This is a ship.
It woke today before the crew, humming quietly, as though testing the edges of its own voice. The sound was low and wooden, like wind through a hollow instrument. No one spoke of it at breakfast—partly because the ship had rearranged the galley overnight, and partly because no one wanted to admit they’d heard it dream.
The sea was not water this morning. It was glass, clear and sharp, reflecting a sky that looked too close. The crew tiptoed on the deck, careful not to break the horizon. Even the boy, who whistled in dead languages, kept his mouth shut. You could see fish beneath the surface, swimming in perfect formation like letters spelling out a sentence no one wanted to read.
The captain—if such a role still mattered—leaned over the railing and stared into the reflection of his own face. “I’m younger in the water,” he muttered. The woman with the storm-grey eye glanced once, then looked away. She had grown tired of versions of truth.
They found something tangled in the anchor chain at midday. Not seaweed, not rope—something thin and silver, like threads pulled from a dream. The cat batted at them, then hissed when they vanished with a sound like snapping glass.
By evening, the ship decided to test its boundaries. It tilted, just slightly, as if to ask: If I sink, do I return to where I came from? No one answered. They were busy watching the horizon fold in on itself like paper being creased. It wasn’t an illusion. The sea and sky were truly bending, wrapping into shapes they didn’t have names for. A gull flew past and never returned from the other side of the fold.
Later, when the stars arrived, they weren’t stars but tiny lanterns—each one swinging from an invisible wire. One by one, they blinked to the rhythm of a heartbeat, not theirs, not the ship’s. The boy tried to count them but ended up whispering numbers backward, as if time itself was stepping in reverse.
They argued about whether they were inside the ship or the ship was inside them. The woman claimed she’d seen her own footprints on the ceiling of her cabin. The captain swore he could taste salt in the wood when he bit the railing. The cat simply stared at them all, tail twitching, as though it had known the answer all along.
Just before dawn, the glass sea cracked. A single line, running miles wide, split the reflection of the world in two. From the gap rose a fish as long as the mast, wearing scales that shimmered like unfinished sentences. It stared at them, then dropped a single pearl on the deck. No one dared touch it.
They sailed on. The crack sealed. The sea forgot itself again.
And it still sails.
