Fleet ‘A Receding Tide.’

Here

He somehow felt the woman sag aside him. Heard a sigh of incredulity and the dull low growl of the two dogs, as he himself turned and looked for himself in the direction of the storm.

Then

‘It is done,’ Emily whispered, exhausted into his ear. Her voice as far away as the time he’d left behind.’The rest will come back upon the next tide- and then all will be counted upon the last of waves.’

She lowered her head still further and sobbed against his chest.

Here

There was a ship. With battered sails, broken masts: it was grey, and shattered and somehow out of place. Somehow there was a localised storm around it: a fist of wild wind and heavy rain that knotted in clenches of broken sky about it.

She looked across the lagoon, heard the wind roar and the deep rumble of the stones slip against each other as the waves and tides lifted the battered vessel up and onto the bank.

There were gasps and cries of disbelief as the lens of storm and weather seemed to fold in on itself, like an eye blinking in disbelief against the coming of night.

Then

‘John! John!Look!’ He caught the sudden urgency in her voice, the loss of intimacy that had for a brief moment brought them, at last, together.

She pulled his hand and moved away from him. Incredulously, he saw what she himself doubted, the storm was abating and with it the ship was somehow fading. Losing shape and form, colour and structure, it was simply dissipating, becoming thinner until it fell back into the mist and fog of tides and time out of view. 

‘What on earth..’ John ran after her and stood amongst the flotsam and jetsam, the barrels and boxes, the sodden caskets abandoned jars and containers. A few survivors struggled to get up, their clothes heavy, countenances shocked, pale and exhausted turned to look at where they were running, stumbling sliding down the pebbles, down to the edge of the receding tide.

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