A Pirate and a Ship in a Bottle

Aubrey Lynch

A girl dressed in ornately embroidered clothes pauses at the window of a novelty shop with the chipped, decaying wooden sign reading “Wonder Crazy” in fresh-looking dandelion yellow paint. In the window, amongst soaps realistically resembling food and everyday objects, comical signs and bottles containing impossible items, lies a ship in a bottle---specifically the Queen Anne’s Revenge---the esteemed ship that once belonged to Blackbeard himself when he reigned over the sea the same way a great warlord may rule over whatever people they’d found in their acquired territory. 

Years ago, when she was only nine, she’d sat mesmerized as the ship cut through the ocean in its relentless voyages in an old, clunky television set that couldn’t so much as weather a storm without static rendering it incomprehensible visually and auditorily. The pirates within went unmatched, taking on nature’s furious winds and waves in storms ordinary people would have perished in. They had taken what they wanted from people, leaving only ash behind when they left like the angry gods of old they seemed to be in modern times, with more monuments in theme parks and movies than most religions had churches. Not even nature could take down a pirate---something resembling a human in appearance alone but more powerful than any force on Earth except time. 

So, she would pretend she was a pirate herself---cutting down those imaginary people who were foolish enough to stand in her way and leaving nothing once she’d gotten her way. The faded wood floors as her sea, a cardboard box for her ship with “S.S. Revenge” scrawled in red crayon after Blackbeard’s first ship, and the smell of mold and old paint in place of the smell of salt water and rain. Here, on this imaginary sea confined by walls barely hidden under peeling paint, she’d been feared and known by imaginary lands as “Deria the Dreadful”- a vengeful pirate with a wrath impossible for a man or woman to match and a greed so egregious it would bring her to raze towns overnight. Her parents were naught but sirens scared into silence, reduced to mere spectators for her as opposed to the deadly song that drew weaker pirates to their doom. 

But she’d aged out of it. Instead, she threatened classmates with a sneer and took what she wanted as she pleased, destroying what she could that wasn’t of value to her. She’d found a crew later, running contraband through the school before falling under the command of a woman whose name went unknown, her appearance nothing more than speculation from those that hadn’t seen her. Those who did see her ended up strung from buildings or in the middle of a street, mangled and beaten---sometimes burned. A pirate without a ship, she bought and sold people while waging carnage-filled wars against law enforcement like the pirates of old. Her brutality earned her the moniker Slave Queen. Deria had run messages and guns for her and awaited the day she would be ordered to become a pirate without a ship herself, so she may shed the humanity that had been her sole scourge and forever cast it aside in blood.  

She had been ordered to do so almost two years into her time under the dreaded Slave Queen. The blood smelled of rusty cannons and power, overpowering the earth and mold scent of the dark room she’d used as the ocean she’d sink her humanity in like a burdensome sack of broken goods that would only weigh her down. Left in place of a person laid a scarlet symbol of the raw untouchability and freedom of what it meant to be a pirate. Feeling like calm ocean waves had replaced her blood, she’d left the room lighter and above the highest forces Earth could offer. She’d left the ocean the room had been for her to navigate the sea of people the modern world is and has always been. She’d left the room a pirate without a ship. 

Now standing in front of the ship of her childhood from behind her own reflection, she smiles. She remembers her feet and walks through the door, finding the cashier.  

“Hey,” she says.  

“Hi. Is there anything you need help with, miss?” he asks, appraising her appearance.  

“I was just passing by and saw the ship in a bottle in your window. How much would it cost to buy it?” she asks.  

The cashier stands from the stool he’d been sitting on behind the counter, turquoise vest straightening itself out over his short-sleeved black shirt. Deria doesn’t take her eyes off him as he moves to the window, coming back after examining the bottled Queen Anne’s Revenge, ship in hand. 

“If you’re talking about this one, it would be forty dollars exactly without sales tax.  Forty-three dollars and fifty-five cents with sales tax.” he says.  

“I’ll take it, then,” she says, taking twenty and five dollar bills from her pocket and placing them on the counter. The cashier counts the money, and hands her back exact change after wrapping the ship in newspaper and bagging it.  

“Thank you,” she says.  

“You’re welcome. Have a nice day,” the cashier says as she leaves the store, heading for her own hideaway as a pirate from centuries ago would’ve done with newly acquired treasure. 

Aubrey Lynch is a junior Writing major and an Environmental Conservation major at Cedar Crest. She is from Levittown, Pennsylvania.