Roustabout

Well, since it doesn't seem like my last post took that well, let's try this one, only 450 words! This was the final for my fiction class. The parameters were:

• The story must be exactly 450 words.
• The title must be "Roustabout."
• Somewhere in the story must be the words: weather vane, tether, pelican, and marionette.
• A character must die by an act of God (insurance company definition).
• The first four words and the last four words must be "It was so cold."

I thought it was really fun to write, I think this didn't come out ... terribly, although expanding it would definitely make it better. We had to read them in front of the class during our potluck final and even though I never shut up in that class and I usually am making everyone laugh, I was shaking while reading this.

Disclaimer for all future and past short stories: just because it's in first person doesn't mean it's about me. It might come as a shock to some of you, but I am not a deckhand, my father did not beat me as a child, and did not die by a flood.

It was so cold that it seemed like the waves that were pounding the deck should be frozen. I’d never been in a storm this bad, or this cold. I tried not to think in comparisons though; I just kept hammering ice off the deck of the boat because hey, at least I had a job. I didn’t know how to do much, except work hard and do what I was told. As a kid, I knew I could adhere to those principles or feel my dad’s backhand across my face, so I listened and learned.

A well-meaning shrink tried to talk to me once about my dad and his parenting methods but I thought, why dig up the past? Yeah, he kicked the crap out of me, but I ran away to the shipyards at 14, and the man’s dead. Like the rest of us, my dad was just another marionette in the narrative run by cheap whiskey and a pitiful paycheck. That shrink should’ve asked what my mom did to him by leaving and what his job did to him by being a dead end. And honestly, there was some poetic justice in him being drowned by an undiscerning current in a flood. Maybe it was sick to be satisfied by that, but I think justice was served.

At dawn, I was relieved for a little bit to catch some sleep. The ship was rocking so badly, I tethered myself to the bunk so I could sleep without fear of rolling out of bed. Worse than the rocking, I could feel the ship veering every which way, like a giant weathervane, victim to the storm’s fickle wind. This was the worst storm I could ever remember being in. I wondered if this might be the last storm, the last job, the last memory of my life.

One time I was sitting on deck, a few years back, and this pelican, just out of nowhere, up and landed on the bow of the boat. It road with us all the way from south to north and never moved once. There was a heavy rain that trip too. We thought the bird was brain dead or something, tried to go out and help it, bring it under the cover just so it wouldn’t freeze to the railing but it started pecking at us if we got too close. I stayed up all night, watching over it. I don’t know what the hell I thought I could do, the bird didn’t care about me at all. I guess I felt like this bird was probably running somewhere too, and it was as tired as I was, because it was so cold.