Three Shipwrecks

The Boston Fiction Festival

Three Shipwrecks

William Orem

I am with child, and with the spirit of a child. Inside me there is novelty, a longing to be born in two senses. I am soon to be a mother but I reject this, I am no mother; I am a child myself, a girl, at most a young woman, sent into union with a man for whom I feel little and taken by him to a world outside the world. At the tar-and-oysters stinking shipyards in Bristol a wave slops up and he reaches out to steady himself on the gangplank rope and does not turn to assist me. I know then that I feel almost nothing for him, this man twenty-three years my senior and neither ugly nor attractive. He wears a tall hat and a tall straight collar, everything about him trying to be grander than it is; even at his age he seems always to be begging some forgiveness. I seek no indulgence from anyone; my own spirit whistles and hops around the dour, dark-suited men as they board, making small of all of their business. My own spirit leaps away from them all, running without clogs.

He has done me no harm. He is only a day-merchant, a Quaker, with little white scars around his temple where he had the pox and simple blue eyes that hardly know themselves. He is money-conscious but no miser; sin-conscious but he cannot be said to neglect his young spouse. But inside of himself he is afraid of the world and for a while I pitied him for it, seventeen years old and already I was his senior at heart, ready to mother him. In time pity grew tired.

I am the flowering branch, the one enduring all for the sun. I am the one who will overreach, as high as the sun, like a bird building its home in the highest, the light-blistered branches.