The Shipwreck of the Ispolen

For one hundred and twenty-five years, I’ve been nothing more than a watery whisper, dissipating in shifting waves, crumbling to shadowy fragments, perpetually washed upon the sandy shore. My fingers are ghosts stretching longingly and painfully back to Norway, where love was once known. Cruelly, my spirit is trapped here: entrapped by watery shackles as a feral animal, craving to return home.

Alma.

Betrothed to marry in our home village of Sunndal, on the Norwegian west coast, my life felt anchored, secure ties of willowy warmth formed in the iced breeze. Our courtship was long, having been promised to the other as children. Our families grew up in the same village, Hoelsand, where, as infants, we’d play in local fields, crisp with frost, playing hide and seek with other village children. Alma always shone brightly. She still does as a beacon for a lost sailor, bereft and wave-tossed by uncaring, brutish, and liquified towers, pummelling tall above my washed-out head.

I chose to remain hidden within the unseen bowels of the ship, buried in the hold. Crew member nine was never formally recorded. My uncle, the Ispolen’s Captain, having allowed me free, undisclosed passage to heal a broken heart. Time away from pining upon Norwegian shores, persistently seeing Alma betrothed to another man right beneath my bleary sight. He had known heartache, having lost his wife, my benevolent aunt. The stains of loss bedecked us both, yet my uneasy sadness appeared unspent within me as if it could burrow an existence into the lost ether of time. My uncle manned a ship – persisted, akin to the gnarly, inflexible innards of a hardy pine cone, even after years of being storm-wracked on depleted woodland floors.

Markedly, heartache doesn’t befit my melancholy: it drips unendingly as time, bending, before erasing, the best parts of me – the once prestigious Norwegian gentleman, due to marry his childhood love. Fate had other plans for Alma and me, but she would prove to marry happily. Prosper. Grow fruitful. Contrastingly, my precarious fate was a dead albatross around my neck: sorrow eclipsed all of me, drowning both starboard and port side until any form of navigational compass for my survival cracked under the strain of pressure atop it. The needlepoint became guide-less, blinded as milky cataracts upon a grandfather’s world-weary eyes.

I don’t blame the lifeboat sailors. They knew nothing of my existence on board. I had sworn the other men to secrecy, not wanting the world to know of my sorrow. I prayed that my melancholia would weaken, dissolving into barely visible bands of ghostly ink enclosed in a jar of water. It did not. Too stealthy were its steely anchors. I did not fight. I chose to fall.

I remember plummeting to deep sea depths, a shipwreck of a man, where blocks of ice passed me, acting as full-length bevel mirrors, reflecting my dying, water-filled self—snapshots of each strangled breath of unleashed physical hell captured while my lungs filled with an oceanic spill. Within my last conscious moments, I recall some icy blocks floating high above me on the sea’s surface, slowly melting like billowing wedding gowns, spreading chalky smudges of satin across the storm-spun, grey-slate waters and skies. Alma’s face echoed in one – an inverted angel, with the weak sun’s rays silhouetting her auburn hair as a halo. I still loved her – even then.

Alma and I had once skated upon such ice as the Ispolen transported, frolicking and love drunk upon frozen lakes and rivers in our youth. Crunching, slipping, and sliding, amidst heady pangs of hilarity, joyously rattling us both, awakening energetic spirits with lives still unraveling, pathways left to lead. A wedding. Children. A growing family. Male heirs. All now are frozen figments – sharp shards of ice that grind against my frayed humanity.

The Ispolen had shipwrecked adjacent to the coast of Sheringham. My first attempts to walk aboard land were intrepid, pale as the ghostly spirit of the ship itself: dwindled to a rickety, wooden ribcage, stubbornly submerged and unretrievable, lost to sandy oblivion. After decades had laboriously swam by me in hazy, blurred mosaics as a drunken swing set game, I summoned the strength to elongate my longing hands to the shoreline. She grew bereft as I did – we mirrored each other with blots of ravaging disrepair – broken and weatherbeaten. As each frame rotted, the sea biting into its once sturdiness, my goodness evaporated. I allowed it to be chiseled out of me by the sea’s harsh nature. The ship and I were ruined in synchronicity – equally losing purpose.

One night, in long years, I dared to place my hollow fingers upon the coarse sands: my first touch of humanity or a coastal semblance of it. Nobody saw. Back then, nobody gossiped about my existence. I was an unknown. A translucent outsider whose hold on the world was delicate, as flimsy as satin dreams, washed clean by the realism of morning rain.

Weeks were endured while I grew bolder, having stomached my grief and a broken heart for far too long. An ice pick had gouged into any remnant of fleshiness that my still heart possessed, wielding it to impervious iron cords. The emboldened flames of the lit gas lamps along the beach’s promenade invited my sick fancy. I was endeared to their flickering effervescence, praying to curl golden flames around my outstretched, tomb-like hands. I had missed heat so very dearly. Its fierce kiss had evaded me for a cavernous duration where my corporeal shell knew nothing but frigid ice, coursing waves of frozen tunnels, where my soul splintered to icicles – sharp, nonsensical shards that pricked at the edge of my dwindling consciousness.

So I haunted coastal walkers, a whispy fugitive, welding my ghastly face within the gas-lamp-lit flames, spurred into being by the lamplighters, boys of the town. I grew impatient for their dusk-time arrival, yearning to pull elongated O shapes with my saline mouth, washed free of moral fibre. My eyes would stretch as ascending demons, rising malevolently from the coals of hell, as passersby stared dumbfounded, alarmingly horror-stricken, at my shipwrecked countenance. It bore the marks of love’s negligence; each seaweed crustacean leeched to my skin told a story of extreme woe. The wrinkles in my brow, the deepest crevices in which the living would lose their souls, shackled to pits of watery despair.

I was once a moral man – an upstanding Norwegian citizen. Now, I am a horror tale, the fabric of macabre legends that thwart people’s existences who dwell close to Sheringham shores, tinging their escapist daydreams to plumes of leaden feathers, tar-drenched, burdensomely heavy. Their minds have no prospect of taking flight. I thrive off their collective suffering. I’m twisted. Evil.

The Ship Inn invited my darkened interest one wintery night. The sea was storm-tossed, tumultuous, as my churning emotions. From afar, I believed Alma sat in the window booth of the inn. The golden stalk of a candle illumined her delicate face. Her features softened as I approached closer, haunting the inn, pervading its walls, and wishing to free her from its containing helm. In desperation, I pressed my watery features to the windowpane. She turned. Horror-struck. The piercing notes of her petrified screams still echo within my sea-eaten shell. She wasn’t Alma, and she never could be. No woman could. My ghostly mark had ruined this young innocent, making her eternally traumatised by men and the cloaks of darkness.

With even more time, I worsened still. Merely channeling abject fear into the very hearts of innocents bored me. I longed for the coal-stirring comfort of a lover. A replacement for Alma – now long buried, happily deadened to the prolonged pain I had no choice but to labour under the weight of. I chose to take a seaside bride to mark the drowning of the Ispolen and my shipwrecked corpse every night on the 23rd of January.

I claim a new maiden for every dismal anniversary of the shipwreck and my drowned, gasping soul. They freely saunter into the sea, lured by my duping siren call of love. They are mere lambs, blithely stepping into a water-filled doom, where I chain their innocently pale hearts to my own. Over time, theirs crack too, mirroring the multiple flaws of my own; its charred entrails entomb any lasting hope, suffocating it with blackened waters.

I have over fifty opal brides of the sea—all wallow underneath my tail of decay. I’m no longer even remotely human. My legs have channeled into a scaly tail like a sea beast. My brides are prisoners, reflections of my fractured loss, where broken love destroys all with a Herculean grip.

***

The night of the 23rd of January 2023 fast approaches. To the people of Sheringham, seek to hide your daughters, for I am shipwrecked, lethally carved as a sharpened blade.

Photo by Stefano Pollio on Unsplash