Free Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances by Neil Gaiman

twelve years old, my boy ran away, down to the docks, and he shipped on the first ship he found, to Flores in the Azores, they told me.
    “There’s ships of ill omen. Bad ships. They give them a lick of paint after each disaster, and a new name, to fool the unwary.
    “Sailors are superstitious. The word gets around. This ship was run aground by its captain, on orders of the owners, to defraud the insurers; and then, all mended and as good as new, it gets taken by pirates; and then it takes a shipment of blankets and becomes a plague ship crewed by the dead, and only three men bring it into port in Harwich . . .
    “My son had shipped on a stormcrow ship. It was on the homeward leg of the journey, with him bringing me his wages—for he was too young to have spent them on women and on grog, like his father—that the storm hit.
    “He was the smallest one in the lifeboat.
    “They said they drew lots fairly, but I do not believe it. He was smaller than them. After eight days adrift in the boat, they were so hungry. And if they did draw lots, they cheated.
    “They gnawed his bones clean, one by one, and they gave them to his new mother, the sea. She shed no tears and took them without a word. She’s cruel.
    “Some nights I wish he had not told me the truth. He could have lied.
    “They gave my boy’s bones to the sea, but the ship’s mate—who had known my husband, and known me too, better than my husband thought he did, if truth were told—he kept a bone, as a keepsake.
    “When they got back to land, all of them swearing my boy was lost in the storm that sank the ship, he came in the night, and he told me the truth of it, and he gave me the bone, for the love there had once been between us.
    “I said, you’ve done a bad thing, Jack. That was your son that you’ve eaten.
    “The sea took him too, that night. He walked into her, with his pockets filled with stones, and he kept walking. He’d never learned to swim.
    “And I put the bone on a chain to remember them both by, late at night, when the wind crashes the ocean waves and tumbles them onto the sand, when the wind howls around the houses like a baby crying.”
    The rain is easing, and you think she is done, but now, for the first time, she looks at you, and appears to be about to say something. She has pulled something from around her neck, and now she is reaching it out to you.
    “Here,” she says. Her eyes, when they meet yours, are as brown as the Thames. “Would you like to touch it?”
    You want to pull it from her neck, to toss it into the river for the mudlarks to find or to lose. But instead you stumble out from under the canvas awning, and the water of the rain runs down your face like someone else’s tears.

“The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains . . .”
     
    Y OU ASK ME IF I can forgive myself? I can forgive myself for many things. For where I left him. For what I did. But I will not forgive myself for the year that I hated my daughter, when I believed her to have run away, perhaps to the city. During that year I forbade her name to be mentioned, and if her name entered my prayers when I prayed, it was to ask that she would one day learn the meaning of what she had done, of the dishonor that she had brought to our family, of the red that ringed her mother’s eyes.
    I hate myself for that, and nothing will ease the hatred, not even what happened that final night, on the side of the mountain.
    I had searched for nearly ten years, although the trail was cold. I would say that I found him by accident, but I do not believe in accidents. If you walk the path, eventually you must arrive at the cave.
    But that was later. First, there was the valley on the mainland, the whitewashed house in the gentle meadow with the burn splashing through it, a house that sat like a square of white sky against the green of the grass and the heather just beginning to purple.
    And there was a boy outside the house, picking wool from off a thornbush. He did