Free Away with the Fishes by Stephanie Siciarz

lady. I’m traveling all over the world in my ship.”
    “Whose boy are you, son? Where’s your mother?”
    “I don’t have a mother and I don’t have a father. I just have a ship. Good morning, lady.” And off his legs took him again.
    He found a boy roasting corn cobs over a fire and greeted him. “Hello!” he said. “I’m a pirate. Could I try some of your corn?”
    “You don’t look like a pirate to me.”
    “I am so a pirate! I even have a ship. The biggest ship you ever saw.”
    “If I give you some corn, will you show me your ship?”
    Quick was reluctant. “I guess so.” (He was possessive of his ship, but he was hungry, too.) The two boys ate and Quick was disappointed to note that the corn tasted just like the corn back home. When they had finished, he led the way to the shore beyond which the ship was anchored. His explorations had taken him from one end of the island to the other and it wasn’t until he saw the dark silhouette of the pirate ship against the setting sun that he realized just how long he’d been away. His heart was struck with terror. Had they returned to the ship without him? Had he missed the boat? From the tall hillside where the two boys stood, it was impossible to tell.
    Quick concentrated all his energies on stifling the tears that tried to spring to his eyes. A pirate couldn’t cry in front of an island boy who roasted corn! He looked toward the sun and held his breath. The yellow ball burned back at him, daring him not to turn away. He was sure he could hear it whisper in his ear. Crybaby Quick! it said over and over. Cry-baby Quick!
    The sun on
his
island never did that.
    “Did you hear something?” Quick asked his new friend.
    “Hear what?”
    The sun started to laugh.
    Quick’s cheeks burned with anger. He would
not
cry. He was a pirate! He stared the sun in the face, his eyes open as wide as they would go. He knew if he closed them the tears would come—a satisfaction he would never give this taunting, foreign sun.
    The sun, which could have blinded him in an instant, backed down, or, rather, ducked behind a passing cloud, and as it did, Quick heard the faint voices of his pirate companions. Had he not still feared the sun’s jeers, he would have cried from sheer relief. He hadn’t missed the boat! The pirates hadn’t left without him!
    Quick turned abruptly and patted his friend on the shoulder. “Thanks for the corn,” he said. “I have to go.” He nearly tumbled down the hillside, so fast were his happy feet carrying him. His friend said nothing. He simply stood rooted in the dirt, in awe of the great ship that loomed in the distance and of the very first pirate he had ever met.
    Quick, on the other hand, barreled through brush and branches, scraping his skin in a dozen places. As he got closer to the familiar voices, the voices he usually heard from under a bench or a thick canvas tarpaulin, he was able to see the faces out of which each one came.
    “Nothing but a bunch of pineapples on this one,” a tall, bony man with a map and a cap said.
    “That’s no surprise. Oh’s known for ’em,” a hairy man furiously writing in a leather book said.
    “You ever taste one sweeter than what you had here?” asked the oldest pirate in the party, with a long cutlass hanging from his belt.
    How funny to see the voices embodied! Fat-sounding ones coming from thin men and ones that sounded clean-shaven exhaled past fuzzy, matted beards. Just in time, Quick fought the urge to shout out to the pirates and share the joke with them. He suddenly remembered that, though
he
considered them
his
companions, they hardly considered him theirs. Terror gripped his heart again as he realized that with the pirates in view, with them all so close to the boat, he had no way to sneak back into it before they rowed off to the ship.
    The mocking sun, which took its sweet time setting that night, shrugged off the cloud donned a few moments before and beamed into Quick’s