Shape On The Water

Written for Sue & Gerry’s Weekly Prompts
Weekend Challenge – “invasive”. Also for
a few of Fandango’s FOWCs and his prompt
words “prepared”, “vessel”, “intensify”, and
“overnight”. Here’s where the prompts took me.

The radio had been crackling all morning, but it was the silence that followed the announcement that told us everything we needed to know.

“They’ve spotted a vessel,” I told my wife, keeping my voice as steady as I could. “Out past the harbor mouth. It’s been sitting there since before dawn.”

My wife looked up from the bread she’d been baking. She didn’t ask questions. After twenty years of marriage, she knew when to listen and when to move.

“It came overnight, invasive and foreign, without warning, “ I continued, folding the map on the table so the children wouldn’t see which coast had been circled in red. “No one expected it.”

The youngest asked if I was talking about a fishing boat. I wished I was.

“We’re going to visit your grandmother in the hills so we need to be prepared,” I said instead, resting my hand on his shoulder. “We’ll pack light and leave before noon.”

By mid-morning, word had spread through every street and kitchen in the village. What had begun as a single reported shape on the gray water would intensify within hours …. the broadcaster’s words, not mine. More shapes had been spotted. Signals exchanged in the dark.

“What’s happening, Papa? Are ships coming here?” my daughter asked quietly as I lifted her bag by the door.

I looked out the window at our small, ordinary street …. the baker’s cart, the neighbor’s dog, the fig tree we’d planted the year she was born.

“Don’t worry, my sweet,” I told her. “We’ll spend a few days with Grandmama and then we’ll return to our home.”

I said it with more certainty than I felt. But sometimes, that is what a father needs to do.

This is “Gimme Shelter” by The Rolling Stones