This is a ship.
It drifts through a fog so thick it feels like breathing cotton. The crew has stopped calling it fog—they call it memory soup, because every step across the deck feels like wading through half-remembered dreams. The wood sweats salt and whispers names when you lean against it too long. Today it whispered three names: one of them yours, though you’ve never set foot here before.
A bell rings, though no one pulled the rope. It rings twice, slow and hollow, and each note lingers like a bruise. The boy who whistles in dead languages shivers and mutters something backwards—no one understands him, but the cat arches its back like it does.
There’s a book on the deck that no one claims. Its pages are damp but not from the sea. They’re filled with words you can’t read yet—words that belong to a version of you who hasn’t happened. Every time someone looks away, another page turns, as if the book is impatient to meet the end of you.
By noon, the sea turns black. Not storm-black, not shadow-black—this is the black of ink spilled across an unwritten letter. The ship glides through it like a quill scratching at the horizon. The woman with the storm-grey eye ties her hair with rope and laughs without sound, as if she’s seen this chapter before.
A single fish surfaces, scales glimmering with lines of poetry. It flops onto the deck, gasping out syllables. The crew listens in silence. The fish says, “When the water forgets its depth, you will too,” and then crumbles into sand.
The captain—who might be the boy grown older, or the man carved into the figurehead, or both—picks up a shard of the fish’s scale and tucks it into his coat. “Every journey’s got a price,” he mutters. “Some just take longer to name it.”
By nightfall, the stars refuse to shine. Instead, they sink into the sea, tiny lanterns drifting on ink, forming constellations beneath the waves. The cat watches them with unblinking eyes, then pads to the stern and vanishes into the mist like it’s stepped through a door no one else can see.
The ship groans once, like a hinge deciding whether to open or close. The woman writes something on the mast with a piece of charred wood: We are here. She doesn’t say who we is.
At dawn, there’s no sign of the fish, no sign of the book, no sign of the stars under the waves. Only the fog remains, heavier now, breathing with the slow rhythm of something alive.
And it still sails.
