Deep Six

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The girl shaded the sun from her brown eyes and stared at a large petrel gliding above the ship’s after cargo boom. She admired the bird’s soaring grace for a few minutes, then, growing bored, she rose to a sitting position, revealing evenly spaced red bars across her tanned back, etched there by the slats of an ancient steamer chair.

She looked around for signs of the deck crew, but they were nowhere in sight, so she shyly shifted her breasts to a more comfortable position inside the scoop-necked bra of her bikini.

Her body was hot and sweaty from the humid tropical air. She moved her hand across her firm stomach and felt the sweat rising through the skin. She sat back in the chair again, soothed and relaxed, the throbbing beat of the old freighter’s engines and the heavy warmth of the sun coaxing her into drowsiness.

The fear that churned inside her when she came on board had faded. She no longer lay awake to the pounding of her heart, or searched the crew’s faces for expressions of suspicion, or waited for the captain to grimly inform her that she was under ship’s arrest. She was slowly closing her mind to her crime and beginning to think about the future. She was relieved to find that guilt was a fleeting emotion after all.

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