Sometimes it is not the length of the journey, but the direction.
Photo credit: Vollwert BIT (altered)
As the sailors bustled about, snapping down the sail, Jallen kept her eyes locked on the building on shore. Home. Or it had been, until today.
So familiar, this act. She had stood on deck in this harbor countless times. Heading up the coast for peppers and spices. Heading down the coast for pine nuts. With her parents and brother. Then just her parents. Then just her father.
He stood at their front door, on the dock. Watching, vigilantly, ensuring all was well. He didn’t wave. He wasn’t a waver.
But now she was heading west, out to sea. Over the horizon, far and farther, to a land she’d once thought was make-believe.
They pulled anchor. A soft lurch—nothing really, as though it were not important at all, leaving—and they were away.
Beside her, the captain raised his hand to his heart in salute. Jallen followed his gaze to her father, watched him nod.
The captain touched her shoulder, timidly, gently.
She nodded, blinked away tears, looked west.
They had a good wind.
**Note that “hard to port” means to turn the tiller toward the port (left) side of the ship, so that you actually move toward starboard (right) — that is, you turn away from port.
See the next story, Unstoppable Waves, for the father’s perspective.
This is my entry for this week’s Flash Fiction for Aspiring Writers. Thanks as always to Priceless Joy for organizing this wonderful challenge! The inspiring photo prompt is shown below – thanks to Louise of The Storyteller’s Abode! Click here to read the many wonderful stories written on this prompt by other boggers — and submit your own!
Tales from Eneana 
Aww. Goodbyes are always hard but they are sometimes the only way to move forward.
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Yes, exactly. You can’t go to a new place without leaving the old one.
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Wonderful story Joy! I felt so badly for her leaving her home for a place that was once make-believe to her and having to say goodbye to her father. Great story and thank you for participating in FFfAW challenge!
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Thanks for reading and commenting, Joy! Yeah, I was trying to get across how very far away and foreign it felt, that she didn’t even think it was real when it came up in her childhood stories.
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I think you got that across very well!
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Sounds like she is off to her own adventures in life. Great story!
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With the handsome captain from the foreign land, no less. There are worse adventures!
Glad you liked it, thanks!
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Beautiful piece, again. There’s a hint of mystery here – what happened to her brother and her mother, did they leave, too, or did they die and that’s why she has to leave now? Or is it more to do with the captain? It reads like the beginning of an adventure and I’d read on 🙂
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Thank you, so glad you liked it! I’m thinking about doing a second short from the father’s POV that would clear some of those questions up, but I almost hate to spoil the mystery, hm….
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Okay, I “spoiled” a little of the mystery with the next story…
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I really enjoyed this story, it is always difficult to say goodbye but it sounds like she is going to have a really great adventure 🙂
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Thank you, glad you liked it! And yes, that’s the sad part about going on adventures–when you have to leave loved ones behind.
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A beautiful yet sad story that is so well written. Although saying goodbye was hard it sounds like she has much to look forward to. 🙂
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Aw, thank you! And yes, I sure hope she does. Although there will be hints later that this other land is even more foreign than she imagines… and not always as accepting as she’d like.
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I look forward to reading more. 🙂
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I enjoyed this story and I also look forward to learning more. From a child’s perspective and that of an adult’s, things can actually be quite different and I wonder if there is some kind of unknown mystery going on.
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Thanks! A little more of the mystery is revealed in the next story I just posted. But to clarify first, the daughter isn’t a child. I didn’t thing about people maybe interpreting it that way, hm… Now I wish I’d added something that clarified. Well, the next story helps clarify that, I hope.
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A lot of unercurrents woven into this story, Joy, and I can see why you want to expand with stories from other viewpoints. What happened to her mother and brother, for instance? In this episode, you have created an intriguing ‘leaving home’ scene, and I love the use of the nautical terms.
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Glad you liked it! I didn’t initially plan to tell it from the other viewpoints, but since I had so much more of the story thought out in my head, it seemed like a good way of getting those across.
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Well, they did make three quite different stories, with the obvious links between them. So, well thought out!
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Thanks! The only thing I had to work at was tying the first and last (ish) lines together across stories. I started that with the second story and committed to it before knowing how (whether!) it was going to work with the third one. But I was able to figure something out, whew.
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