I looked up, and all of a sudden Jack and Anamaria were gone. There were skeletons in the boat with me! And well, I've always had this weird little phobia about being trapped alone in a small space with rotting skeletons that stand and move around on their own. I screamed and clung to the mast, climbing up it like a frightened squirrel. I looked down at the skeletons over my shoulder--and saw that my shoulder was bone. So was my whole body. Dear God, I was a skeleton. A small panicked skeleton clinging to the mast and quivering.

"It's all right, girl," one of the skeletons called to me in Anamaria's voice. "It's the curse, remember?"

Oh right. The curse. Well, fine then. I was totally and completely fine with being a living skeleton with soft blackened bits of putrid flesh hanging off my bones, as long as there was a good reason. I climbed back down carefully, staring at my hand. My bony white hand with bits of gristle still between the small bones. Even my clothing had become tattered and rotten. And so, too, had the bandanna over my right hand.

It didn't hurt at all now, whatever that meant. And without flesh, it couldn't be too gruesome, could it? So I sat down on the deck and gingerly unwrapped the bandanna. My hand fell off.

It hit the deck with such a perfectly deadpan thump that I almost wanted to laugh. Except that I had just, you know, lost my hand. The other skeletons turned at the noise, and it took them a moment to realise what had happened.

I felt dizzy and nauseous, which didn't make much sense considering that, strictly speaking, I didn't have a stomach. But I knew that if I let myself start to break down there'd be no going back. So I shrugged it off. "I guess that takes care of that," I said airily, picked the hand up, and, God help me, tossed it into the ocean.

"Why'd you do that?" the skeleton that must have been Jack almost screamed. "Get it back!"

It had sunk, the water was dark, and the boat had moved on. It was a needle in a haystack at that point. I looked at Jack and shrugged. "I don't have any more use for it anyway."

"No... you don't... wounds heal when you come out of the moonlight," Jack said, still astonished at me. "It might have healed back on!"

Well, shit. I tried to cover my face with my hands the way I do when I've just done something very stupid, but that didn't work out well. I couldn't even shut my eyes. "Oh God, I'm an idiot. My hand... Oh God."

Anamaria came over and put her arm on my shoulder in a comforting way. Except that it was cold bone that touched me, so I nearly jumped out of my skin. Come to think of it, I already was out of my skin. "It's done now, eh? Don't worry yourself too much. Probably wouldn't have healed anyway. Least this way it'll heal clean."

"That's right," Jack said, backpedaling with all his might. "Matter of fact, one of Barbossa's pirates had an eye missing, and that didn't come back even after the moonlight."

I sighed. Not sure how I was doing that without lungs, but I was already talking without lungs and moving without muscles, so it clearly wasn't my place to decide what was and wasn't possible. "Forget it," I said, sounding brittle. "Just forget it, okay? It can't be fixed now. I've got one hand, and I'm fine with that." I picked up the bandanna and handed it to Jack. "Here, you can have this back."

He pulled away from it delicately. "I don't want it back." He had a point. It was pretty well soaked with blood and glop. I dropped it into the ocean too.

Skeletal, one-handed, no longer able to disbelieve anything, I was saved from utter insanity by the appearance of Coral Point--and the Black Pearl. It was beached, leaning far to one side, and the crew lay on the sandy beach not far from it, asleep.

There was a guard posted, though, and as soon as we were close enough to see them, they were close enough to see us. Distantly, I could hear yelling as the crew woke up. Jack clambered up the mast, perched on top of the beam supporting the sail, and waved his hat at them. "It's me, Jack!" he yelled.

"Jack!" The man on guard--I didn't know his name--didn't seem particularly fazed by the whole skeleton thing.

So we landed there, the crew woke up, we were welcomed back, we explained what had happened to us, so on and so forth. They'd just finished repairs on the Pearl and would drag her back out to sea in the morning, and then we could return to the Isla de Muerta and break our curses.

Ever practical, the men of the crew went back to sleep almost immediately. Jack, Anamaria and I couldn't, so we just lay on the beach, hands folded behind our heads, looking up at the stars.

"Funny the way things always work out, isn't it?" Jack said to no one in particular. "When I left England, I would have laughed if anyone had told me I'd so much as let my hair grow long. And if you said I'd be a living skeleton lying on the beach with a pirate crew and the ship I command..."

"I don't think anyone expects to become a pirate," Anamaria mused. "It just happens. You get poor enough or mad enough or alone enough and it happens."

"Aye. Just like falling in love."

Anamaria laughed, not completely kindly. "And you'd know?"

"I'm already a pirate," Jack said. "Having that and love would just be... greedy."

"Or maybe you're just so greedy you keep all your love to yourself."

"Maybe," Jack said, unflappable.

"So, er, what were you before you were pirates?" I asked lamely, trying to break the tension. The moon was setting on the horizon, and our skin was coming back, translucent at first, but thickening. I looked over at Jack, and his body looked like an X-ray, bones draped with the ghostly outlines of flesh.

"A cartographer," he said with a laugh. "A bloody mapmaker."

Anamaria was quiet for a moment, and then answered softly, "I wasn't anything before. I was just a girl. I don't know what my life would have been otherwise."

We just lay there on the beach, staring up at the sky, for a long time. The moon set completely, and we became fully human again. I had a clean, healed stump on the end of my right arm--not as nice as a hand, but a damn sight better than a painful gangrenous wound.

At sunrise the crew awoke, and immediately set about the task of hauling the Pearl out to sea. The boat was huge, but they tied ropes to the front and put levers in the back and as Jack barked commands and Anamaria and Gibbs echoed him, it moved. I was holding a rope of my own, and when the command came to heave, I heaved. It was hot, rough, hard work, and the pirates didn't complain or falter. They just grunted, and put every sinew against the ship, and with the creak of wood and the stink of sweat, the Pearl crawled down the sand and lifted up into the water.

As soon as everyone was on the ship and everything was in order, the pirates locked me down in the brig.