The scarf touched the water. Vanished. The air around Salvador twanged like a snapped stay on a mast. The wind died instantly. Calm settled, not just over the cove and the ship, but over Salvador himself. The feeling of death and trepidation? No more. In its place . . . absolute peace.
In his heart of hearts, Salvador knew their luck had just changed.
He raised his beaming face to the powder-blue sky, cheered, and crossed himself with vigor. "Gracias, Lord! Gracias, Capricho!"
Then he looked to the northeast. Toward another that had touched his heart. He whispered, “Angela, mi rosa. How I wish you were here with me now.”
A voice shouted from below. It was the pilot, Juan Carlos, his words rising on the air like a squawking gull. “Salvador! Which way do we head? I need to chart our course!”
Salvador sighed at the interruption. So this is what it’s like to be captain. Gripping a shroud, he leaned out from the fighting deck and scowled. “Did you not get my orders? We set sail for Havana!”
Juan Carlos thrust his fist in the air. “Havana and home!” The crew that bustled about the deck echoed his words like a battle cry.
Salvador’s courage soared in the strength of the crew’s enthusiasm. Home. They were heading home.
As the pilot moved to leave, Salvador called him back. “Juan Carlos?” Salvador stabbed a finger toward him. “You keep her in the blue. There are hungry shoals and reefs out there, with teeth as sharp as daggers. See to it they don’t feed on our hull.”
Juan Carlos stared up at him; the men fell silent. There was a long, uncertain pause. Then, glittering white flashed upon his face in a broad smile. “Sí, mi capitán.”
The sailors tilted their heads, weighing the sound of the title against the man so addressed. Grizzled Sanchez drained a dipper of water, looked at the men, nodded. With their own nods of approval, they murmured, "Capitán."
A warm glow of pride flushed Salvador as the sailors returned to their duties. With a last look to the northeast, he swung into the ratlines and climbed down to the deck and his men.
There’d be time for mourning later, and for healing, in his Angela’s arms.
Wulf Moon
Wulf Moon is an Olympic Peninsula writer. He believes in born storytellers. You must also serve seven cats—every successful writer knows that—but allow only ONE in your office.
Moon wrote his first science fiction story when he was fifteen. It won the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and became his first professional sale at Science World. Since then, his work has appeared in Third Flatiron anthologies, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds II, Future Science Fiction Digest, and Writers of the Future, Vol. 35.
Moon has won many national and international writing awards. Most recently, his story "War Dog" won Critters Annual Readers’ Poll, where it was awarded Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Story of 2018. Moon also won the international Writers of the Future Contest with his story "Super-Duper Moongirl and the Amazing Moon Dawdler."
Moon has created numerous podcast episodes for Gallery of Curiosities and Third Flatiron. He is podcast director for Future Science Fiction Digest.
Donald Maass of the Donald Maass Literary Agency has represented Moon on one novel and is awaiting his current work in progress.
Website: driftweave.com
Facebook: wulf.moon.94
Amazon Author Page: wulfmoon
PILE OF BONES
By Michael J. Sullivan
9,000 Words
SURI WONDERED IF it would hurt to lose a limb.
If her arm were torn off, the pain would, no doubt, be excruciating, but the ash tree with the missing branch was quiet—no screaming, not so much as a whimper. The tree, which clutched the cliff near the top of the waterfall, remained quiet, and Suri, who sat on a huge rock in the middle of the stream, was impressed. Large and dignified, the old ash, who went by the name of Esche, wasn’t the sort to blubber. His elderberry cousins, who grew in the highlands, might moan or whine, and a willow—well, a willow would sob continuously for a month, but not Esche. In general, ashes weren’t the sort to complain. They were a noble, tough breed of wood. Even so, Esche was more steadfast than most. During the previous spring, Suri had witnessed a woodpecker stabbing at Esche’s bark for an entire day—and the tree hadn’t so much as flinched. Now he was exhibiting the same sort of stoic perseverance.
Suri was certain she would cry if their roles were reversed. Esche’s limb, which had fallen into the stream, had been a big one—a lower bough as thick as Suri, not that she was all that stout. The juniper sapling down by the frog pond always proclaimed the girl to be skinny, which was a clear case of the fern calling the oak green. Still, there was no denying the truth in the sapling’s assertion: Suri was small for her age.
Tura had speculated that Suri was likely eleven, but the girl felt confident she was a full twelve and a half—and for a twelve-and-a-half-year-old girl, she was unquestionably small. Not squirrel-small obviously, nor even fawn-small, but certainly lower-limb-of-the-old-ash small.
Even as slight as it was, the branch had landed at the edge of a waterfall, and it was large enough to divert a small amount of the river’s flow. From Suri’s stone perch, the torrent now looked like a partially drawn curtain. Seeing the disruption raised two important questions.
The first had gnawed at Suri so many times that she had considered performing an experiment of her own to solve the puzzle: Can I stop a waterfall if I lie in the stream right where the water spills over the edge? That answer was apparently no. Now that it had fallen, Suri could see that the branch was actually thicker and longer than she. This fact was something Suri was willing to admit to herself, but never in a million years would she concede the point to the juniper sapling. If that fallen limb wasn’t enough to entirely block the water—and it wasn’t because only a foot-wide gap was being cut out of the falling curtain—Suri had her answer on that score.
The second question, and the one Suri couldn’t believe she’d never wondered about before, was, What’s behind the waterfall?
In her own defense, Suri had no reason to expect anything except a solid rock face that matched the rest of the cliff, but that’s not what she was now looking at.
“Do you see that? Do you? There’s a tunnel under there!” She turned to Minna for her reaction.
The wolf sitting on the river’s bank yawned.
“Don’t give me that. We need to see where it goes.”
Minna yawned again.
This was unexpected. Minna had always been interested in exploration. Together, she and Suri had investigated nearly every cave, meadow, hollow, and thicket in the forest, and most of those places hadn’t appeared half as interesting as this. Suri displayed her indignation by placing not just one but both hands on her hips. “Are you seriously telling me you’re not the least bit curious?”
The wolf made no reply.
Suri then used both hands to point at the gap in the drapery of falling water. “A tunnel. One that goes behind a waterfall! How has this been here all our lives and neither of us knew about it? It’s like waking up to discover you live on the back of a turtle or something. This is”—she struggled for a word that could sum up the monumental magnitude of the revelation—“big. No, it’s huge. If not for the storm last night, we’d still have no idea—none at all!” She stood up, leaned over, and stared at the dark crack in the stone, glistening from the wet. “It could go anywhere. It might lead to Nog!”