Seven Seas

Microfiction (300 words or less)

There was an old man who sat in the corner of the pub who said, when asked, that he had been in the navy, and that he had sailed the world.
Although we never believed any of his stories, we believed him when he said he’d been at sea. The hands that clung onto the pint glass as though it were a hawser in a storm were rough and cracked, and blotted tattoos leaked out from under the sleeves onto their backs. One of his legs was purple and bloated tight by the gout that comes from a lifetime of drinking, though he swore that it had swollen up as a result of a jellyfish sting inflicted in the turquoise waters off of Borneo. A tiny cigarette, brown and mean, perched upon his thin lower lip and periodically sprinkled ash onto the snowy bristles on his chin as he wove his tales.
He told us, through the wreath of blue smoke that hung in the air in front of him, that he had seen apes in Java that lived as humans, that he had fought against Corsairs off the Barbary Coast, that he had left a wife on Pitcairn Island among the descendents of the mutineers of the Bounty…always with a conspiratorial twinkle in his icy blue eyes that drew us in and made us as much a part of the telling as him.
One day, though, he stopped coming to the pub. We asked John the landlord what had happened to him, and he said that he’d heard he’d died. We never saw the old man again, and we never found out what had happened to him, but within seven young minds he lived on, in each one sailing upon the calm waters of a different distant sea.