![]() I received all sort of gifts that I kept hidden inside a box. I think my mind travelled to all unknown places he told me about – places I thing I never would be. Fridays would be curious and I would be so excited to talk to him, wondering what new stories would come up. I wondered if she knew that I was keeping them. His gifts, I kept them in a corner of our hut, away from my grandmother’s eyes. Once in a while he would look at me and explain things looking at my eyes, which would grow by surprise. Some days he told me stories of his land and the others of the endless sea, the storms he had seen and the ships that had been travelling too fast. Some months went by and I visited him every Friday. As I turned to leave, he pulled my cheeks, adorably. It must have been an hour,I sat there, listening to him, all he said. I wanted to tell him, I too wanted to come with him because at least food wouldn’t be scarce then, would it? But I was too shy to say a word. ![]() I could feel my eyebrows rising and falling with everything he mentioned. So I listened as he spoke about the wonders he had seen, the taste of food he had gotten and so on. No body spoke to me like that apart from my grandmother. We sat there in silence for some time and he asked for my name and how far I lived. He came out of the ship and sat by the shore. He handed me over one more of it and said he got his during his voyage. I sat by his side and inquired where he got this thing. “It’s called a chocolate, Hanna De,” he smiled up at me. What was it? The food that you gave me.” – I said with curiosity brimming up in my voice – almost in a murmur. This time I was alone when I saw him walking towards me, and I smiled. I almost forgot about the gift when I met him the next Friday. But well, she would not budge, would she? I wanted to tell her, he looked kind to me. When I told him that a stranger gave me this, she almost sweated over it, reminding me repeatedly not to consume anything given by a stranger. I shared it with my grandmother and she wondered from where I got it. “ Don’t sell it, eat it.” I wondered if he was a mind reader. I hesitantly looked at it, took it suspiciously and as I was leaving it, he buzzed, A golden colored wrapper with something solid inside. He asked me to come closer and handed me something. “ Hmm, I am a new sailor in this ship“, he said, perhaps what I might have mistaken with a smile. How did I not know him? Even last Friday I had come to the same ship. Then it striked me, I had been coming to this place since youth, and I know almost all the shipman, sailors and moorers. “ I collect things from the ships, ask the moorer. I would never be able to move past him, so was his size. I was ready to leave when he asked me to stop and stood in front of me with folded hands. “What’s up there, littlie?” – Said a man with broad shoulders, a moustache and a small cut in the middle of the eyebrow. As I went close to the ship and began to look underneath the panel, I heard a voice calling me. I went into the ship in search of any exquisite things that might turn my luck for that day since my grandmother was running fever. My curiosity should have killed me someday. I belonged to the group of sellers who collected stuffs in the morning to sell them throughout the afternoon, only to retire late at night. That had always been our means of living, since the time my parents died of the sea-sickness that the vast waterbody bought.Įvery evening on Fridays we looked in the docked ships, sometimes leaving a trail of sand beneath them, for something akin to lost jewels. What did we not collect? From the tainted glass, the colored mirrors which had little beads of reflecting stone on it, the sleek bow stitched with golden reels, to shells of oyesters – we collected all things fancy and nice. ![]() We lived by collecting the left out items from the sea, and selling them to the local market. In the distant, the ships were docked whose siren used to wake me up from my sleep. The hut was surrounded by oak and mixed sclerophyll forests. Near the mediterranian sea where the sand dunes mixed with the oceans in the horizon, I and my grandmother lived in a small hut.
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