This is a ship.

The water does not move the same way anymore. It folds around the hull like something reluctant, like hands dragging on cloth. The crew says nothing, though their eyes flick to the wake and then away.

The decks are too quiet. Boots thud as if on hollow ground, though the planks are thick and old. Somewhere below, a door swings on its hinge without wind to push it. Nobody goes down to close it.

At night, the rigging hums. Not from wind. From weight. The ropes pull against nothing, tightening and loosening as though unseen sails are being hauled. Once, the captain went to cut them. The knife dulled, and the blade bent.

Some of the crew whisper that the ship remembers. Every plank replaced, every nail hammered in, every rope retied — none of it forgotten. It knows where the wood came from. It knows what the hands who shaped it carried in their hearts. It knows the blood spilled, the laughter lost, the grief sealed between fibers.

Others whisper that the ship is not remembering — it is rehearsing. Preparing itself for a voyage without them, when there are no more hands to pull lines or eyes to scan the horizon. That it will sail on, dragging its shadow-crew of old voices and bent knives into seas where no one follows.

One boy says he saw faces in the grain. Another swears he heard his own name whispered from the mast. The cook has started throwing food overboard, “to keep it fed.”

No one argues with him.

The captain writes in a log that he will not sign. Every entry ends the same way: The ship is not ours. We are its.

And still, each dawn, the crew rises. They step onto the creaking deck. They raise hands to ropes they no longer trust. They breathe the air that tastes faintly of iron.

Because what else is there to do but sail?

And it still sails.