First chapter of the completed manuscript for publication
Fergus Mackenzie–

Fathers died on the island. So often, it seemed their only purpose, and so it no longer interested the residents of the little place. Because of this, not a soul watched the coffin as it was lowered into the ground. All eyes were on the departed’s son who stood over the hole, an arms length from his mother. Grief was far more compelling than the dead, and a child’s grief, in its new grasping of the despair the world had in store for them, even more so. Nothing pleased adults more than dangling the cruelty of life in front of the young’s eyes as if they themselves had not made it so. Tears streamed down the boy’s face and the rest of the funeral goers looked on entranced and, (to varying degrees of understanding), the same thought occurred to them all. The boy was beautiful. His father would have said he was too old to cry but his father was dead so Sebastian cried. As he stood under an assembly of clouds, morning dew rising like spirits around the thin crowd, he looked like a portrait of grief and loss distilled to its purest form. This was the true glee and the fulfillment of the hidden purpose of funerals. His cheeks were red and hot as tears came down in even streams and his eyes and face were swollen but all agreed it only added to his beauty. The bent forms of darker trees scraped against the sky, encroaching on the cemetery as the priest waved his hands in gesture as if spelling out some arcane language in the air. Sebastian looked to his mother, so practiced in grief, but she could be of no comfort to the boy.
Sebastian’s mother took a handful of dirt in a clenched fist and tossed it gently atop the coffin, now resting at the bottom of the grave. When she looked at Sebastian, the young boy, crying and helpless and confused, the thought occurred to her that she should comfort him but the instinct to nurture was not there so she just looked on as if the boy was obscured in some way. Since Sebastian was an infant, she had often refused to hold him or touch him, only to nurse him had she ever held him in her arms but only out of an animal necessity did she do this. She never put a hand on his shoulder to guide him along nor had she ever graced his cheek or stroked his hair like a mother should. She shrunk away from his beauty as if it would strike her down where she stood. He was a cruel slight against her from the outer world.
This grieving wife had been born on the island and raised on the island and not one good thing had happened in her entire life. She was not a shrewd woman. She was kind and thoughtful and smart, but those were not things the island rewarded. Her father died when she was younger than her son was now, he had waited, in one last act of cruelty, until she could just hold memories of him. Her own mother never recovered from the loss. She saw herself in her daughter, so in an act of self-flagellation and taking up the solemn duties of a man, she would bend her daughter over the kitchen table and beat the girl until her wrist hurt. As soon as Sebastian’s mother was old enough to work she got a job at the tavern by the dock as a maid and soon after that, she grew tired of her mother’s beatings and married the kindest man she had met there and moved into his family home. It took a year until the beatings began again, but he had a gentler hand than her father and mother, so she was happy. Now, her husband was dead and without his guiding hand, she had little idea what to do. She thought herself vile, lower than dirt and undeserving of any good. When she had her baby boy, she looked at him, wet and wailing, and could not believe that such a perfect thing had come from her. A mocking reminder of some distant good. Some women might have devoted themselves to that beauty they created but she had been broken beyond repair. She was too dirty and too guilty to touch such a thing. The boy must have been for someone else entirely. 
Rain had begun to come down softly on the hill as if to hurry the ceremony along and the priest had gone on far too long for a man undeserving of any memorial and the crowd began to become visibly restless. The priest, sensing that he was losing his audience, wrapped it up quickly, and within minutes their cemetery hill was quiet.

Sebastian dreamt of a garden that night. Beautiful and teeming with life. He saw a great big tree whose branches didn’t look swept and bent by the ocean wind but stood strong and proud in the center of it all. All the flowers gathered around that tree in worship and they gave everything in their power for it to grow bigger but the tree did not see the worth it had, as it was a tree, and could not see at all. But the flowers knew, and so in their offerings they begged the tree to reduce them to nothing and drain them of life and beauty so it could stand taller still and give them shade so that they may never grow again. 
Two nervous looking birds engaged in something close to play in the upturned branches of a small pine tree outside Sebastian’s window. Sharp splinters of old green-painted wood jutted out of the sill revealing the tan guts of soft wet wood underneath. The wind had steadily gotten worse over the days and the house made fearful clattering and groaning in its attempt to cast away its thin coil and return to the earth. It didn’t know that every bit of unused wood on the island was collected and hauled for burning in the fires of ships that would be sent forth to open waters. But that was hardly the worst fate for an old house. Some more forgotten homes remained standing against the calamity of the island like they were cankers on the skin and long before their will had gone to keep out the elements, people would abandon the things and wind would whistle through holes in the siding and rain would drip from the roof into sad scenes of past living, leaking mildew and seeping mold but there would be no purgation. It would remain standing and by the odd passerby, regarded as an awful blight on the landscape.

Sebastian woke to the dull grey light and clattering wind with his sheets soaking wet with what he only could know as sweat. Beneath the groaning of the siding under stress he heard his mother downstairs, busying herself with sobs and wails. He rose out of bed and climbed the crumbling stairs and at the kitchen table, saw his mother with her head in her hands caked in the kind of dark only their little kitchen could produce. She raised her head and the boy thought she looked like a banshee or some sea-witch, her hair frayed and wild and her face frantic.
“Sebastian, my sweet boy. My good, good boy, come here and sit with your mother.” The floor creaked as he crossed the room down and took his place across the table from her. He looked out the window and watched the light struggle to make it through the small window that sat alone above the sink. The sun could try all it might, but there was no stripping the house of dark, “your father… he was a good man. Remember that for me, Sebastian. When you’re feeling sad you have to remember that.” 
Sebastian’s father beat him nearly as much as he did his mother, but he didn’t mind. It served as the only reminder that he was one deserving of love. Sometimes, when he was feeling sad, he would stay out in town or wait in the tall grass outside the house until after dark just so he could feel his father’s hand on his backside to know for certain he was.
“I’ll remember,” said Sebastian, knowing it would make his mother happy. 
“Good… such a good boy,” she wiped the tears from her face, “I have to work tonight but I’ll leave dinner on the stove, okay? Don’t worry, I’ll be back by morning.” Sebastian nodded and leapt from the chair to make his escape.

Sebastian and his mother lived a short ways outside of town, in the sparse farmland that sat in the center of the island, long after the buildings of the city thinned out and fields of weeds and grass stretched on to meet forests and cliffs at the side of the sea. There was no single distinction between the two areas, like a feeling fading without some great catastrophe, slowly and un-deliberately, wood fences sumac and moss nestled themselves in between stretches of cyclopean walls. Soft dirt and silvery fields faded to harsh cobblestone and metal gates bordering towering stone buildings. Rock walls marking the separation of shanty houses with neighboring patches of dirt gradually became brick shops and glass windows. The view obscured by structure and order instead of meadows of pokeweed and wild rose and the beach grass far-off against the dunes. He enjoyed the benign mystery that the city held for him. You could see everything from the front of his home, but in town, vision was useless. Standing in front of his cottage he watched the sun clear the horizon and settle firm into the sky again and saw the jagged dark outline of the city pressed up against the new reddish sky.
Sebastian took his usual route, cutting through the alleys like a high-tailed cat who had been let out of the house for the day without the slightest intent to ever return. Just before the busyness of town, where the sound of voices and crowds were faint in the distance, Sebastian turned down an alley and stopped when he saw, cross-legged and sat very still against the wall, a stranger among a flock of unbothered gulls. There were plenty of people Sebastian didn’t know on the island, but even those he had never met had the distinct familiarity of a local to them, or else the stink of a tourist who would be gone before the weekend ended. This man had neither, and when Sebastian’s foot came down on the stone, the horde of gathering grey supplicants around the figure burst into frenzied flight to find some quieter street to loiter on. As he got closer to the man, the first thought that came to mind was sailor, but Sebastian had either seen every sailor on the island, or enough of them to know what they looked like. Instead, the man looked like he had washed up from some distant island. His skin wasn’t tanned and dark or hardened by the sun and wind, but blistered and red. Thirsty and desperate for a reprieve that the stranger would not grant and his hair was sandy and sparse and sat in thin strands on his head. The feeling of danger was foreign to the boy, he had never felt afraid before, even when his father was drunk enough to beat him without restraint, so when the hair stood up on the back of his neck he mistook it for something else entirely. Sebastian thought it a kind of curiosity, or anticipation, that rested unpleasantly in his gut rather than high upon his chest. So with little self preservation he walked towards the stranger.
“I heard about your father, boy,” he said.
His voice sounded as if it had been stretched too thin and the feeling became too heavy in the bottom of his stomach to be mistaken for anything good. He intended to ask the man how he knew his father but the words got caught in his throat and instead he stood dumbfounded in the alley before him.
“You shouldn’t mourn the man. He was rotten and a drunk, you know that, boy.” 
Sebastian wanted to tell him that he didn’t know a thing about his father but neither did he. Instead, Sebastian took off running through the alley and didn’t stop running until he reached the comfort of noise in the center of town.
The boy weaved through the crowd of tourists in the main square. He liked crowds and the people that made them up in all their self important posture or dainty pretenses. Blending into the sea of legs and feet there was no one to dote on him, no old woman to scold him, no man to thrash him. He preferred to be right in the middle of town amongst the strangers, but only during the summer did the island grant that peace. Even then, if one were to stray off of Main Street, the people quickly thinned out and the footsteps echoed and the only company that was to be found was the bazaars of grey gulls congregating in noisy prayer to some unseen force. 
He stopped at a wood stall, rickety and makeshift with the word confectionary painted delicately on the front in white paint and pink trimmings decorating the dark wood beneath. A young woman ran the stall for the bakery further down the street but Sebastian preferred to stop here, even when he had no taste for sweets. The woman who ran the stall was kind and would smile at him when he appeared peering above the stall to look at the cakes displayed behind their little glass covers. His true reason for coming, was the young woman and her habit of bending down low over the counter to hand him his cake, her smile and floating high-pitched, “hello handsome,” and the gawking look he could sneak down her blouse as she did it. 
Sebastian held the cake close to his chest in a small box and began his dance through the crowd once again. He moved with an invincibility that children often do, the world being something that moved around him, only ever grazing him and leaving just as quickly. But he was only safe from the adults who pushed and shoved their way about, not to one of his own. Just as he broke through the sea of people, Anna, spotted him and pushed her way through the crowd in one forceful motion and caught him by the arm.
“Why didn’t you tell me your father passed away,” She scolded him.
He scanned his surroundings looking for a means of escape but she still gripped his thin arm. She was the only other child he really knew, as she lived on a farm (that for a very long time, did no farming at all) a short ways from him. He hated Anna, although didn’t fully understand why. She had a distinct air of bitterness to her that he couldn’t stand. She stink of the old women who clung to their windows, watching their streets like hawks for any disturbance or children unsupervised. Sebastian sensed this without fully grasping why, just as Anna adopted every last mannerisms of the one and only adult in her life, her grandmother, without ever realizing it. Because of this, Anna resented Sebastian’s boyishness, and a relationship of oblivious animosity was the result. 
She took a deep breath and repeated as if she were at a recital, “I am so sorry for your loss. If there is anything I can do for you, don’t hesitate to tell me.”
“Let me go!” Sebastian had heard those words come from the mouths of every last adult at his father’s funeral and it pained him to hear her parrot that same insincerity. 
“Have some manners, you idiot. I’m offering my condolences.” He yanked his arm out of her grip and took off running through the alleyway. He ran for his life, panting and stumbling through the forest of bodies, as he tried to gain distance from his assailer. He had somewhere he needed to be and wouldn’t let anyone make him late.
Sebastian slipped from an alleyway at the end of Main Street and, finally reaching the pier, took his place in front of the ferry’s ticket station. He sat on the steps, just to the side enough so that no one would ask him to move, and started eating his cake. Any moment, the ship would sound off in triumph as it lumbered onto the dock in great ceremony to let out its cargo of men and women. Sebastian would wait and watch them spill onto the shore of his home. Anxious and serious business men whose wives convinced them they needed a holiday from their work. Unimportant artists, looking for inspiration in dreamy seascapes and sandy cliffs. And functioning alcoholics who were tired of drinking and fucking in the same old haunts, looking for a change of scenery to enrich themselves in. Sebastian thought that if all these people came here, thinking it beautiful, then the place they came from must be too horrible to imagine. He watched everyone crawl off the boat with interest, and took great pride in his ability to sum them up just by their stride or the cut of their pants, but what he liked more, and the reason he came to the docks every morning, was something else entirely. Daughters, ferried in with their parents, some came with lovers in hopes to fall even deeper in love, and others arrived in a crowd of friends to soak on the beach. Sebastian watched them now with something rising inside of him. He would scrutinize them all with a kind of eager curiosity. As if the world itself must lay somewhere in them, some way in which they moved and spoke.  They would twirl off the ship in a flurry of flowing fabric, bright and light and full of life and they would dance across Sebastian’s vision, like ballerinas performing just for him and then just as quickly exit the stage into the crowds of the town never to be seen again. 
“Sebastian, boy!” He heard a voice boom out from the bottom of the stoop. The inspector, the only source of authority on the island, was standing tall with his hands tucked behind his back, “ha! I know what it is you’re doing here, I do. I used to do the same when I was a boy. You’ve come to watch the men work, haven’t you? It was all I wanted to do when I was your age. I used to dream of living a life like them. Braving the sea, battling the elements, seeing far-off lands.” Sebastian knew that if you let them, most adults would talk themselves dizzy. He didn’t mind the inspector, though. He was always kind and he appreciated him not mentioning his father. 
It came as a vague thing on the horizon, and quickly to a mechanical behemoth lumbering onto the shore as if it came from some other more innovative world. The dock master stood tall and stern over his duty with his hands on his hips as men and women with spotless dress stood around him. He barked orders at a gangly group of young workers all in anticipation of the coming ferry. A horn blew and bells chimed and the awful rumbling of the engines slowed as the ship reached its dock. The dock master shouted once again and he received some sign of assurance from the top deck and then there was a rattling of chains and a flurry of movement from the boat and shore. The dock master received a hawser thrown from a ferrymen and in an instant the vessel was secured and a ramp was slid onto the pier followed by whole mobs of people coming ashore with luggage in tow. There were shrieks of excitement from long awaited meetings and between the movement of longshoremen and bellhops receiving their guests luggage and declarations of lobster dinners and fresh fish and warm chowder, the vacationers had gone as quickly as they came, filing out of view into the city.
As if in a dream, just as the last of the crowd dispersed, Sebastian thought he heard the ringing of bells again that drowned out all other sound, higher and more hopeful than the horns of the ferry. In a moment of sincere clarity that shattered every listless hour of his young life, he was aware that he was witnessing a moment he would remember forever. He could see his life, everything that would come to pass, in a torrent, and knew that through it all, the image of this scene would bring him to ecstasy through the worst of it. A girl, as mesmerizing as Sebastian had ever seen, climbed down from the ferry onto the dock, the last to get off. Her father’s hand firmly resting on her shoulder, guiding her down as to make sure she did not slip through the gap into the water. Now, Sebastian had never read poetry, nor had the presence of mind to realize what exactly he was seeing. He had seen the sweeping waves at dawn from the cliff at the highest point of the island, the purple sky haunting the straggling beeches of the forest from the roads below, the green pastures dotted with horses and cows stretching out as far as the world went but Sebastian did not think of any of these things as beautiful. They had never been described as beautiful, nor had anyone looked at them in amazement or awe in front of him. The only thing he knew to be beautiful was himself, and only at the insistence of others, but he had very little idea of what the word meant. So now, as he watched this girl clumsily and beautifully navigate the docks with shoes that did not seem to lend themselves to walking, the only thought that he could grasp was, “I’m looking at me. I’m looking at myself.” 
“Who is that?” The words tumbled out of him without him meaning to, but the inspector answered in earnest
“The Abney’s. From the mainland. Very wealthy folk. I’m shocked you don’t know them, Sebastian. They stay for the summers nearly every year! Have a house up the glades.” 
Sebastian didn’t think it was strange he had never seen them before, because at the moment, he was not thinking at all, “The girl?”
“Ah, Mr. Abney’s daughter, Isabella. Just a few years older than you. But don’t get any ideas, boy. With a face like yours she’d fall in love and we don’t want that, do we?”