The Fisherman's Wife

It's been 100 hundred days since Jared left on the fishing boat and she's out there today, just like every other day.

Juliet sits by the edge of the water on a bleached piece of driftwood. It's been there since they moved here. Their small shack overlooks the ocean. The wind is blowing off of the ocean. The breeze is not gentle, the waves lapping and crashing across the stones that are like sharp teeth rising up from the ocean edge. The young man stands at his shack and watches the woman. She pulls an old gray sweater closer around her shoulders that are slumped like a weary tree in a storm.

The world seems to have stopped, at least for her. Everyday he has watched her walk out here since the last day that her husband pushed off from the shore alone in his small fishing boat.

The word around the local store is that he left one morning before she even awoke. His intentions were to fill his net and come back and surprise her, at least that was what the note he left her on The breakfast table said.

The only thing on the table besides the note was a cup half full of coffee and a plate with crumbs from his last piece of toast.

He'd seen them walking hand-in-hand on the shore many times before. He was envious of the love that he saw between the couple from far off. They would stop from time to time and look at one another and smile. Sometimes the husband would pick up a stone and toss it into the ocean watching it skip across the waves. She would laugh sometimes and run ahead tossing her sandals on the sand an go wading into the salty ocean water, pulling up her skirt high.

He didn't know Juliet, but he felt that he knew her very well. From that window he wished that he could go to her and share some kind of comfort but her lonely vigil seem to tell him to stay back and let her wait. He hoped fervently that somehow, someway that fishing boat would come rowing back to shore with a net overflowing with fish.

After her husband went missing, they sent out a crew of local men who came to the shores looking for at least a body. But no body could be found. Perhaps somewhere he had washed ashore on a small island. He was afraid the perhaps the man had sunk deep into the ocean or was attacked by the merciless sharks. When the sun started to sink he would see her stand up and pull that gray sweater close around her, hugging herself. She would glance back across the ocean, her lips move as if she were talking to him, or praying, or both. Then she would fade back into the little shack that they shared and wait until morning when she could come back again.

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