Ebb Tide

A sun-scorched tub, more barnacle than timber, drifts into a cobalt mirage where three maritime rejects—Davis, a skipper whose compass only points to shame; Herrick, a soft-souled drifter nursing a novel’s worth of regret; and Huish, a venomous jester pickled in gin—spy the pearl-walled Eden of Richard Attwater, solitary sovereign of a guano-laced atoll. They beach their failure like driftwood, expecting easy plunder; instead they find Attwater’s missionary civility stretched over volcanic wrath, his daughter Ruth a moonlit enigma tethered by coral and conscience. Greed uncorks: Davis salivates over the oyster’s pale moonlets, Huish schemes with the patience of a striking scorpion, while Herrick’s gaze lingers on Ruth’s salt-kissed silhouette until desire eclipses treachery. Discovery detonates: torches kiss the night, Huish becomes a howling comet, Attwater is felled beneath a toppling mast, and the lovers flee a pyre that hisses into surf where an octopus unfurls its tentacles like black silk. What survives is neither pearl nor ship but a brittle, phosphorescent tenderness wrested from carnage.