Friday Flash Fiction 37
Filed under Flash Fiction • Friday Flash Fiction • 23-05-2008 •
This week’s offering is a coda to my short story ‘Six Lights off Green Scar‘, which you can read online at InfinityPlus: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/sixlights.htm
No tags for this post.SAL DERVISH
By Gareth L PowellSal Dervish turned up in a busted starship with a dead body in the hold and a dying woman in his arms. He splashed into the sea and the local fishermen towed him into harbour.
Now, months later, he’s fishing from the end of the village’s wooden jetty and his ship, The Wildcat lies half submerged in the brown water beside him. He’s gradually mining her for scrap, selling odds and ends to a local merchant. The guy’s ripping him off but he doesn’t care, as long as he gets enough to live on. Overhead, the sun burns white and clean, the same colour as the sand on the beach. Behind him, the village huts drowse beneath their shady palms, and in a clearing a kilometre or so back from the beach, rough wooden crosses mark the fresh graves of his two former passengers.
When he’s done fishing, he’s going to sit out on the quay with some of the locals, drink a few tall glasses of the local whiskey. It’s Saturday evening, which means there will be fireworks in the village along the great sweep of the beach, and music from the tinny speakers nailed to the bamboo posts of the jetty. But for now, he has The Wildcat‘s radio out on the planking, where he can hear it. Occasionally, it pops and crackles with snatches of official transmissions, the cross-chatter of search and rescue teams. But they’re not searching for him. They’re searching for Tamara, and she’s dead.
Ouch.
Pass me a large Scotch.
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On an unrelated note your myspace page says someone had compared you to Chandler – have you done some crime stories?
bt