A Day At Sea

"A Day At Sea" is a short story written by Jack Goldwrecker.

Chapter One

2:00 PM was, in my opinion, the most inglorious, tiring, and laborious time of any, rather every, day. That was, on a “pirate” vessel. Or so we call ourselves. We were considered robbers of the seas. We are thought as disgusting disgraceful things, much less than the nobles and governors and kings, who, unlike us, spent their two o’clock afternoons sipping tea, attending frilly parties and being honored in the most glorious way the human psyche could conjure up. However, that happened to not be the life we “pirates” were meant to endure. Nor, in fact, did we want to endure such a life. A life on land is a fruitless life. A dry and boring life. As pirates, we pledge our life to the sea, and the sea only. That is, at least, what our captain thinks.

Our captain was not a normal man, even by “pirating standards.” He was often depressed and paranoid. Not that it was his fault; the man was sixty five. How he managed to live that long we do not know, and doubt we will ever know. As for his appearance, it all depended on his mood. He was short, stocky, and had a full head of hair comparable to a gorilla, including his massive ragged brown beard. The crew didn’t fear him; he was too old to waste his energy on punishing us, and many of us were much stronger and bulkier. So, how does he get the crew to listen to him, is the question. It was as if he had a “power” or “force” or something that compels us to comply with his every order. Strange, indeed. However very interesting. Like I said, our captain was not a normal man, even by pirating standards. He missed “normal” by a long shot.

As I was saying, two o’clock in the afternoon was hard for a pirate on our vessel. By then, after at least seven hours of full grueling work, we were deeply tired; our muscles ached, our hamstrings were sore, and on a normal day one man would be either dead or pierced by a blade. On a lucky day, one man would go insane and jump into the ocean, while another would get drunk and kill the other man. Today, it was a normal day. The men as sore as usual, we were either passing out drunk while the captain slept, our pretending to swab the deck, then passing out drunk while the captain slept. That is correct. The captain spends most days in bed sleeping his dying ass of, then getting drunk and falling asleep again. You may, in fact, be wondering who was made the first mate. If so, It is me. My name is Emanuel Bolèmo. I wasn’t exactly made first mate under the captain’s command, who is in fact named Jèsus Clementi, but voted in by the whole crew. Not that Bolèmo would give a damn anyhow. In our eyes, he had to work on being human before being a captain. On that happy note, it was the captain’s voice that brought me out of my thinking trance. “Dazing off, are we?” he said in slurred drunken speech. “To hell with you, you damn devil-of-a-woman!” he screamed at me, flailing his arms, then staggered away. He probably had no idea what he was talking about, let alone who he was talking to, considering the fact that he was half blind and half deaf. To be honest, I, as in the entire crew, would wish he would just drop dead. That is, not including the preacher.

The preacher was a tall but skinny you man, who had claimed to have been “saved” by Jesus Christ, the “Messiah.” Some of the crew jokingly called it “blasphemy,” while others called it nonsense. I was the latter. I didn’t believe in a “Messiah.” To be honest, I thought it was quite outrageous, the thought of believing in a “man in the clouds.” The only thing I saw in the clouds was may ass, which appeared frequently, to my much dismay. However, that didn’t stop the crew from avoiding pirating on fridays.