A hand.
It was nagging at her mind, the ghostly blue image of a hand. She looked down at her lap, where her own hands lay, spotted and withered, more skeletal than ghostly. They held a tissue. Had she been crying? These days it was hard to remember anything from one moment to the next, let alone something that happened so many decades ago.
Oh, yes. She knew where she was again.
She’d been telling her story. The story about the mighty passenger ship. The story of adventure, opulence, and romance, which she knew by heart. The story about a handsome young man named Jack.
Jack? Was that right?
Her brow creased. Of course, Jack! What was wrong with her? Why was she seeing a ghostly blue handhe ? She shrugged it away, determined not to think of it. Instead she looked up at the friendly faces surrounding her.
Kindly, smiling faces, eager to hear more about… what?
Oh, yes.
The story about the ship, and romance. The story that had unfolded in her mind all those years ago, on a wooden plank in the middle of the freezing ocean, as she waited to die. The story she’d told herself ever since, to forget about that image of the ghostly blue hand.
Her hand.
Her own ice cold hand, holding a kicking, struggling man under the water, so he wouldn’t tip her plank. A stranger she’d never known, but called Jack.
“There’s no record of him at all,” said a bearded man who had been listening to her story.
Rose smiled.
“No, there wouldn’t be, would there? He exists now, only in my memory.”
—
Credits to: IPostatMidnight
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