Flight of the Sparrow
...
Soft melody, light and tinkling, wafted up from the main floor of the brothel to hang ebullient and dusty as smoke amongst the old, heavy beams of the rafters. It drew the ear and filled one's soul with the weight of strange, foreign hungers that the soul refused to look at during the harsh, judging light of day. A voice accompanied it, low and rumbling; carried by the somber swell of notes, bringing the song to a melancholy sweetness that was somehow just as vibrant as it was dampening.
Captain Edward Teague, with his great feathered hat and his sprawling mane of bedraggled dreadlocks, sat languid upon a low stool in the center of the parlor's foyer. His face was lined with age and experience, perpetually chapped by a life spent facing into the lashing wind, lancelike sun, and the salty spray of the sea. But, in the crinkled corners of his eyes and the steady regard of their burnt umber gaze, there was an understanding that was so pervasive it was impossible not to be charmed by it.
He rocked to and fro as he sang, the baubles and miniature seashells twined throughout his locks glittering and gleaming in the low firelight of the hearth. All manner of variations of the feminine creature were flocked and gathered about him, several visitors of the male clientle interspersed throughout the dusty, threadworn interior of the brothel. They sat on the armrests of sofas, reclined on large, soft cushions upon the floor; knelt, and hovered in a cloud of captivated silence as his bejeweled fingers whispered over the frets, a discordant, haunting strumming twanged resonantly from the strings, and his low voice rasped darkly. His words filled the room with a polarizing wanderlust. Awakening a longing so strange and so yawning, it was really more of a hunger.
Every eye, every ear was focused solely upon him.
Yet, there was one who held his notice.
She held herself apart, as if the sound were actually better at a distance, and the rest of the party had merely got it wrong. There was something about the set of her lips and the dimple in her cheeks that suggested she was a person who knew things that others simply did not. Her eyes were as lovely as they were dark. Her true nature a blatant mosaic of obscurity that merely complicated itself the harder one looked into those eclipsed orbs. He had seen her before, the last time his ship had stopped to harbor on this godforsaken island.
Her hair was cut short. Like a boy's. He could make out the textured spiral of the inky curls in her hair under the pale glow of the moonlight. Her hips were svelte, the angles of her frame a dichotomy of petite vulnerability and wiry animal strength. He had spent many a drunken night-in bed with some grotesquely superficial whore, alone at night on the lonely trek of a blustering, swaying pier-and he'd been transiently blinded by phantasmic flashes of this very girl's dark, satiny skin. A color so rich and full it was like the caress of a balmy summer night to behold.
She may have been a prostitute, but she carried herself like an empress. A dream incarnate.
Captain Edward Teague watched her as she watched him from across the room. He ventured a dry, crooked approximation of a grin.
She flexed one corner of her mouth, her lips naturally defaulted to the set of an alluringly enigmatic pout. The soft glow of the firelight softened the angles of her high cheekbones and aristocratic brow. Painted her dark skin in flickering gradients of obsidian, as if she were made from living stone.
His fingers stumbled as the nature of her regard trebled into a summoning smolder. Heat bloomed between them, murky and sweet with promise.
Years down the road-when the foggy rustle of thoughtful recollection was the only remnant he had of their love-he would look back on himself in this moment often, and smile wretchedly. Bitter hot tears of anguish ghosting down the ice of his cheeks.
...
...
Five Years Later
...
Small bare feet, dusty from the sandy paths that stood for roads in the backwater port town, scampered lightly through the halls of the Dawn's Tide brothel.
"Ma! Maaa!"
A small voice shrilled, causing several scantily dressed ladies and their clients to wince as the tumble of woolly hair and dirty rags passed by in a blur of commotion. The little boy was already halfway up the main stairwell before anyone thought to stop him. Lady Harahn, the Madame of the establishment, nodded discreetly to one of the younger girls, signaling for her to go after him.
"Ma! Lookit what I found!" the spry five year old nimbly avoided the girl's outstretched hands, dancing around the banisters on the second floor, "I gotta show you!"
In his small brown hands he held what appeared to be a gentleman's tricorne hat with the waggling, grey hairpiece still attached. It dangled just so that, upon turning the corner at the top of the stairs sharply, the boy tripped and sprawled bodily on the old, worn floorboards. He was up and scampering away the very next moment, panting in his excitement.
"Jack!" The young women who'd been charged with stopping the rampant scoundrel hissed as quietly as she could, clutching at her skirts as she raced behind him, "Jackie, get back here!"
But the little boy had already made his way to the door at the end of the hallway. Grinning a devilishly gap-toothed smile at his pursuant over his shoulder, his taupe brown eyes glinting mischievously, Jack rose up on his tip toes to paw at the brassy doorknob.
"Wait!"
The young woman chasing him froze in horror when she saw the flipped sign hung against the wood. She paled behind her rouge. That door was closed for a reason.
"Oh, no, no, no, noo-" she moaned quietly to herself, gathering her petticoats in a sweep of her arms, and starting to sprint towards him - But it was too late.
"It's a rich man's hat!" the little boy was chortling with mirth as the heavy door swung open, "With the hair still on it! You'll never believe it, Ma, you'll-"
The hat dropped to the floor with a quiet thud. Two sand-dusted little legs tottered for an instant, nearly losing their balance.
From inside the dimly lit room there came the unmistakable sound of heavy breathing and low, animal moaning accompanied by the driving creak of the mattress.
Jack stiffened where he stood in the threshold, his dark eyes growing wide. His small hands still held before his front emptily, as if he hadn't noticed he'd dropped the hat.
"M-Mum?"
The girl who'd been chasing him caught up to him suddenly. Her arms slung about him, and she drew the stunned five year old tightly to her chest, making him flinch and gasp.
"Mum!"
The boy began to grow frantic, frightened tears filling his uncomprehending gaze. He struggled wildly in the girl's arms. The man inside the room didn't seem to notice the interruption at all; his hands remained where they were, buried and knotted to the knuckle in the prostrate woman's kinky hair. The ceaseless crush of his hips slammed down upon her, knocking the bed frame into the wall behind hard enough to jostle the shelves of plants and odd trinkets that Jack and his mother had organized together.
"Jack, oh, Jackie, sweetheart." cried the girl as she fought to tug him away, "This is not for you to see."
He squirmed in her hold; small, urgent noises of distress that broke her heart to hear spilling from his lips. He clawed at her forearms, wrapped around him like the mighty trunks of the elephants his mother liked tell him about for bedtime stories.
"Aaah!" he kicked his sandy feet, thrashing, "Mum!" Tears rushed down his cheeks, and he was choking for breath.
The girl lurched the both of them backwards a few more steps, crying herself now. All the conversation in the brothel dropped to an uncomfortable lull as the sound of their struggle reached the downstairs.
"M... Muh-" Jack's cries snagged in his throat when his mother turned her face towards the still open doorway and saw him around the planted arms of the man grinding atop her. There was a flash of disoriented shock in her face, and then a look of the coldest defeat. And something deeper, something worse that the little five year old couldn't understand seeing in his mother's beautiful, dark visage. A look that would haunt him forever, long past almost any other memory he had of her had paled and blunted with time.
He fell limp in the girl's hold, curling in on himself as the unbearable sensation of his chest collapsing in on itself struck him mightily. She gathered him closer to her chest, dragging the crying child back down the hallway.
Jack began to shriek.
"Nooo!" his feet kicked the air, "No! Muuuum! Mum!"
"Hush," the girl wept, trying desperately to quiet the distraught child in her grasp, "Oh, don't. Don't-"
"-No! Le'go!" he sobbed brokenly, "He's hurting her! Muuum!"
"Jack, Jackie-"
...