A Life Unlived (old short story)

Author's Note: I wrote this when I was just about 18, and I'm thinking of rewriting it. I want to know what works, what doesn't, and why! Thanks :)

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A Life Unlived

The old sailor, broken by years of rough seas and more than his fair share of ship-wrecks, looked at his tired and calloused hands. On his chapped lips a frail smile appeared as he reminisced of the days when his hands had the strength of a thousand horses and could do the work of a hundred men.

As he watched, and seemingly on their own, those hands shot forward and grabbed the nearest bottle of rum; it was almost empty – the work of a lonely man in one night – but the sailor was far from drunk.

As Gallus’s lips found the warm embrace that they so longed for around the mouth of that bottle of alcohol and the contents slipped down his throat into his stomach, he smiled yet again. He could feel it… the ship rocking beneath him, the waves caressing the hull and tossing the vessel where they pleased. It wasn’t a feeling that one could easily forget. Not even if one tried to and oh! Oh! How he had tried to forget…

As, finally, he lost his way down the dark corridors of memories he did not wish to remember, he saw what he hoped never to see again. The blood and the bodies and the death. The feeling of pistol in one hand and cutlass in the other. The soft sounds of bullets hitting human flesh and steel meeting steel. He felt the ocean on his face and the blood on his hands.

When, finally, he came back to the physical world he inhabited, he looked down at the bottle he had finished.

He laughed. Laughed at his own foolishness and at his own simplicity.

‘Get used to it,’ Gallus remembered his first captain telling him as he pressed a bottle of rum into his hands. ‘You’re going to need a lot of it, boy. If you live long enough to remember.’

Gallus had never forgotten those words and they haunted him every day of his misbegotten life. He tried to lick what last drops of rum he could from the bottle but it had gone dry. In an odd mixture of disappointment and satisfaction, disappointment at hoping for relief and satisfaction in confirmation of his belief that hope is useless, he put his head back and the bottle down and drifted off to sleep.

He knew what was coming. The dreams. And he was ready. As he always had been.

52 Years Ago

The cutlass cut deep into the pirate’s chest and Gallus took a step back, shocked at what he had done. That shock didn’t last long because within a moment he had been set upon by another one of the beasts.

Gallus dodged the jab and jumped out of the way of the wild swing. Somehow, he managed to grab a hold of his pistol though he was off balance and he fired, point blank, into the pirate’s chest. The man’s expression went stone cold, his eyes frozen in terror. He stopped in his tracks and in the next moment, he had been blown back by the shot.

Gallus then saw him reloading the gun and turning it on himself… bam!

But of course; that didn’t happen. That’s just what he should have done. No. He didn’t die that day. Although by all accounts he should have.

50 Years Ago

By now, Gallus had become more accustomed to death but by no means did he find comfort in it. No matter how many times he slayed; be it pirate, Frenchman or even deserters, he found himself perplexed.

He had often considered what it would be like to die…

Gallus thought he didn’t have to wait long. Every fight he fought he thought to be his last. Every time, he was wrong.

And now, as he stood on the bridge of HMS Endurance, looking on the burning wreckage of a French vessel, and he gave the order to finish off the survivors, he felt like hurling himself off the deck. He didn’t. Maybe, just maybe, he should have.

44 Years Ago

The smell of gunpowder was oddly comforting and the resulting explosion even more so. And there, on a distant coast that his vessel was battering, he saw those explosions; flashes of red and yellow followed by clouds of black smoke that billowed into the sky.

Gallus heard the screams, or so he thought, of the dead and dying and for the first time, he felt a strange pity for them.

But more so, he pitied himself.

He pitied what a monster he had become. What a beast of slaughter, a machine of death, he had turned into. Death to him was welcome. Be it delivered by him or to him.

32 Years Ago

Now… finally… yes… death. That, he remembered, thinking to himself, as he lay on the deck of the Endurance, a bullet wound in his stomach.

Finally, as the battle was over and won, he saw his crew rushing to him and he felt his eyes getting heavy.

Yes. He thought, as at last, his eyes shut and drifted off.

Never again was he so disappointed when he woke at home, his wound bandaged and a doctor staring at him.

‘You should have let me die,’ he said. And the doctor didn’t reply.

Today

The man dreamed on, asleep in his chair. His son sat beside him sighed in despair.

He looked on at his father, as helplessly as one could.

‘Don’t wake me up,’ his father had told him ‘I need to die.’ The son said nothing. What could he say? What could he do? He knew the life his father had lived for now he lived it too.

‘I’ve not lived a life my son,’ Gallus had said. ‘I’ve unlived one.’

And as, at last and once and for all, Gallus breathed his last, the son fought back tears. A life unlived and death too welcome.

The son knew what waited for him. And he welcomed it as had his father done.