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The Custom of the Sea
by Debra Cazalet
He was saved
-though less of a man than he once was, that bleach-boned baggage nestled in the calamitous cradle of southern ocean swell, mean-spirited as his mother and
still ringing in his ears the hiss and crash of spouted spray, the thrill, the moth-like murmurations encased in his ribs arrested as he was in uncharted chase. His men voyage weary, succumbed, leaden-sunk by whorls and waves in the wake of a bedevilled whale
-that gold-riddled Sperm
-that monster/magister of the deep
But he was saved, the Master
only he, one-legged, hand replaced by stone-smooth stump, ill-at-ease against cracked and shrubby jaw. Shoulder-hoisted from raft to ship, from ship to land to tell a tale he'd rather drown in strong rum swoons, his words cast to his jury, ship owner and harbour master amongst eager ears and eyes crowding his fragility
The facts of his saving are warranted. A monotone reel, his tongue, unwinding imagery of ceaseless horizons, of hallucinations and howling into the crook of his arm, all foetal and thirsty
-so thirsty he can't taste ocean salt crystallising his mind
-so thirsty, even with piss as wine
He spares them not the logistics of cannibalising his own leg, the custom that Customs does not wish to declare
and now, here amongst the buffed leather and brocaded finery it seems deviant to have been so resourceful. Here he has become something savage and unholy, hairy on the inside. Watching thoughts, dark-hemmed and heavy-cloaked, dragged, threaded through those judging sockets, stitching pity to a shroud.
Debra Cazalet is a non-practising hermit and published poet with an allergy to being constrained. She has a lifelong interest in all things hidden and is torn between the archaic and the futuristic. She also paints and photographs random stuff and is editing her first completed suspense novella. She previously appeared in Chrome Bairn 74.
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