The Storyteller: The Tale of Dragon Ghan

[annarti.livejournal.com]

Sen still couldn’t completely banish Captain Tu from her thoughts. She didn’t entirely want to, either. On the morning of her birthday, she and Kaiji were cleaning the morning’s catch, along with half a dozen other children in the village. It was a communal gathering. If one fishing boat didn’t have a good day, another may have caught too much for one family to eat. Everything was tossed together and distributed among the families for breakfast. This morning, Kaiji was gutting the smaller fish while Sen cleaned them. The bigger teenagers got the bigger fish, like salmon and long, slippery garfish. No part of the fish went to waste. The guts and the scales would be boiled up to make stock for soup that night, with kelp that hung in dried ribbons in the sun.

( 1969 words )