Striking Midnight

The voice wastes no time listening to the churn of the storm that veers our ship sideways at a sharp lurching angles.

look it says.

I fix my crooked eyes on the waves and keep them there. Hours later when we pull safely into harbour, I am not entirely sure I had nothing to do with it.

There’s something about remembering him that terrifies me. There are so many things I wish I could tell him: the shame I’ve felt since his passing—over the judgemental, dismissive attitude I often approached him with.

I’d want to tell him I’d done it to others. Dozens. That it had never been the others I’d feared or hated, but rather past versions of myself and all the choices she made, the ways in which she knew nothing, how she cut up good things and fed evils while she sleepwalked drunk through so much of her life.

I’ve been working hard to stop making so many mortals into gods. I’d tell him that too. That I was trying.