This is a ship.
The sea is not constant. Today it comes in waves of glass. Yesterday it was ash. Tomorrow it might be hands. The crew has stopped asking what it will be. They only ask who they’ll be when it arrives.
The boy wakes with a scar he didn’t own before. The woman finds her eye has traded colors in the night. Even the cat looks different—thinner, heavier, older, younger. Each change comes quiet, without explanation. The ship does not apologize. It creaks in another language now, as if the wood has learned new words.
At noon the sea folds over itself. Blue becomes green, green becomes red, red becomes something unnamed. The horizon tilts. For a moment, the mast leans like it might uproot itself and walk away. It doesn’t. Not yet. The sails shudder, alive, and for an instant the whole vessel feels like a throat clearing.
A gull lands on the railing, feathers smoking. It opens its beak, but no sound comes out—only salt, pouring like sand through a broken hourglass. The captain collects a handful, tastes it, and whispers: “Not the same salt.” He looks at his hands. “Not the same hands.” The others don’t correct him. They aren’t sure of their own, either.
By evening the sails are no longer cloth. They shimmer like scales, alive, flexing with the tide. The crew pretends not to notice. They pretend not to feel their teeth rearranging, their names shifting, their shadows leaving them behind. Shadows fall into the sea like discarded cloaks and dissolve without a ripple.
Later, the woman ties her hair with rope and writes on the deck with chalk. One word: Again. The boy erases it with his foot, then writes another: Still. The cat bats at the chalk, smudging the word until it reads something else entirely—something no one dares speak aloud.
Night stretches. The stars rearrange into new constellations: ships made of triangles, lanterns strung together like bones, a spiral that spins the wrong way. The sky is no longer where it should be; it hangs too close, like a ceiling about to fall. A single star drops onto the deck, glowing like an ember. They do not touch it. The last time they did, someone forgot their own name for three days.
Change keeps coming, like a tide that will not turn. The sea of change does not ask permission. It takes, replaces, forgets. Yet the ship endures. Perhaps because it remembers. Perhaps because it refuses to.
And still the ship sails.
Because whether or not it is the same ship—whether or not they are the same crew—it remembers the rule:
A story that begins the same.
A story that ends the same.
The rest is just planks.
And it still sails.
