Sirocco

The sea lapped at the doorstep.

Lita had travelled with the town all her life, sure she’d seen everything it could put outside her window. A hillside of maples gone red in Quebec, close enough to touch. Snowdrifts taller than her head, one January in Helsinki. Niagara filling the window with its roar. Sun-scorched sand, the sea distant, the sea nearer – but never this near. Never close enough to wet the step she’d sat on to lace her shoes.

She unlaced them again and stepped down into the water.

It closed warm around her ankles, fine pebbles shifting underfoot, and she waded out until the hem of her skirt went dark and heavy and clung to her shins. There she stopped. Breathed in – salt, weed, the green rot-and-brightness of a shore – and turned to look at the town.

It lay along the empty beach as if it had grown there. The asphalt road, straight until the town, gave up at its edge and bent into a horseshoe to gather the narrow streets. She could see the church at the top of Central Street, the round back of the tavern, small figures crossing between the houses with that purposeful Vagamonte walk. Somewhere under the splash of the waves, the morning noise: a door, a voice, a single complaining note of a cart that needed oiling.

The church bell rang ten.

The window above creaked. Lita looked up, squinting as the sun glinted off the glass and pricked her eye.

“I think, dear,” her mother said, leaning out, looking at the shore over once, “we’ll have to use the back door for a while.”

“Where are we?”

“You’re standing in it. You tell me.”

Lita turned back and studied: warm sea, pebble shore, the particular dusty green of the slopes coming down to meet it.

“Mediterranean,” she said. “Italy, I think.” She squinted at the hills, less sure. “I don’t know what’s behind those.”

“Genoa is behind those.” Her mother said it the way she said most things, as if it had never been in question. “If you’re going outside the town, take your bag.”

“But Mom, why should I–”

“Suit yourself.” The window shut.

She knew how this went. When her mother used that suit yourself tone, the one that didn’t bother to argue because it didn’t need to, she turned out to be right. Every time. It was the most irritating thing about her, worse even than the bag itself.

Lita waded back harder than she needed to, splashing her own skirt, and went to get it, huffing once at her mother’s shut door on the way.

The bag was grey, stiff, and sullen on its hook by the back door. The strap bit into her shoulder, and she let it, because shifting it would have meant admitting she’d be carrying the stupid thing all day.

The nook behind the town hall, where she lived, was empty, though still gritty with the last of Morocco. Three weeks they’d sat in that sand. By the end of it the stuff had got everywhere, into the bread, into the bed; Lita worked a grain off her molar with her tongue and spat it onto the cobbles.

Then she set off up the hill toward the church, quick and pleased with herself. That was the best part of a new shore: the little while when the knowledge was hers alone. Italy, she’d say like it was nothing, and watch them all wonder how she–

Bread. Pies. Coffee.

The smell came down the hill to meet her and her grand entrance forgot itself.

Gunhilda Stevenson’s tavern had come to the town a few years back, the way Lita had heard a cat come to a house: it simply arrived, sat down, and could not afterward be imagined gone. The town had taken the whole building in and carried it off on the next move. Now it stood on Left Street, round as a yurt, wedged against the shoemaker’s shop, to Mr. Craig’s lasting and frequently stated displeasure.

The backyard smelled of resin and baking. Gunhilda herself, monumental behind the oak table, had already spread a cloth and was cutting into a pie the size of a wagon wheel, the huge knife small and obedient in her hand.

“Good morning, Miss Stevenson.” Lita arranged herself into someone who had merely happened by. “Lovely day, isn’t it.”

Gunhilda did not look up from the knife. “Sit down, sweet. It’s nearly ready.”

Lita sat down. “Do you know where we are?” The pie had defeated the last of her cunning. “I do! We’re in Italy. Genoa, just behind the hills.”

“Mm.” Gunhilda slid a wedge onto a plate and pushed it across. “That’ll be why it stinks of weed, then.”

It did not stink. The sea smelled the way it smelled, green and alive, and Lita would have said so to anyone else. But the pie was in front of her now, meat and steam and a crust that gave under her fork, and she let Gunhilda be wrong in peace.

* * *

The day took Lita as town days did.

She was the mayor’s daughter and so had no particular job, which her mother had long ago decided was no excuse for anything. The mayor must be useful everywhere, Arabella said, or people start wondering why she sits in the hall with such an important air.

Arabella was useful everywhere. She had never in Lita’s memory been caught above a task.

So Lita washed a tottering stack of plates for Gunhilda. She carried nails, one fistful at a time, to Mr. Kellbot, the carpenter raising the new barn on the edge of Right Street, where the smell of cut pine followed her. She did a hundred other small things, none of which anyone would have missed had she skipped them, and all of which she did anyway.

By evening she’d had enough, and still hadn’t made it to Genoa. The hills behind the town had been pulling at her all day, and she climbed them instead of going home.

The sun came down red, bled into the clouds and set them burning. She stood on the high path and watched it the way she always watched it, longer than was sensible, until the colour was gone and the dark settled around her.

I don’t want to be late.

She went down the barely-there path, fast, eyes straining, hands out for branches she couldn’t see. She came over the last low rise where the town should have been laid out below her with its lamps coming on one by one–

There was no town.

The road had gone straight again. It ran out from under her feet and away over the dark hills, and along the whole length of it there was not one house, not one light, not one round tavern or silent church or town hall. While she’d stood on the hill loving the sky, the town had loved itself, and gone on without her.

For a while she just walked.

Lita told herself that the hill had tricked her, that she’d come down the wrong side, that the town was there, behind the next rise, and she’d crest it and see the lamps and feel like a fool. So she crested the next one, then the one after. She walked the length of the shore where the house had stood that morning, looking, as though a whole town might be folded behind a boulder.

It wasn’t anywhere. A town is not a thing that hides.

It came up in her all at once, hot and childish and enormous: they left me. They had looked around, and counted, and not counted her, and gone. Her mother had stood in the tower with her map and her markers and moved the whole world and left her daughter standing on a hill. After everything. After every single day of being useful everywhere. Lita pressed her lips together hard.

The anger held her up for a little while. It was warm and it was something to do.

Then it went out, the way the sunset had gone out, and left her with what was underneath it: she was alone as she had never once been in sixteen years of windows full of other people’s weather – no town, no mother, no Gunhilda, no voice under the morning noise, no one who knew her name within a hundred miles of dark.

She sat down on a stone.

Lita did not know how to be the only person in the world.

* * *

A splash brought her head up: a boat, out in the little bay, and a smaller shape going over its side into the shallows.

Lita was up and moving down to the waterline before she had decided anything. Coming closer, she saw a woman in silhouette, small, wading in fast with her shoes in one hand, stopping short when she saw Lita.

“My God.” The woman came on again, slower. “All right. You’re all right. What’s happened to you, then. Out here on your own.”

“There was a town.” It came out ragged. “There was a town, here, this morning, the sea was right at the door, and I went up the hill and I only – I only stayed a little too long, and when I came back it–” Her throat closed. “It’s gone. The whole town. They went and they left me, they wouldn’t, they wouldn’t, but they–”

“Hey. Hey.” The woman settled a hand on Lita’s shoulder, rough and steady. “Breathe first. The town can wait, it’s not getting any more gone.”

A laugh came up out of Lita sideways, half a sob.

The woman studied her for another moment. “Right. You’re cold and you’re done in, and neither of those gets better standing in the sea.” She was already moving up the shore, unrolling a bundle from under her arm. “Go on, there’s dry wood back in the bushes, sticks, anything.”

It was something to do. Lita went up the shingle into the dark of the scrub, snapping deadwood off by feel, and the small ordinary hunt for dry sticks gave her mind a place to be that wasn’t the straight black road. That was why she’d been sent.

“Good. That’ll do. I’m Eve.” The woman looked her over as she came back, hugging an armful of crooked sticks.

“Lita. Lita Linnhold.” And then, because her mother had raised her to give a whole name to a stranger: “Miss…?”

“Paraskevopoulou.” Eve got on with the firewood.

“Par – Miss Para–” It fell apart in her mouth.

“Eve,” she said. “Otherwise we’ll be here twice as long as we need to be. Now – hungry?”

The question was so ordinary that Lita’s eyes stung.

“Yes,” she managed. “Very.”

The fire was Eve’s in the end: Lita brought the wood, but her hands were still too cold and shaking to coax a flame, and Eve took it over without a word. It didn’t matter. Lita had done a thing with her hands, and the doing steadied her; she sat as close as she dared and let the heat work on her.

“So.” Eve raked a bed of the embers aside with a stick and settled a pan over them. “A town that moves.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“I didn’t say that.” She laid sausages in the pan, and they caught and hissed. “I said a town that moves. I’m turning it over. It’s a big thing to turn over.”

“It’s true.”

“Mm.” Eve didn’t look up. “Where are we, then? You came up that hill this morning knowing exactly where you were – so tell me.”

Lita’s chin came up. At last, something else she could do.

“Italy. The Ligurian coast. Genoa’s behind those hills.” She nodded at the dark shapes of them. “We came in from Morocco, three weeks there, I’ve still got the sand in my teeth.”

“Nearest island.”

“Gorgona.” No hesitation. “Then Capraia. Then Corsica, if you keep on.”

Eve looked up at that, the firelight moving on her face. “Nobody knows Gorgona. Italians don’t know Gorgona.”

“I know where I am,” Lita said. “I always know where I am. It’s the one thing–” It’s the one thing they couldn’t take by leaving, she didn’t say, and looked at the fire instead.

Eve let it pass. She turned the sausages, and the smell of them reached into Lita and woke a hunger so sudden and so total it was almost grief. When the plate came she ate like she’d never been fed, burning her mouth and not caring.

“Slow down, kopelia, you’ll choke – and then where are we.” Eve was watching her eat the way Gunhilda did. “God. When did you last – never mind. Eat.”

For a while there was just the fire and the sausages and the sea going about its business in the dark. Lita, full and warm and no longer entirely alone, felt the day’s horror loosen its grip one finger at a time.

“Thank you,” she said, when she could.

“It’s sausages.” Eve looked pleased, and a little sad. Lita didn’t know why.

* * *

After a bit, they put the fire out and waded back to the boat through the shallows. Lita climbed the ladder up the side of a hull she found more by hand than by eye: wet rope, cold planking, the slow rise of something tall above her against the dark.

“Mariposa,” Eve said as they came aboard.

Below, in the dark of the cabin, Eve struck a match for a lamp, and the small space appeared around them: a narrow wooden bunk down either side, a cupboard ajar, a chart curling at the corners and a tin mug wedged in its rack. It smelled of a place lived in alone for a long time: lamp-oil, coffee, salt gone into the wood.

She set the grey bag down on the bunk. She had not let go of it since the hill.

Here it came down on Lita all at once, the whole of the day, the sea at the door and the pie and the sunset and the straight black empty road – and her face crumpled.

Eve turned to go up and leave her to it.

Lita caught her, caught a fistful of her shirt, pressed her face somewhere into Eve’s shoulder, and cried the way she hadn’t let herself cry on the shore.

Eve didn’t say anything. She just stood and let herself be held, one hand coming up to the back of Lita’s head, and waited.

Later, when the worst of it had wrung itself out of her, they went up on deck.

The water washed in the night, nearly invisible past the hull; the yacht creaked; the anchor chain jingled somewhere below.

Eve lifted her face to the dark. “Wind’s getting up.”

Lita felt it, a wind warmer than the night, close and a little thick, pushing in off the water. “A bit.”

“Sirocco. Comes up off Africa, off Morocco. It’ll be dusty by tomorrow. Everything’ll have a film on it.” She considered the wind a moment longer, then let it go. “So. What do we do with you?”

“Do with me?”

“You and me. In the morning.” Eve leaned on the rail beside her. “You can’t stop out here, on the shore. So. What do you want?”

It was, Lita realised, the first time all night anyone had asked her what she wanted. She thought about it properly, the warm wind moving her hair. “I want to go home. Only I don’t know if they want me back. They left. Maybe that’s – maybe that was the answer, and I just didn’t hear the question.”

“That’s a lot of maybes for a girl who knows exactly where she is at all times.” Eve didn’t look at her. “Everything you’ve got is there. Your mother. Your bed. Your whole life. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Then that’s where we point the boat,” she said, as if it settled the matter. “I’ll get you there or near enough. I haven’t had a proper thing to do in a while.”

The wind kept coming.

“What about you?” Lita asked. “Where’s your home?”

Eve was quiet long enough that Lita thought she might not answer. Then she knocked her knuckles once, lightly, against the rail. “This. I live here.” A pause. “Same as you, really. A thing that moves and you live on it and that’s the whole of your address.”

Lita turned that over. “Then we’re the same,” she said.

“More than you’d think.” Eve smiled at the dark and didn’t explain that either, and they stood and looked at the water until the cold drove them down.

* * *

Lita woke not knowing where she was, which had never once happened to her, and for a few seconds the not-knowing was its own small horror.

Then it came back.

The town. The road gone straight. The fire and Eve and the boat. A hot lump climbed her throat, but footsteps came down the companionway, and she swallowed it whole rather than be caught crying twice.

“Morning, greenhorn.” In the daylight Lita saw her properly for the first time. Small, but not young – older than her quickness let on. Tanned to leather, hair cropped short and gone the colour of dry grass, and pale eyes that didn’t seem to miss much.

Eve lowered herself onto the end of the bunk to pull her boots on, and for a moment she stopped with her hand flat against her side and exhaled, once, the way you do over a stitch – and then it was gone and the boot came on.

Lita, full of her own morning, thought no more about it.

“Everyone earns their keep on this boat,” Eve said. “Can you make coffee?”

“I can set a sail.” Lita sat up and pushed her sleep-wild hair down. “I mean – aye, captain. Coffee, captain. With cinnamon, captain?”

“Sails, she says.” Eve stood. “Coffee first. Then we’ll see about sails.”

The galley was a cupboard and a half. Lita found a copper cezve gone soft-brown with age, a tin of beans, a hand mill, and a twist of cinnamon that had given up most of its smell years ago.

The stove defeated her for a full minute, hanging in its gimbals and giving no flame however she turned the knob, until she found the valve on the panel and the burner caught with a soft thud.

“Coffee, captain,” she said eventually, pouring out two cups, absurdly proud.

Eve drank, and shut her eyes a second. “Well. You won’t starve. So what about sails?”

Lita had it then: a summer in Wales, a hired sloop, her mother making her do it again and again until it stuck. “Mother taught me, ma’am. She said any girl should know how to handle a sail. Helps in life.”

“Your mother’s an interesting woman.”

They went up into a bright, blowing morning. The wind was warmer than yesterday, carrying a faint haze that softened the hills.

Eve folded her arms.

“Right. You said sails. Tell me.”

Lita looked the rig over, and the old lessons came back up through her hands before they reached her mouth. “Mainsail,” she said, nodding to the long sail furled along the boom. “On the boom, behind the mast. When you tack, the boom comes across – you watch it, or it takes your head off.”

“Mhm.”

“Headsails forward.” Two of them, she saw. A cutter, then. “The big one on the outer stay, that’s the genoa, like the city, I have no idea why. It overlaps back past the mast when it’s full. And the little one inside it, on its own stay closer in–” she reached for it and found it “–staysail. You’d fly the staysail alone when it’s blowing too hard for the genoa.”

Eve’s eyebrows had gone up. She pointed forward, to a scrap of sail lashed down small by the bow. “And that?”

“A handkerchief,” Lita said, and then, catching herself: “–storm staysail. For when even the staysail’s too much.”

“I’m promoting you.” Eve’s mouth twitched. “Ship-boy. Ship-girl. Whatever you are. Come and eat.”

Eve made the breakfast herself, eggs spitting in a pan that swung with the boat. They ate in the cockpit with the cups wedged where they wouldn’t slide.

“We’ll go into Genoa first,” Eve said. “Stock up. And then–” She scraped her plate. “–I hope you’ll tell me where we’re going.”

“Genoa, you said.”

“After Genoa.” Eve looked at her, plain. “Where’s your town, Lita?”

Lita opened her mouth to say I don’t know, and found the words didn’t come.

Her mother always knew where they were. She’d known it every morning of Lita’s life, well enough to put a marker on the great map in the tower. Lita had never once asked how.

And Lita herself always knew where she was, on any shore in any country, the way she’d known Gorgona without reaching for it. For the first time in sixteen years she looked at her own life from the outside, as Eve must be seeing it, and the ground went uncertain.

“I don’t–” she started.

“It’s all right.” Eve was already up, gathering the plates. “Long way to Genoa yet. Plenty of time to know what you know.”

* * *

Weighing anchor woke the rest of it in her hands: the drilling her mother had made her do until it stuck, a year rusted over but still there.

Eve took the helm and gave her the headsails. Lita found the sheets, took a turn round the winch, and waited for the old rhythm to come back: haul, cleat, brace. The bow swung through the wind, the genoa went slack and thundering, and she let the old sheet fly and hauled the new one home – late, the first time, the sail flogging while she caught up, because Mariposa was bigger than anything she’d worked.

“Again,” Eve said, putting the bow back through the wind.

The second tack was better. By the third she wasn’t thinking anymore. By the fifth she was grinning into the spray, the staysail sheet burning a little through her palms. It was the first time since the hill that she had felt good.

They were down on Genoa by mid-morning. The working port went on forever: cranes stalking the skyline, container ships stacked colour on colour, the hulls of them like the walls of a steel canyon, and a din of engines and chains and men shouting across water. Lita worked the staysail where Eve put her and tried not to gape.

“We don’t want the big port. There’s a corner for the likes of us,” Eve said, reading her face.

The corner was past the commercial moorings almost out of sight: a marina of small craft riding in neat rows, and along one pier old wooden boats Lita couldn’t stop looking at – stubby, bright-painted, high in the bow. They sat among the white fibreglass yachts like grandparents at a children’s party.

A mooring attendant, tall and burned brown, walked down the pier as they nosed in and raised a hand.

Eve nodded Lita forward.

Lita took up the line, judged it, and threw. He caught it out of the air without seeming to look, took a turn round the bollard, and walked the bow gently in until the hull kissed the fenders and stopped. She got the second line across, adjusted the fenders down the side the way she’d half-remembered, and it was done: Mariposa lay still against the concrete.

“Well thrown,” Eve said.

Below, she dealt with a bit of paperwork Lita didn’t follow: a folded document the attendant glanced at, a few words in Italian, a fee counted out; and then she straightened, one hand going briefly to her side, and reached for her hat. “Right. Ashore. We’re finding you better clothes before you cook in those.”

The city took them in and closed over their heads. One moment they were in the glare of the waterfront; the next they’d turned into a crack between buildings and the sun was gone, shut out far overhead, the heat with it. Caruggi, Eve called them – alleys so narrow Lita could touch both walls with her arms out, the houses leaning up and away until the sky was a bright thread five storeys up. Cool damp stone, and the smell of hot focaccia with nowhere to rise.

Eve walked it like a hallway in her own house, never slowing or glancing up to check herself. Lita gave up the map after the third turn and followed the small, sure shape ahead of her.

“You’re a local,” Lita said. “You have to be.”

“God, no.” Eve chuckled without stopping. “Crete.”

Lita stopped. “That’s – that’s so far.”

“So far.” Eve reached back without looking, hooked her by the sleeve, and towed her on before she could clog the lane. “It isn’t far, re. Japan is far.”

“You’ve been to Japan?”

“Once.”

“I’m so jealous I could die. I’ve been half the world over and never once to Japan.”

“Mm. Don’t.”

They went on, down steps, under an arch hung with washing.

“It’s not fair, though,” Lita said. “You and my mother both, you just know things. She’s never wrong, not once. Yesterday morning she told me to take my bag and I didn’t know why and of course she was right, she’s always right, it’s the most maddening thing about her.”

“Live as long as she has,” Eve said, “and you’ll be right about most things too.”

“But that sounds awful! Imagine waking up already right about everything, with nothing left to get wrong. People are supposed to make mistakes.”

Eve was quiet a step or two. “Don’t worry about that. You’ll get enough to find out.”

* * *

Eve picked out for her a pair of long shorts, a light shirt with sleeves, an orange scarf for her neck or her head. Lita changed in a curtained corner the size of a wardrobe and came out dressed, for the first time, for where she actually was; the cuffs turned back twice off her wrists. She paid, and thanked her mother silently, again, for the bag.

In a cafe with its windows thrown wide and the air barely stirred by a fan turning overhead, they took two high stools, and only when she sat did Lita understand how worn through she was.

“We load the boat, and then we point her where?” Eve asked.

“I don’t know.” The town was gone. Maybe I’ll never see it again.

And then the morning came back – plenty of time to know what you know – and before she could decide whether she believed in any of it she closed her eyes and let herself remember.

Here was her house, the sea lapping at the doorstep, gulls on the unaccountable tower of the town hall. Here was the church, and the bell; she had climbed up it once to ring it herself at eight in the morning, and the tongue of it was so heavy and the sound so huge it went through her teeth. Here was Gunhilda’s tavern, round as a yurt, the pine floor still smelling of resin, the windows warm at night. Here was Central Street with the elms down the middle and the houses opening straight onto the cobblestones. Here was the farm at the edge with its chickens and its few smug, placid cows.

Here was home. She could feel the whole of it, every street of it at once – and the feeling had a direction.

She raised her hand and pointed, without opening her eyes, and when she did open them her gaze went past Eve and past the bright street beyond, not seeing any of it. Her arm knew exactly how it wanted to lie to aim at it.

“There,” she said.

Eve looked at the pointing hand, and at Lita’s face. “That’s lovely, but it won’t help me plot a course. I can’t steer to there.”

Lita lowered her arm, a little shaken. “It’s west,” she said. “Past Spain, I think. I’d know it anywhere – I just can’t tell you how far.”

“West past Spain. That’s Gibraltar, then, to start. We aim for the gate and you keep pointing, and we’ll see how good your arm is.”

They cleared the port by late afternoon and turned west, and the sea opened out ahead of them.

The sirocco had changed its mind about being gentle. It came at them dry now, off the open water, carrying the dust it had been promising – fine, reddish, the dust of Morocco hauled all this way across the sea – until it lay on everything, on the coiled lines, on the white of the sails gone faintly orange, on Lita’s own arms and the backs of her hands. She tied the scarf over her mouth and nose the way she’d seen Eve do it and tasted Morocco again, the same grit that was still in her teeth from three weeks ago, came round to meet her a second time.

Of course it followed me.

They settled into the boat’s long rhythm. Somewhere in the second day Lita noticed she was no longer waiting to be told. She trimmed without asking. She steered for hours while Eve sat forward, and Eve let her – which Lita took, at first, for trust.

Then again, Eve was tired in a way that sleep didn’t mend. She ate little. She’d come up for her watch and sit very still for a while before she was ready to move. Lita once caught her with her hand pressed flat to her side again and her jaw set, riding something out, and when it passed Eve saw her looking.

“Old injury. The sea makes everything ache. Wait till you’re my age.” She said it so easily that Lita put it down and went back to the sheets.

But there were good hours, too. Lita learned the boat until it stopped being a boat she was only helping on and became half hers to sail. She kept her arm honest: every so often Eve would say “well?” and Lita would shut her eyes and find the town and point, and the direction held, steady as a compass, west and a little south, no nearer that she could tell but never wandering. They passed Palma in the night, a low scatter of lights off the starboard side, and didn’t stop; the wind kept them moving till morning.

Lita fell asleep on deck near dawn, wedged against the mast with a fistful of canvas so the wind couldn’t have her, and woke at noon under a square of sailcloth Eve had laid over her against the sun, with the dust still coming and the coast of somewhere low and dry on the horizon, and felt – God help her, with everything still broken – almost happy.

* * *

The storm came down on them off Ibiza, and it came fast.

Afterward Lita understood it had not come from nowhere. It was the sirocco itself, the wind that had pushed them west for days finally stacking up into something with a fist.

But there was no afterward yet, only the sky going the colour of a bruise, and the sea standing up. The first gust pushed Mariposa over so hard that the rail went under and Lita’s feet went out from beneath her.

She got the genoa off and clawed the storm staysail up in its place, and even that was nearly more than the boat could carry. The wind howled in the rigging. Water broke over the bow in green slabs and found every gap in her clothes. She worked the sheets with hands she could no longer feel and thought of nothing at all, because there was no room for thinking.

“Eve, I need you on the–” She turned for her.

Eve was not on the helm.

Lita found her gone to her knees and folded over herself, both arms locked across her stomach, her face the grey-white of a wrung-out rag. The wheel spun loose with no one’s hand on it and the bow was already falling off the wind toward the troughs that would roll them.

Lita looked at the woman who had fed her and clothed her and believed she could find a town, and crossed her off.

The boat first. Her after.

Lita grabbed the wheel, hauled it round, threw the bow up into the wind, and held it there, shaking with the whole weight of the sea trying to wrench the spokes out of her grip. The storm staysail cracked overhead like a gun going off, but the next wave passed under them instead of over.

Then the lightning, and in the white of it she saw the coast.

And the cliffs.

Black, streaming, far too close, the sea exploding white where it met them. The storm was driving them straight onto a wall of rock and there was nothing she could do about that; the wind owned them. All she owned was the wheel.

In the next flash she found what she was looking for, what she had no right to hope for: a cleft, a narrow throat of water going in between two faces of rock, barely the width of the boat. She took it. She aimed Mariposa’s bow at the dark slot between the breakers and let the wind that wanted to kill them throw them through it instead.

The mast screamed against stone in a long grind, rock on aluminium, the whole boat shuddering as the cliff took the pennant clean off the top of it – and the next moment the hull slammed and dragged along the wall, and then, impossibly, there was a kind of quiet. The storm still raged out beyond the gap, but in here, in the throat of the rock, the water only heaved and slapped, and the wind passed over the top and left them be. Mariposa rocked and knocked her flank against the stone.

Lita unlocked her fingers from the wheel one at a time.

And then it came for her, all of it, everything she hadn’t had room for, and she shook so hard she had to hold the wheel again to stay standing, soaked through, breathing in sobs that had nothing to do with sadness, just the body emptying out the terror it hadn’t been allowed to feel.

A sound from the deck. Eve, through her teeth, barely. “First aid… it’s below. Port locker.”

* * *

When the worst of the pain had loosened and Eve could sit propped against the bunk, grey but breathing, Lita sank down onto the wet boards beside her and took her cold hand.

“What’s wrong with you?” she said. “And don’t say old injury.”

Eve looked at her for a moment. “I’m dying,” she said plainly.

“What do you mean, dying.”

“I mean dying. People do.” A breath. “Cancer. The pancreas. It’s had me a while and it’ll finish the job before the year’s out, and there’s not a doctor on earth who’ll tell you different, so don’t waste your breath.”

Lita waited to feel afraid, or to cry, the way she had on the boat.

The rage came instead.

It came up through her like the cold up a well, total and clean, and it had no patience in it and no sense in it and it did not care in the least what was possible. No, it said. No. Not her. Not this one. Not while I’m here. Eve had said dying the way Gunhilda said it’s nearly ready, the way her mother said suit yourself, as if it was settled, as if it was a fact you could only sail around – and that was the thing the rage would not have.

Lita did not believe in sailing around it. Lita believed in her mother, who moved the world when the world was in the wrong place.

If she can do it, so can I.

She shut her eyes and reached for the town the way she had in the cafe, found it at once, west and south and waiting, and then reached further – reached for the holding of it, the moving of it, the thing her mother did in the tower without ever seeming to try.

For half a second she felt how it was meant to be done.

It was like the wind. The town wanted to go somewhere, the pull of it plain as a sail wanting to fill. She did not have to lift it at all. Let it come round and it would fill, and go, and the weight of it would come onto her hands smooth and almost nothing, the way Mariposa had gone quiet under her on the third tack and every tack after.

She could feel the shape of that ease just past her fingertips; all she had to do was be calm enough to catch it.

She could not be calm.

Eve was dying eight inches away and calm was nowhere she could get to from here. She did it the other way, set her whole self against the weight of it and hauled.

Lita took the houses on her shoulders, the town hall, the church, the farm with its placid cows, the elms of Central Street, every cobble and every lamp, and she lifted them the way you lift something that is not meant to be lifted, against the grain, against the wind, by main force and refusal; the blood came up pounding in her temples, and the cabin went dark at the edges, and still she hauled, because the wind-way was shut to her and rage was the only engine she had and rage, it turned out, was enough.

She saw the town go shrouded in haze, the lamps guttering out street by street. She saw the gulls lose their footing all at once and go up crying, wheeling over the place where the roofs had been. She saw the mountains draw back with a long, reluctant scrape, making room. She saw the lamps come up again in a new place, gold in the dusk. And she saw her mother in the tower, head lifted, listening to something on the air, and then reaching out, unsurprised, to set a fresh marker on the great map corner to corner across the wall.

Lita came back into her body and found it ruined: shaking, soaked, sick to the stomach, head splitting with pain. She had slid down onto the floor. She pushed up on one arm.

Eve was staring at her, eyes huge in the lamplight. “What did you–”

“San. Jose.” Lita’s voice came out of her in pieces. “It’ll be. There. San Jose. We go. There. Tomorrow.” She got the words out and no more, the whole of her spent down to the wick. Then she dragged herself onto the opposite bunk and fell into the dark.

* * *

In the morning the storm was a stain on the southern sky and the sea had gone long and easy. The rig had held: a silver scar down the mast where the cliff had bitten, but the stays were tight, and she would hold.

Lita was sailing.

She had the wheel in one hand and the chart spread on the cockpit seat under her knee, weighted with a winch handle against the breeze, the course already pencilled on it in her own uneven line. She’d woken before Eve, taken Mariposaout at first light, found the boat wanting trimming, and trimmed it. She checked the heading against the thing in her chest that pointed, and set the bow to where both the compass and the pointing agreed. None of it had felt like a decision.

That was the strange part, as she noticed it now: the deciding happened in her hands before she thought to ask.

Eve came up the companionway slowly, one hand on the rail, the colour not yet back in her face, and made as if to take the wheel the way she always had.

“No,” Lita said. “Sit down. I’ve got her.” It came out with the whole night behind it, and they both heard what was in it.

Eve let her hand fall. “Aye,” she said, sat in the place Lita used to sit, and pulled a square of sailcloth over her knees.

“There are two women living in the town,” Lita said, after a while, watching the chart and the sea by turns. “On Central Street, in the old teacher’s house. Together, I mean.” She felt her ears go warm and pressed on past it. “They share a bed and everything. A couple.”

“I gathered.” The corner of Eve’s mouth moved. “Go on, then. The couple.”

“One of them was sick when she came. Really sick – the kind of sick where they’ve stopped telling you it’ll be all right.” Lita kept her eyes on the water. “That was years ago. She’s still here. Still sick, I won’t lie to you: it’s not a cure, we don’t do miracles, we’re not a holy well. But she’s been better for years. Years, Eve. Whatever it is Vagamonte does, it did it for her.”

“You’re offering me your town.”

“I’m offering you a visit. You can think whatever you like about whether it’ll help. I’m not asking you to believe anything. I’m asking you to come and see, before you decide there’s nothing for you but the sea and the year you’ve got left.”

“That’s a lot of asking from a girl who pointed at a horizon two days ago.”

“I moved a town last night.” She hadn’t meant to say it like that, but there it was. “I think I’m allowed to ask.”

Eve looked at her sidelong. “I gave up on miracles a long way back.” A beat. “I’ll think about it.”

They rounded a cape, and the coast opened ahead of them: rock and surf and the dry hills going up behind.

The town sat in the fold of the mountains as if it had grown there, as if it had never been anywhere else: the church on its rise, the roofs in their brick-red rows, the streets bending into their horseshoe to gather it all in. The same mountains she had felt draw back grumbling in the dark now stood quiet around it, holding it like cupped hands. And below the town hall a fresh pier ran out into the water, put there in the night by the town itself for the boat it knew was coming.

Beside her, Eve made a low sound, and Lita turned, afraid the pain was back.

Eve was staring at the town, and there was something in her face Lita hadn’t seen there before. “I know this coast,” she said. Quietly, almost to herself. “I’ve sailed it. There’s nothing here, Lita. There’s a headland and a dry valley and not one stone on top of another, I’d swear it on my life, I’ve passed it–” She stopped.

The town went on sitting in the mountains, unbothered.

Eve pressed her hand to her mouth and was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke again the wryness had gone out of her entirely. “All this way I thought I was humouring a frightened child.”

* * *

Lita brought Mariposa alongside the pier as gently as if she’d been doing it all her life, and stepped off onto boards that smelled of fresh-cut pine, and made the lines fast. The town breathed above her: woodsmoke, bread, a voice somewhere, the church bell about to ring the hour. Home, set down whole in a place it had never been because she had carried it there.

“Are you coming?” she said.

Eve hadn’t moved from the cockpit. She had her hand on the gunwale, and she looked at the town, and then she looked at the open water behind them, and Lita watched her choose the water.

“Go on up, kopelia,” Eve said. “You have people missing you.”

“You’re running.”

“I’m not–” Eve stopped, and started again, gentler. “Lita. I can’t. My place is out there. It’s been out there a long time. You don’t undo a life like that by tying up at a pretty pier.”

“Who said anything about undoing it?” Lita put her hands on her hips. “I’m not asking you to stay forever. Look at you – you can barely stand! How exactly are you planning to sail off into the sea right now, today? I’m asking you to visit.Come up, rest, see the place. And if you still want the water after that, you can have the water. I’ll have Mom move the whole town down to the shore and set you off myself.”

“And she will,” said a familiar voice from the pier behind her. “Good afternoon.”

Lita dropped the line.

Her mother stood at the foot of the pier in the late light, exactly as she always stood, as if she had been there the whole time and the rest of the world had only just arrived to join her. Lita saw, for the first time, how much of Arabella there was in her own stance.

Arabella’s eyes went first to Lita in a quick, complete inventory, whole, here, mine; then, with grave courtesy, to Eve who remained at the gunwale. “I don’t know you,” Arabella said, “but you brought my girl home across half a sea. I won’t forget it.”

Then, to Lita: “Hello, dear.”

Lita went to her, and they stopped a pace apart, and looked at each other, and neither of them moved to close it.

“You did that,” Lita said. “The town leaving.”

“Yes.”

“Test passed?”

Something moved in Arabella’s face: not quite a smile, something more cautious. “You’re my clever girl,” she said. “I never doubted it for a moment.”

“That was a test?” Eve was on the pier – Lita hadn’t seen her leave the boat – gripping the bollard, outrage doing what the painkillers couldn’t. “You set the sea on a sixteen-year-old to see if she’d – what kind of mother does that?”

“The only kind that could’ve taught me this,” Lita said, turning to Eve. “There are things nobody can hand you, Eve. You can be told a thousand times and it’s just words. You have to be put out in the middle of it with no one coming, and find out what your own hands can do.” She heard, as she said it, how much she sounded like a sailor talking about wind. “It’s like learning to sail. You can read every book there is. But until you’re holding the sheet yourself, with the weight of all that nothing pulling at it – you don’t know. You can’t.”

Eve looked at her for a long moment. “And yet,” she said, but there was no fight left in it.

Lita reached out and took her hand. “Come on. You wanted a miracle.” She drew her toward the town, toward the lit windows and the bell and the streets that had moved across the earth to be here.

“You told me you had no miracles.”

“We’ll make an exception.”

Behind them, out past the new boards and the rocking hull, the sirocco that had carried her all this way – off Africa, off Morocco, across the whole width of the sea and home – gathered itself, let out one last warm breath against her back, and was still.

Only the sea lapped at the pier.

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

Sirocco was yet another contest piece that didn’t win, but the concept behind it was solid. So solid, in fact, that I thought: this world wants an anthology. So if you’ve read to this point, and you’re into writing short stories and you like the concept – reach out to me. I’ll put a more formal announcement and open call in the next few days.

Next flash story at 15th of October, Songbird. There will be gentlemen and lady.

Thank you for reading.

Aldwin