Mackerel Scales and Mares' Tails

Nottingham Writing Group with their first anthology, Stories in Sandstone

This Friday the Nottingham Writing Group launch their second anthology of 22 stories at the Nottingham Writer's Studio: Mackerel Scales and Mares' Tails. Each tale is based around the theme of change and transition. Like the clouds on a changeable day, the stories range from dark to light. Profits from the sale of this book will be given to Framework Nottingham, so dig into your pockets and shell out for a copy. Presented below is a story from the collection: "Lost Souls".

Lost Souls

Mackeral Scales and Mares' Tail

15 April 1912

It’s the waiting that’s the most difficult: I grieve that so many of these people are going to die.  I should by now be inured to these feelings, but I’m not and I suspect I never will be.  I hope I never will be.

From my high vantage point, I scan the faces of the poor souls who languish in the water, looking for the one I am here to find.  I can see him now.  He’s with his wife.  They cling to a piece of wreckage but, fingers numb with cold and clothes weighed down with seawater, her grip is precarious.  He braves the cold to enter the water so that he can push her further onto the makeshift raft.  I’m supposed to be beyond such feelings, but his desperate efforts to save her cause a flutter of emotion deep inside me.  I remember what love felt like, and this feeling is something akin to that.  Because of his courage and determination, she will live.

But the icy water paralyses him and I can see him start to sink beneath the surface.  She screams his name, but the sound is lost amid all the other screams and cries of the lost and dying.  She tries to catch his hand, but there is no strength left in her fingers and he slips beneath the waves.  It is time.

I follow him down, invisible to all the other lost souls that the stricken ship has disgorged into the hungry sea.  He tries to hold his breath but the shock of the cold makes him gasp and he breathes in great lungfuls of salt water.  As he hovers on that precipice between life and death, I make my move.

I wrap my wings around him to protect him from the deadly cold.  I hold him in a tight embrace and press my cold lips to his to breathe air into his lungs.  He is only vaguely aware of my presence: he thinks he is in the midst of a dream – or a nightmare.  The nascent wings forming on his back are curled like those of a butterfly that has just emerged from the chrysalis.

I burst through the surface of the ocean and take to the air on wings as black as a raven’s, carrying him with me.  I can see others below, some already dead, most dying, but although I feel pity for them, they are of little real interest to me.  I have my prize: I have what I came for.  He is mine now.

Mackerel Scales and Mares' Tails will be launched at the Nottingham Writer's Studio on 29th May, 7pm.

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