She’s A Pirate
“How was my mother, Agnes?”
Agnes took a long gulp of rum, tried to dry his lips with her sleeve and failed, and poured more rum in her glass.
“She was the best pirate, ‘at she was, child,” she said. “You got ‘er eyes, Meghan. And ‘er hair.”
“That I know, Agnes. I can see it in this picture and in my mirror every day. I don’t mean that. Give me a simple answer.”
Agnes laughed and drank more.
“Simple, aye. That’s me. Simple.”
“Agnes…”
“No, ah mean it. Ah’m simple, ah chose it. A long time ago, when I realized life was tough… It’s the best, always goin’ fer the easy way out.”
“Until…”
A shadow crossed the older woman’s face. “Until it isn’t.” She downed her rum and grabbed the bottle. Seeing it was empty, she looked around her, found another one that still had liquid in it, and filled her glass. “Cheers,” she said, and drained it.
Meghan just stared, and then took a sip from her own glass. Then she realized Agnes had started speaking, but her voice was barely above a whisper.
“Each one of us, the veterans, has a story,” Agnes was saying. “All of us who helped create the Sisters of the Coast.”
Meghan looked closely at her. At the face of the woman who had always been there. Her rock in a world that didn’t want them, the Sisters, to exist. For the first time, she spotted the lines in her face, the crow’s feet around her eyes. The grey hairs Agnes still bothered to dye and didn’t quite manage to.
How old this woman really was?
“You kids came later. You were born here. We… we started this. And we, each one of us, we had a story. And you know what? Nobody asked. If you were desperate enough to seek the Sisters, you were welcomed, and you were given a job, either on a deck or here on land. If you performed, you’d get paid and that was all. You were a Sister. And all the time, nobody would ask you why.”
Agnes made the liquid in her glass whirl.
“Nobody would ask… Indeed. Many simply wanted to forget. Some sought a measure of justice. Some of us wanted revenge.”
Meghan noticed the careful choice of words. She also realized that this woman had dropped the cheerful, slum accent she usually affected.
“Then Morgan came. Until then, the Sisters had been… an idea, something a small group of women had taken up. A divertimento. Morgan appeared out of the blue, and changed that. She made us sailors. She made us a crew. She gave us a safe port. She made us feared.”
She took a heavy breath.
“She gave us revenge.”
Another full glass. Agnes just stared at it, her hair over her eyes.
Meghan extended her hand and let it rest over Agnes’ arm. Agnes didn’t move.
“You loved her,” Meghan said.
Agnes looked up, and smiled.
“Aye, she was a beloved cap’n, child.”
“That’s not what I mean, Agnes.”
“I know.”
I’m back. Not that you may have noticed I had gone, I guess. Anyway, I left for a while, and now I’m writing again.
In the meantime, Andy Brokaw decided to change her Writing Wednesdays prompts into Seasons. This suits me, as it allows me to smoothly re-enter the game. The image above corresponds to Season 1, Week 1, and is titled “Graniaile” by Nicole Chartrand.
By the way, Andy originally created Writing Wednesdays in MeWe, but now it can also be followed via Twitter and its own website.
