olive-green and orange seaweed caught at his ankles as he walked toward the finished skiff--a silver ghost caught in the tentacles of a deep-ocean dwelling creature trying to drag it back to the depths. He pulled the clinging mass away and stood for a long time at the water’s edge where the steely sea met the colorless sky.

The water lapped at the shore without a sound. Turning to look back at the cottage, he saw in his mind’s eye the promise of what it had once been. Perched high on a dune, its bright clapboard face rose out of the golden sand. Sunlight glinted off windows that looked out on the glittering sea.

The odor of rotting seaweed rose on the slight breeze, and the dream cottage faded before his eyes to the ruin it had become, emptied of the life it had nurtured. It crouched low in the sand, neglected clapboards hung at jarring angles, and windows, once filled with golden light, were dull and empty now.

He turned away from the sinking heap; he turned back to the sea.

He held up a finger to check the breeze. It was a habit--there’d be no sailing today. The sea had not returned the mast, but after a brutal winter storm, had sent him a mismatched pair of oars. He fit them into rowlocks on the frame and pushed the little skiff off into the dark water, leaping in just as it lifted off the sand and onto the sea.

He hadn't packed a lunch or brought fresh water. He brought neither compass nor charts. His destination wasn’t on any map, and he wouldn’t require food or water when he arrived.

The silver skiff cut through the still water, leaving a gentle wake to mark its path. He lost sight of land and kept rowing further out to sea than was safe in such a tiny craft. Finally, his arms and back aching, he stopped rowing and rubbed his hands together to warm them.

He had reached a place where the sea, the sky, even his skin was cold and gray–a neutral, liminal space between sand and sea, between song and silence, between life and death. He waited there, and the skiff gently rocked him while the bitter cold seeped into him through every pore and chased the warmth from his body.

A fog bank formed, mist rising from the icy water into the icier air, thickening and surrounding him until he couldn’t see beyond the prow of the boat.

Silence overcame him. He would sleep now, a sleep undisturbed by the dreams that haunted him. His limbs were heavy, and he no longer felt the cold. He imagined himself consumed by a gentle, glowing flame that spread through him, warming him.

He opened his eyes, his frosted lashes framing his vision. His vision of her. Sitting with him in the skiff, surrounded by sunlight and bright colors, her hair blowing in a warm breeze.

“Make a wish,” she said.