Free Away with the Fishes by Stephanie Siciarz Page B

book.
    “Captain! I believe the boy’s right, sir. Look!” He showed the captain a sketch. “The manchineel, sir. Common in these parts. The sap in that fruit would have blistered your insides and killed you.”
    “Fat lot of good those books of yours do us! I could have poisoned myself if the boy hadn’t come along! What’s your name, son?”
    “Quick, sir.”
    “Quick? What kind of a name is that?”
    “Don’t know, sir. I never had a real name.”
    “What do you mean you never had a real name? Where are your parents?”
    Quick explained that he had lost his parents even before he found them. He explained about the village and the rats, about his island and his itchy feet, about the broken ankle and his stowing away. He confessed to stealing candles, admitted to eavesdropping, and pleaded to re-join the other pirates on board the ship.
    The men looked from the boy to the captain to each other as Quick told his incredible tale.
    “Your name’s more believable by the minute,” the captain remarked. He rubbed Quick’s head and explained to him that his men weren’t pirates or on a pirate ship. They were merchants and scientists and they were on an expedition, he said. He explained what an expedition was and asked Quick again if he was sure he had no parents.
    “I’m sure.” And in the darkness that had finally fallen, he hung his head and cried.

    I should tell you that this particular captain, one Thomson Bowles, had set out on the expedition in question to run away from a ghost. Two ghosts, as a matter of fact. Captain Thomson had lost a wife and son to childbirth and everywhere he turned on land, any land, he saw the pair of them, mother and baby, cooing and cuddling. The vast sea and a creaking vessel (sturdy, but creaking) were the only things bleak enough not to call his departed family to mind. On the dry land of Oh, however, in the moonlight, they had shown themselves to him again. They splashed in the surf and softened his lonely heart to Quick’s desperate tears.
    The captain adopted the boy right then and there, on the beach, and christened him Dagmore. “In a land I once visited,” he said,“this name means ‘long life.’ For this day on Oh, this day on which you saved my life, Dagmore will be your name forevermore.”
    Thus, with a word—a name—one life ended and a new one began. Quick thought it was the best name he had ever heard. Dagmore. He was even beginning to like the sound of Oh, with its corn and its pineapples. Oh. Yes, it was a beautiful name when you thought about it. Almost as beautiful as his own.
    But Oh was not Dagmore’s immediate destiny. Other, bigger, islands awaited, and so he left her, a sailor if not a pirate. His brilliant future, which was only just beginning, would see him schooled not only in weather and navigation, but in science, philosophy, and music. It would take him far and wide and back again, like one of the capricious piano sonatas that Dagmore would learn to master—renouncing its motif and taking it up again, a gentle refrain between
sforzandos
and
appassionatos
.

13
    T he Fuller house lay shadowed in the newly fallen dusk, its small front yard a mosaic of heavy greys and tired purples, bordered in shaded buttercup. Overhead the sky hung confused, belonging neither to night or day, hints of both sun and moon at its edges. The air was thick with the scent of cooking callaloo and sweet potato, with the perfume of rosebush, and the smell of cooling earth. Across the verandah, two kitchen windows curtained in worn, flimsy cotton took turns revealing May’s rapt and delicate figure as she tidied and hummed, willing her cheerfulness into the air that the evening breeze spread throughout the house. In her brother’s nearby bedroom, Madison’s soft, regular breaths soothed away his stress and strain, then joined her muffled song.
    May knew that when Madison awoke, so too would his worries, and she hoped, early though it was, that he was in bed for the