3. Flash Fiction: Whispers
Emily Barnett hosts a flash fiction challenge on Instagram every Friday. (Flash fiction, for those of you who don’t know, is a type of fiction that is very short, usually no more than a few hundred words.) I’m sharing my contributions on my blog for those who don’t follow me on Insta. Use the button at the bottom of this post to sign up and get any new blog posts straight to your inbox.
The whispers followed her everywhere.
They said she was wealthy, and she was. They said she was wild, and it amused her to imagine what they’d say if she’d gone with the pirates rather than her father’s ship.
They said she was mad, and two weeks ago, she’d have called it absurd — but that was when she still felt fresh from the open seas and knew nothing about ghosts that came in the night.
She stood now at the window in her room, watching the sun slip toward the purple moor. The rest of the house party lounged in a swirl of reds and blues in the garden below, but she preferred the stony heights of this cavernous old castle — and the distance that separated the gossips from her prey.
Rustling filled the corners of the room. A breeze tickled her cheek, and as the orange sun dipped below darkened hills, unearthly music oozed from the walls around her. Clenching her fingers in the cloak that hid her trousers in ladylike folds, she wished once for a ship and the sea — and turned.
They watched her from the shadows — eleven young ladies less solid than the floor on which they stood. Eleven whispers made visible, gowned in vapor-thin silks and dancing shoes, given shape by the music in her ears.
“And I make twelve,” she said aloud, wondering if saying it made her mad for sure.
The floor rumbled under her feet. The rug became a hole, and she laughed, a hard sound in the dampness of the night. She’d faced sirens and sea dragons with her father’s crew, but they’d left her alone with these spirits of whisper and song — spirits that dragged her to the depths in the dark for a dance with a devil.
Flexing her toes, she felt the hard blade tucked into her leather boot and watched as the first of them descended toward the tunnels below.
And she smiled. Because she hadn’t had to leave her father’s ship to be a pirate queen.
Fingering the knife tucked in her sleeve and feeling the weight of the others in her hair, she followed the spirits into the hole. With her, they were twelve — and twelve had always been her lucky number.