The ship’s deck creaked like a rusty hinge, eerie and threatening, a construction of half-rotted wood drifting through the ocean of fog that covered the black-blue of the water. Aboard, nothing stirred but for the mice. There were no skeletons that knocked into each other as the ship swayed in accordance to the will of the wind. There was no blood to indicate that a gruesome encounter with pirates had taken place. The ship was simply empty, devoid of life, like the inside of a lightning-struck tree.
Beside the ship, darting silhouettes tread the water. They swerved around ocean debris with ease, flowing with the ocean current that carried the empty ship into the horizon. Before the ship fell off the edge of the world, the shadows slowed and began trailing behind it. As the ship teetered on the horizon, its ragged sails billowing proudly before the wind carried it to its doom, they emerged from the water. The surface bubbled as though touched by acid when three humanoid heads rose to the surface.
They spoke through wide, red raw lips lined with serrated bone white teeth. Above the wound-like mouths, they had two slanted slits on each cheek that fluttered, first thick like a brush stroke then thin as a line of thread as they breathed, like the dilation and constriction of a pupil, which they did not have. Their eyes were huge and wide, nearly glass-like in appearance but no color penetrated the white circle of their iris. The opaline sheen of their eyes shivered as the sun dipped below the horizon to follow the fallen ship.
With a last syllabic utterance that sounded like rocks grinding against each other, the three creatures fell beneath the surface until they were mere silhouettes once more.