Picture a Hollywood yacht; a Florida diversion. White paint on aluminium is sharp in the crisp sunlight. The sky and sea are filter split into hot copper and furnace green. The boat drifts with its white sail limp and passionless for the lack of wind, where no breath wakes the feverish ocean. The steel perfect mast casts a stiff little shadow from an overhead sun. Light waves lap up to caress the unnaturally smooth flanks of the decadent metal.
There are two on board. A bronzed man drowses at the tiller. His arm rests lightly on the rudder which angles up from the new purity of the blue ocean - the great eye of the green ocean. His head droops forward over thick sinews. Blood flows dark hot and strong in his slumber.
At the bow is a tall woman. She lies stretched full length across the deck, black ringlets of long springy hair cushioning her head and spread behind. Only a thin triangle of bright green fabric across her loins, protects her browning body from the sun god it worships. Her breasts are ripe and full. They laze heavily, the nipples dark and blind, quivering gently with the slow rise and fall of her chest. The shallow shadows which they cast are of no use. The cruel sun god bakes every available square centimetre of the offered flesh without mercy. Skin breathes desperately; gasping for life through pores which open to cry or bleed their rivulets of sweat. Tracks of dried moisture across the soft creamy white and darkening belly and thighs are only intermittently refreshed by beads of new liquid wrung from her dehydrating body. One leg hangs wantonly languid over the side of the boat to escape below the captive holding rails, whilst the other, bent back at the knee, receives the full grilling on the deck. Her toes cannot quite reach the water. On this shaded side, light, reflecting from the waves writhes lasciviously over the virgin hull and plays across the floating limb.
Nothing moves. The yacht is becalmed a half mile and an eternity short of a tropical island in a world quite different from the one where it was fashioned as a rich man’s toy. So subtle was the change that the crew continue their pleasures of indolence unaware. Ignorance is bliss, and bliss is sleep.
Under the gently rocking cradle the fish swim unnoticed. From their coral citadels they have come to shuttle about the new arrival. The gentle roar of water in the ears, shells pressed tight and waves on coasts is transmitted through the medium of the all encompassing sea right around the world and seems to find its own sonic echoes from the blade of the pleasure craft. Dissonance is delicate and retreating - beyond the course senses - vanishing as absorption to the green world is complete.
The woman stretches, forcing her arms behind her head. Tiny muscles are contorted beneath the skin, stretched on a rack to add to the torture of the heat. Their stabs of protest penetrate dimly through to their mistress’s torpid brain. She utters a low moan of mild protest. Her eyes half open. In the gap between wide open eyes and completely closed lids the sun is refracted through long dark lashes. It is hard to tell whether the shield black blue is genuine vision or a tungsten bolt of sheet lightning burning through an inner lid straight to the retina. There is no detail in the colour but then there is no detail in the sky. For a few moments she experiments with slowly opening and closing her eyes, recapturing the transitional blue and trying to pinpoint the moment when reality intrudes.
There is a balloon in the sky. Drifting from bow to stern she sees it suddenly and watches it without effort, continuing to lie sprawled in sacrifice to the sun. It is daubed with bright jungle purples and reds though it looks as if it was once white. In the full light coming from behind her head the occupants are mysterious. Although too small to make out clearly they look strangely foreign. All at once she knows, without being able to say why, that this is nowhere near Miami.
There is a brief conversation in the balloon which will not carry far in the pristine air. The two travellers watch through large amber eyes the clean lines of the boat below. It will ground on the coral about nightfall, they agree since only the weak sea currents are moving it. Guests of the spirits, they agree. In the high air their feathers gleam proud and tall from dark scalps. They have crossed many islands in the reclaimed “Daughter of the Sky”. This far above the still surface the nature of the air is kinder and it carries the patched cloth bubble with ease. But we cannot say where they are going.
In different elements, with different speeds their drift slowly separates the two vessels. Even when the sky ship briefly burns its lifting tongue it is only a quiet echo to the sea. The woman sleeps.
