Terese Svoboda - Pirate Talk or Mermalade

You must.

Gone.

Or just a cloud.

Or we’re inside the fish—

— and another’s come to swallow us.

Or something’s slipped out and gone down below, into a hole in the ice.

By the ghost of all the blubber that rinses these seas! It’ll come roaring up next at our feet when we least expect it, it’ll come roaring up and rip off our legs and chew us up alive like one of those map serpents.

At least it’s not — my female parts.

Keep walking. First you see things that aren’t there and now this talk of female parts. Seven. I’ve known you since all the seas were fair game, you bastard, we were boys together with our Ma, our gibbetty Ma.

Seeing that we’re going to die, I thought I’d mention my true parts.

The wind has changed, the ice is freezing itself. Did we turn wrong?

It changed, like me.

Now that we’re not going to die just yet, you stop that telling of things, I mean we will die but we don’t have to do it just now. So whatever it is you’re wanting to tell me more of, you needn’t be in a hurry to.

You always admired my backside.

That I did. I do, as a brother should on the sea. But you as a woman? You’re my brother and that’s how brothers get along. Quiet yourself.

Ha! You’ll see — you’ll be rubbing your bloody stump against me, melting the snow for miles.

That’ll keep me walking a league or two more.

I wore curls and a dress until you were out of short pants.

All the young wore them, it was the fashion to dress and curl. I myself wanted powder.

Ma wished to protect me from her drowning and throttling and the dangerous drubs she plunged herself into. She said women had these ways and I shouldn’t be ashamed but that I should hide them all or men would open me up, the men from the sea beside our house, every pirate and captain and huckbutt that sailed or swum up.

I’d die before I’d tell a thing like that on myself. A woman!

Better I tell and we walk a little faster. Seven is the number.

Unless seven is a mistake from the start, another mistake from the start like being from some other parent, our Ma being that way and you being our Ma’s way, a woman that is.

I am a woman so every man I killed coming aboard could be killed for Ma and myself, together.

I’m lifting my boots a little higher just to clear my haunch and get back quick to tell the pirates about the woman they remembered smelling way back before. If it be true.

A siphon for when I made water. A siphon — you never saw.

I never looked. I have my delicacy.

I confess to having used your cutlass to cut my own wailer’s cord as I birthed him one dark night out of Newfoundland. Out of all the clothes I wore to round me, I bore a wailer from the likes of that slaver dressed as a monk. There, I’ve said it twice.

The Frenchman who slaved us? Who folded the paper?

Whom I did not trick, I could not. Which is why I believe we were unchained at the storm, why we were not drowned as the others were.

I always wondered.

I never had the rations to bleed until the monk took me on as a pet. Or else the father could have been Phynias.

Phynias with the pig knuckle hands? I only heard about him.

It could’ve been Phynias. I didn’t complain. I gave the wailer over to Molly, the wretch, with her two others.

The wretch we tossed overboard?

She and the babes were tossed, yes.

And you?

My eyes couldn’t take the sun, if you remember. I stayed down below for once, buttering the seams for a week.

I did wonder. You hated belowdecks.

No one will take me for who I am, I’ve been too long at it. Even you don’t get the gist of it and you’ve tried my backside.

It was dark, it was always dark. That’s when you do a thing to your brother.

You never were much for exploring.

Pirates are a perfect picture of a person piecemeal, falling apart.

I’m five years younger than you, I’ll find the ship.

You’re a woman, and women don’t live.

There’s a handprint in the snow, do you see it? In the drift.

It’s our frozen mates’ hand, trying to get to the water that’s there, just beyond.

We ate them all, remember?

Or one of those South Seas folk — and their boat is near.

Or a new boat?

A bad business, a handprint in the snow. Better a hand.

The first time we get a clue we are somewhere, you quarrel with it. At least we have found water not so frozen. We must follow where it flows, sevens and sevens, to a boat. Put that cutlass down.

I would but I can’t get my arm out of the air. Give it a tug, would you? Careful. The right way.

Maybe I should sing. I feel like singing.

You can’t sing, if you sing the snow will fall on us, off the mountainside, straight from the ice.

Next time I trip over the treasure, I’m going to stamp on it. It’ll have my bootprint then, my own hobnail.

How thick is the ice?

It could be just water, the difference between truth and consequence, or it could be the sky flattened and now broken. I don’t know about thick. There’s a snow in my brain and ice all about. And a heat fog. The kind a whale leaves after a spout.

It could be ice with teeth and breath.

Or a toothless bird, one of a flock left after the ocean was made.

Or a folded paper.

Quiet.

If you can speak, I can sing:

There was an old man with a single eye

Who danced upon the ice.

He chopped a hole so deep with his peg

He slid up to his arse.

You’ve scared them.

No.

See where the creatures run up to that hole and look over? See — at the end of my arm. They trot right up to the water like Sunday parsons, with their necks streaked in the colors of the sun. They stand on their heels, the tops of their beaks tucked to their bellies, squinting into the sun and all that white.

It can’t be, it can’t be.

There’s more of them, over there, sliding right over the edge.

Mind the edge. Thin ice — here and here—

Get off me. Your damn leg put a bruise in my shin. Stand up on your own good leg and hold the rope.

Take the cutlass now. I can’t balance with it.

You trust me with this sacred weapon? The one you swear by and sleep beside and love truer than your own brother?

Take it.

The birds stand on the edge and then just slide right into the thaw. It looks like true amusement. When we were boys in the colonies—

You never were a boy in the colonies.

Eyes. Just there.

Go at them with my cutlass, brother mine, mine own brother. Take it and fight them that has eyes before you freeze to your death in your breasts and quim. The whales you love so much with all their spouting steam will crack through and we will fall into their caverns — but we will have our cutlass out and thrashing.

The eyes are in the ice.

A brook of chatter even unto the empty wind. Let us fight. We must fight them. Give me that.

Put it down. Don’t you see? Your foot is on her head in the ice below.

It’s a she who comes at us? I can run through a she as well as a he.

Wait — she holds a child to the crack, mine own child.

Say it is a bird or a seal or a fish.