‘I’m a pirate,’ he told her on their first date, touching his earring.
‘The terror of the high seas.’
‘How do I know that’s true?’ she asked.
‘You don’t,’ he said, and flashed her a smile. ‘That’s the trouble with pirates.’
That night, he came alongside to board her, and although she welcomed him with open arms, offering no resistance, still she went down with all hands, coming to rest on the soft bed.
She lay still and stared at the light filtering down from above, and, in time, made a home for coral, and kelp and starfish.
He couldn’t stay, he said. Work to do on the Spanish Main. But before he went, with a stroke of the cutlass, he left behind his pirate’s mark.
And buried a treasure deep in the warm sand of her body.
Nights were storm-tossed, mornings came in waves that left her ravaged and sick.
At the hospital, the sonographer mapped out the raised island of her belly and pointed at the screen with his pen.
‘X marks the spot,’ he said with a smile.
He captured an image in black and white: not much more than a skull and some bones: a spine curled like a seahorse.
‘Do you want to know?’ he asked.
‘I already do,’ she said.
She only took one copy and, at home, stuck it high on the door of the fridge
She looks at it every time she goes to get milk.
At the single, sunken eye, black like a patch. And the little fists clasping pearls in a watery grave.
