Millennia ago, the Maine coast drowned.
     The human eye sees a fractal shoreline, two thousand coastal miles compressed into two hundred. The human eye sees islands cluster by that shore like flotsam.
     This neglects the deep connection of bedrock. So long ago that the islands themselves have all but forgotten, they were mountains. Fold mountains, rucked up when continents collided; volcanic mountains spewed from the planet's interior. Glaciers crushed the peaks and then receded, melted, that inrushing waters might roar through their valleys and up their slopes.
     Some shouldered up to host again the brotherhood of soil and plants, offering purchase for the roots of trees and shelter for small creatures. Some provided a sun-baked ledge for seals to bask on, or a craggy, isolated nesting place for seabirds--the closest to the skies that they would ever come again.
     All they once were is but a ghost of longing locked inside cold stone. Perhaps that is what draws the fogs: the lost giants wreath themselves in mists as once they were wreathed in clouds.
     The waves are restless. Surfaces cannot be trusted. The chasms of the past remain, submerged, connected, hidden from the wariest eye.

     Storm and dark congeal, giving shape to a thing of calcified malevolence. A knife-sharp prow impales the air; sails and rigging emerge behind it. A jagged, impossible tear in the clouds lets slip a shaft of moonlight, and the vessel's sides absorb it, glowing white as bone. Her blank transom slants in and under the hull like a grisly slide for the keelhauled.
     Her deck seems empty. Manned by memories, she has death for ballast, her timbers caulked with regret. But a pair of bloodless hands still grip the wheel: her captain is aboard.
     He turns the wheel, sluggish. The vessel has already begun to tack. Of its own the main boom swings over his head, the mainsail luffing in a phantom ripple; wood groans as the sleek structure comes about. There is a brief, deceptive pause as the spars fly to larboard. Then the sails snap full again, the sheets jerk taut, and the ship, coming dangerously into the wind, heels onto her beam ends. Water reaches through the scuppers like the fingers of a drowning man.
     Close-hauled, she dives into the shrieking blow; her bowsprit spears the storm, the empty pulpit at its tip nodding blindly into the swells.
     She is beating toward land.
     In her wake the stormclouds close over the moon, the roiling ocean's surface left once again as black as what lies beneath it.

From Moontide, copyright © 2001 Erin Patrick.