Dear Reader,

Welcome to The Storyletter. There’s a special relationship between reader and writer, something unique to the medium. Without you, there’s no story. True, the writer facilitates the journey, but it comes to life when the reader makes it into their own. So here’s a story for you and I can’t wait to see what you make of it. ~ WM

On a balmy island off the coast of Madagascar, six men stood around a heap of earth in a clearing under the midday sun. The palm fronds clacked overhead. There were headstones between the wild grasses. It was a graveyard for pirates.

Captain Avery held his cocked hat in hand. He smiled wistfully.

“Poor Patrick, he weren’t like us. Christian through and through. From dust we come, and into it we’re said to return. But you and me, boys—and especially you, Black Shandy—we’ll be lucky if our carcasses are whelmed lead-weighted in the sea when we go and not plucked and eaten by the carrion birds. I’ll wager a few of us’ll be doin’ the sheriff’s dance when our necks are stretched on Execution Dock. But Patrick couldn’t bear to see a man suffer, neither child nor woman harmed. He had a tender heart, pure as Nan’s. And we dumped poor Nan, sweet lass, over yonder last year.”

The steward poured rum in a cup and handed it to Avery. Black Shandy put a foot-sized stone at the head of the grave with a skull carved on it but no words.

“Perhaps what I do now for our dearly departed mate will redound on me in Heaven—or remit a scourge or two in Hell. I can almost hear Patrick address me,” Avery said and tilted his head as if listening. “I can hear him call my name. He’s salutin’ me—just as me precious treasure salutes me when I find it. He’s sayin’ ‘Good day to ya, Captain Avery.’”

The men laughed and Avery held the cup over the grave as if he were about to pour out a libation. “Well, he won’t be needing this,” Avery said, and swallowed it in a gulp. He thrust the cup into the steward’s hand. “Goodbye, you lucky bastard.” He put on his hat and led the party out of the clearing.

Patrick O’Galloway’s spirit had heard the hobnailed boots pressing down on the humus above.

“Good day to ya, Captain Avery,” he said aloud. And then a strange thing happened. Patrick felt his ghost slip out of his brain and bones and rise from his open mouth. He felt it float up through the soil. He saw the worms and beetles making their way down to his soon-to-be rotting flesh. He hadn’t thought his soul would be so tiny, no bigger than a doubloon. It rose out of the earth, and spun round in a circle. He could see the backs of the pirates receding as they walked through the grass. He saw the cutlass at Avery’s side, saw him step over the vines and into the jungle.

Patrick rose higher and higher. There were cobwebs between the palm trees and hairy, black spiders crawling on them. He thought his soul would keep rising, but it got stuck in a web and one of the spiders ran to Patrick and wrapped his soul up in silk so that he looked like a babe in swaddles. Then the spider carried him off on its back.

Patrick saw other spiders dining on insects, sucking the blood from them and leaving juiceless husks. When the spider brought Patrick into the hollow of a tree, he was surprised to see another soul tied up, hanging by a skein. Patrick was hung up beside it. The spider admired the two with a thousand eyes. Then it left the hollow trunk but not before turning one last time to make sure the two were still there.

“Ah, hello Patrick,” the woman’s soul said.

“Well, it’s Bonny Nan. Look at you. Is this our punishment now? Are we to be eaten like the others?”

“Oh, the spiders won’t do us harm. They treasure us, covet us. Funny, ain’t it? We plunder in life and become plunder in death.”

“I’d’ve thought me soul would’ve slipped through the cobwebs over the grave and kept goin’ up,” Patrick said.

“Nah, the good ones stick to the webs, it seems.”

“What happens to the ones that don’t stick?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “But this isn’t all that unpleasant. In life me tits was so big they was an agony. Now I feel light as a feather and a bit at ease in the afterlife.”

Over the course of years, the two were taken by other spiders, moved to other webs, other holes and crannies. They saw a lot. The afterlife was never dull. Sometimes they would stop speaking for decades. Patrick would hear Nan say “Ah me” but it never seemed a complaint, just an abstract sigh, almost a sigh of content.

One day Patrick asked, “Why do the spiders have so many eyes?”

“Because,” Nan said, “they’re greedy. They keep their eyes on what’s theirs and don’t want others to filch it.”

One day the spiders came no more. The two souls were left dangling under a ledge. The clouds and the sky became red. Then a slanting fire fell to earth. The ground itself upheaved and threw flames up to the down-falling brimstone.

“Looks like the world’s dying,” Patrick said.

“Ah, Patrick. It ain’t dyin’. It’s bein’ born. I tell ya, the reason it’s women wha’ tend to the dead and bring babes into the world, is that we know that birth and death are one and the same.”

“It’s a wondrous spectacle to see outside of time,” Patrick said.

“That it is,” Bonny Nan agreed.

“But why do Heaven and Earth rage so fiercely?” Patrick asked.

“Because Heaven and Earth are cruel,” Nan said.

They sunk into the earth’s bowels, because the Earth hides what it holds dear.

One day Nan squealed for joy. “I never thought I would be so precious,” she said.

“Would ya look at that, Nan? Both our souls are locked in a lovely emerald… together.

“As green as the groves of Killarney,” she said.

“Ah, Nan, you bring a fond tear to my eye—though I can’t seem to cry now.”

A Hindu in a loincloth chiseled them from the rock, carried them to his hut. He fashioned the emerald into a skull and made it one of fifty-two on a garland that hung on the neck of an idol of Kali. The other fifty-one skulls were themselves very much awake and chatty. There were souls in them too. But Nan and Patrick kept to themselves, because they couldn’t understand what the other souls were saying.

“Look at us, Patrick, we’re quite a bauble. See the people pray to us?”

“I see it, Nan. Curious ain’t it? Scorned in life, adored in death.”

Arabian thieves broke into the temple and stole the garland from the idol. It was sealed in a chest filled with wedges of gold, diamonds, rubies, and pearls. The chest was loaded onto a boat. But a storm struck the ship and it sank. The chest floated onto a sandbar and the waves washed over it. Sometimes the chest was under the sand, sometimes it poked out and the current slapped the chest’s sides. It wasn’t unpleasant being shut up in the dark, but when the chest shook or the waves slapped without warning, Patrick found it hard to concentrate.

“Nan, why is it that the Sea troubles our rest?”

“Because, Patrick, the Sea knows no remorse.”

One day the Good Pirate Patrick heard the oars of a pinnace. He felt the chest lifted from the sandbar, and heard the rusty hinges creak. There was light. A dark face peered down at the garland of emerald skulls. And one skull with two spirits in it looked back at the face and jointly seemed to recognize it. The countenance reflected all the greed of the spider, all the cruelty of Heaven and Earth, all the remorselessness of the Sea. And Patrick spoke to the face, which seemed to hear him, and said, “Good day to ya, Captain Avery.”

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