A little story I wrote a while back as an exercise, to see if I could write a cogent story in 500 words or less.
He looked up to the rigging, then down to his broken hands. He had devoted fifty years of his life to sailing on barks, through biting subzero winds and desertlike calmed oceans, where the sun beat down and reflected, turning searing skin black and filling those salty seas with even more sweat.
He had gone through too many friends. Joe - fallen off the foot-line in a gale. Ralph - struck by lightning and still smoldering when he hit the deck one hundred seventy-five feet below. The old man was tired, but his knowledge was irreplaceable.
The jigger stay-sail called to him. His cracked arthritic hands subdued their pain and he scrambled up the ratlines to the complaining sail, tied it off in his mind and contemplated the stars. Why on earth had he agreed to this?
He worked his bulk back down and into the cabin, where the only other crewman on-board was creating a meal. In the old days, he had slept shoulder to shoulder with sweating men in a forecastle knee-deep in seawater. This cabin was gimbaled and luxurious even by the standards of Captains' quarters. The food stock was a sailor's dream. No rancid salted pork, no lime juice ration, but sumptuous pork loin steaks, oranges pregnant with sweet juice, and apple pie to die for.
The world had reverted to sail when the use of oil and coal and nuclear power had been banned. Ships were not the ships of old, carrying four thousand tonnes of cargo, but now carried four HUNDRED thousand tonnes. His survivor knowledge of sail was too valuable to be lost.
He remembered his deathbed, and how he had signed the contract to live ten-thousand years if only each day held enough pleasure to balance the pain. The injection, the complete valsification of his brain, the cloning into a thousand others. How he wished even then that he had never had that final press.
It was only logical that the ecologically-minded governments of his great-great-great-great-bastard-grandchildren had decided that just solar-wind driven space exploration would be allowed. He cursed them when they invoked the renewal clause on his contract, placing him on this voyage to eternity.
After the meal and a peaceful pipeful of shag, his cabin mate mercifully rebooted his system for another day, clearing his funk.
He looked up to the rigging, then down to his broken hands. He had devoted fifty years of his life to...
409 words - writing time 1 hr 42 minutes.
Inspired by an article in the May 1948 National Geographic - Square-rigger in a Tempest.
