Frank

Abstract

He stood at the railing, peering over the frosted caps of the parting seas, the morning bursting over the cold waters. The scent of sea spray flourished in his nostrils before dying away on the wind. He hadn’t slept the night before. The image of the shimmering moon danced in his mind long into the night, swaying back and forth like waves that carried his ship, glinting and spinning end on end; a beacon of his arrival. He often imagined the moon as a woman from some exotic land even he had not ventured to, a wild and mysterious mistress swaying to the rhythm of the earth. Such women he had met before, green of eye and soft of tongue, often singing long into the nights with whispering tones and gliding melodies, their silken dresses blowing and wavering under the stars of some distant land. Oh, he scoffed, how naïve he was to believe the Dublin he’d heard of could ever be anything but a trace of the world beyond its walls.