Spreye
A story in 300 words
Gracie can’t swim. One slip, she’ll be opening her arms in salty-lunged resignation.
Her boots are brined with seawater, patterned with white waves like an incoming tide. She bends, back to oars, face set, determined as a petrel landing on a stormy cliff. Heyah-Haw. Sea races. Summer light dives tern-like into the waters before dawning anew. She mustn’t be seen but summertime-dark scurries.
She steers onto a shore, sandpit-small. Pushes into silt, a spike, upright as a guardsman. Ties the boat with a knot learnt before she can remember. Grabs buckets, throws them sandwards. Takes a small-headed shovel, “Just right fr’a lass”, grandfather said. Its handle has changed as often as his expression: once when grandmother died, once when a filly proved barren, once when Gracie kissed “that boy”, and once on hearing he’d be in the graveyard before lambing. Which sounds like four but is just two. Angry and angrier.
Their title deed is kept safe as a grail. Thickly-black ink declares in Latin, Edward I gifts the Mumbys 150-acre Spreye; an island, newly-birthed after decades of stones and sand fattened sandbar into farmland. Centuries, cattle chew, sheep graze, and a stockade of crofts resists the North Sea. Then, a breath, once gentle as a candle snuff, starts bellowing. Weather confronts Spreye. Fights. Sea, always peevish, becomes vengeful. Rain swells tides into torrents. The insomniac sea tosses and turns, scouring Spreye like pumice removing dead skin, depositing scrapings onto a jut of land a northerly hop away.
Spreye’s wasting. The owner onto whose land this flotsam-acreage accumulates remains oblivious. Gracie doesn’t. Each grain belonging to Spreye, she reclaims bucketful by bucketful. Time to row home, silt-filled buckets perilously lowering the boat. She ignores the curled cold ache of fear in feet. Tomorrow she’ll return. A Sisyphean repossession beyond bravery.
Barbara Whitfield 