Ships on their Tongues by Brian Holland

Some men catch butterflies and pin them to a board.

The check-out girl stared vacantly into the divers displays arranged around the shop area. A spangle of silver nose-rings spoiling an otherwise perfect feature and her translucent skin glowed like it had been glazed and fired in a kiln.

She would be quite a catch ― to the right collector.

The girl, blush with goodness, all the while continued to slide groceries along the scanner towards him ― the man who dropped the items methodically into his carrier bags.

It isn’t that they gloat over them simply for collecting’s sake, no ― it’s because they can’t bear to lose such loveliness once it has been caught. And the possession of this beauty is its own confirmation of their need.

The girl screwed her delicate lips together in a wasted kiss as she shuffled more items off the conveyor.

A similar agency operates when people fall in love at first sight. They don’t know the other person; they know nothing about them. They are so overcome by beauty alone that they must pin it to a board in their mind. That way they can possess them, forever.

He watched through bottle lenses as she completed her work in silence. His latent thoughts hovered over the moments, like a net above circling fish.

Yes, this might seem sad to some people, particularly as that same confinement of beauty deprives the object of its very essence, leaving a hollow spectre of what was originally there. So, all the collector has is a mere simulacrum of its authenticity.

‘You’re as pretty as any butterfly,’ he said, passing her his credit card.

She smiled uncomfortably at the moisture on lips that protruded venally from the rough scrub of a greying beard and made no answer.

‘Men with love on their lips have beauty in their soul,’ adding as he left.

But men with iron in their hearts have ships on their tongues fraught with phoney cargoes that can slip easily into unmastered waters.

Looking beyond his shoulders, through the wide supermarket windows, she suddenly noticed how dark the day had become.

And rain came like a lifting tide…

Brian is a retired technical author who has also written fictional stories and poetry.

Photo by Brenner Oliveira at Pexels

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