Figurehead

As she walked, she melted. Overspill sloshed out of the sides of her shoes, leaving abstract splashes on the boardwalk behind her. Her fingers had dripped so long, they threatened to knock against her knees. But the sea was close, and so she kept walking.
In the bleached gold of the beach, she was the only moving thing save for the seagulls that drifted lazily through the dry air, like pages dropped out of a seven story window. She swiped her hand across her upper lip, flinging the excess onto the bone-white boards that her heels tlocked across.
If she squinted, she could see, on the wavering horizon, the vague outline of something almost the same color as the boardwalk, swaying gently in the sea. She walked minutely faster, and the skin of her back sluiced down her spine soaking the back of her shirt, splattering the backs of her thighs.
She wanted to cry, but the heat wouldn’t let her, and instead, her eyelids drooped down her cheeks. She reached up and tried to hold them in place, but her fingers were too slippery, and the dripping slid past her lips, stinging her tongue with the acrid salt.
She wanted to run but didn’t dare, for fear of being unable to stay together long enough to get to the ship. All she had to do was get to the ship, which didn’t look any closer, no matter how long she had been walking. It had been a stupid idea to get off in the first place, but that was always the problem, wasn’t it? The grass really was greener on the other side.
She had just wanted to trade the rollicking sea for steady land, see how firmly she could stand, how tall she could grow when she wasn’t constantly swaying and rocking. See what she could be when she didn’t have to keep her head crammed with wind speeds and knot conversion. When her mind wasn’t laced with a web of latitudes and longitudes.
But dry land was just that, and nothing more—dry. Arid. And too, too hot. The heat of the deck in the noon sun on the equator had nothing on this skin-peeling heat. And the second she had noticed her toes dribbling off the balcony of her room she had made for the ship again.
But it was so hot, and she was going fast now leaving horrible, peach-colored stains behind her, like the blood spatters of a crime scene bleached and sepia’d. Her earlobes deliquesced and slid down her neck, and she shivered. She would never leave the ship. Never again. Besides, she had been useful, there, hadn’t she? Maybe the Captain hadn’t strictly needed her, having a first mate and crew, but she was important in her own ways.
Here, no one had even known her name.
If she wasn’t mistaken—and she prayed to every deity she had ever encountered in the shadowy corners of the world—the ship looked closer. The skin on her calves was sluicing off now, and the wet slap of it against the boards was too loud to ignore. But she pushed herself faster She could almost see the Captain’s face, smell the oiled brass of his fingers. She could almost feel his warm hand on her shoulder, the joints not pinching like she had initially worried they might. And if she blocked out the sounds of her melting, she could even hear him telling her softly, in the middle of the night when he was the only one still up, “Don’t be scared”, as they sailed into yet another anarchic port where no one was certain of leaving alive.
She could barely see now, but she knew that once she got close enough, someone would see her. Probably Patrick, trying vainly to get a tan on the deck, even though everyone knew he could only burn. She tried to smile at the memory of Stephen dousing Patrick with water one of the many times he had caught on fire in the sun, but her lips had long since deformed into an ugly grimace.
When she felt her shoulders caving in on her, felt her hands mingling with her shins, she heard a shout. She couldn’t be sure who it belonged to, but she hoped it had come from the ship, and pushed herself into a slow and clumsy jog.
But she had only gone a few steps when her knees gave out and she splashed to the ground, spilling out wide.
“No,” she bubbled, the word choked out from the stew she was fast becoming. Now she did cry, though no one would be able to tell. And in fact, she hardly knew it herself, but for the fact that her lung were seizing and heaving in a way that she recognized to be sobbing. She had only seen someone sob once, but she had remembered that moment forever, running over it in her mind like someone feeling their way through one of those metal knot puzzles.
She had done well. She had helped the crew. She had been with the Captain since he was only seventeen. She had heard him lose his fingers, heard the painful operation of giving him brass replacements. She had seen crew members die, and new ones join. And all she could do was hope that they would remember her for that, and not as someone who wasn’t content to guard their ship, and just had to get to the land. She hoped that by the time they came looking for her, she would have melted away completely into the sea, leaving nothing for them to find.
Something pressed into what remained of her shoulder, and she tried to twitch away from it to little avail. But then fingers were reaching through the miasma she had become, curling around her skeleton, lifting her off the boardwalk. As she was carried forward, she imagined she could feel a slight breeze, and the smell of the sea became even stronger.
She heard the sound of boots ascending the gangplank that had always had a special resonance to her ears. And she could hear the whispering of her crew, hanging from the ropes, peeping out the little round windows. She didn’t believe herself far enough gone to be imagining the deck of her ship so vividly. Her sensory imagination had never been quite that good. Which meant that that faint tang of brass she could smell through the lattice of salt in the air was her Captain, carrying her to the bow of the ship. Carrying her back where she belonged.
She tried to open her eyes, to see his face, with his small black mustache, his strangely neat hair (because who would expect a captain to have such impeccable hair?), but she couldn’t manage it.
“Hush,” she heard in her Captain’s voice. “You’re home.” And then she was being lowered down, and felt her spine latching onto the white wood behind her. Vines of wood curled around her arms, gently wrapped round her neck, holding her steady while the slight spray of the sea did its work.
The effect was almost instantaneous—the dripping stopped, and she felt what was left of her begin to solidify again. The wood behind her fed her, filling out the shape she had once been. And when she finally managed to open her eyes again, she saw the slightly smiling face of her Captain hanging down on the ropes in front of her, and behind him, the endless sea.
“Glad to have you back.”

(I'm sorry if this is technically fantasy; I really didn't know where to put it!)

Hey there! Welcome to YWS. I hope you're having a nice time so far, and if you have any questions at all, don't hesitate to PM me.

Now, on to the piece. Here's what I'm thinking right now. I'm thinking that at first, you had me. You added interest by the weird poetic choices you made, such as describing splashes as abstract when I have no idea what it's supposed to me. But it added interest because it served as an obstacle, slowing me down and making me consider the splashes, really look at them. That helped make the opening rather vivid, but obstacle after obstacle kept slowing me down until I felt like stopping. I skipped forward. You picked me up again when you mentioned that she was there to hear the captain lose his fingers, when they were replaced with brass. That was real, relevant, it revealed to me a little more about who this person was and why they were struggling.

But that's what I think this is mainly missing: drive. You give us no reason to be interested, you give us no movement to keep us interested. I understand that everything feels slow and dragging and intense, but at a certain point, building that tone loses the reader and suddenly you don't have one.

Furthermore, is this part of a larger piece? Because if this is a standalone piece, I don't think it works. When I think of a story, I think of taking a journey with a character, watching something change within them, feeling like something is different at the end. Sure, now the character is in a different place, but her struggle was nothing to me. You might as well have started with her rescue. If you want to keep this as a standalone piece, you need to make the struggle matter. More than describing how she moves through it, you need to tell me what's at stake. Why is it important for me to read this piece? Consider why you wrote it.

Let me know if you have any questions about my review! Good luck and have fun here.

Hannah

Huh. So, this was very interesting. While I agree with the person above--a lack of action, perhaps; too much build up--you did do one thing right. You did show redemption. While you only painted a picture of what the figurehead was before, you did rather well.

One thing I would like to see is the time before redemption--before the punishment, before the knowledge that came after punishment. More backstory on the figurehead--maybe even a name.

Otherwise, I quite liked it. It was interesting and very off-kilter. I'd love to see it even fuller. Also, your writing style reminds me of someone. I can't remember what their name is, but it's similar--her tone was just a lot weirder.

So, yes. I have one nitpick and it's pretty simple:

Yours: She swiped her hand across her upper lip, flinging the excess onto the bone-white boards that her heels tlocked across.

Mine: She swiped her hand across her upper lip, flinging the excess onto the bone-white boards that her heels tlocked across.

Sound words should be in italics from everything I've read. I didn't really notice any other grammar issues, though, which is quite good.

So, yes--keep up the good work and I hope to see new things from you soon. You would appear to see things very differently, something I always love to see.

-Cspr