…snap, drawing the dagger to kill him.

“Alright.” You look him straight in the eye as you talk, wrist easing the dagger into position for a quick draw. You take a deep breath, unavoidably breathing in the musk of sweat and semen.

At the end of your lungs capacity, you begin to breath out, timing the breath to pull the dagger from your trousers.

“You’re-“

You send it flying forward, his stupidly content expression falling to the look fresh of surprise filling his face. Wiping away the smirk gives you an added thrill as you rush to end him, your whole body straining as you put everything you have into the blow. His hands still rest on the sides of your head from nodding it, and so you aim your dagger at his inner thighs artery. It will be messy, but it’s the most fatal spot you can easily reach.

With his eyes widening, his legs pushing him up, his hands dart down for the dagger on instinct. He misses, but with reflexes that seem at odds with his meaty drink laden strength, he grabs your wrist and arm with both hands instead, causing your wrist to explode with pain as he grips it with a vice like strength. The dagger point is a fingernails length from piercing his skin, shaking at the tip with your effort. You drop it into your other hand, the same moment that he lets go with one of his, reaching over for the rock. You aim at the artery in his other leg, your less skilled left hand taking up the task it was given.

You push forward with the knife as his arm swings.

You look up as the stars shift and double, spinning and playing with the darkness. The mutton chopped face of the pirate blocks out his own self-shaped pantheon, a mere silhouette against the other glittering lights, and like everything else, he moves and shifts, doubling in your eyes. His is a special movement, unique to the rest, moving like the sea washing over the sand, up and down, back and forth, rising and falling. What a curious thing to do. Your about to ask him what he’s doing when you feel it; in and out, in and out, in and out. Is he ... having sex with you? But you’re not even married. This would all make far more sense if the ground stayed where it was supposed to.

You try to move your leg and feel your thigh sluggishly brush against another, hairier leg. Surely not yours? The gentleman above perhaps? You feel the leg scrape against your own and trace the feeling back to the continuing in and out motion between your thighs. You feel your pubes rubbing against someone else’s and vaguely think ‘that can’t be good’. You cannot raise your head to look.

It starts to rain off the man’s forehead, sprinkling warm water onto your face. Some of it goes in your mouth and you taste salt. Is it raining the sea? Are you actually looking down instead of up? Looking at a water reflected sky? That would explain why it moves so -bobbing and boiling and shifting with the current- and why his grunts have such a muffled underwater quality. Why your ears won’t stop ringing and why you feel so weightlessly heavy.

In, out, in, out, in, out. The feeling continues, pushing into you like the wind on sales, taking you across the sea of stars. The wind picks up and the man looks worried or pained in some way. He grunts and pants as wetness blooms within you. Man overboard. The darkness returns.

You walk through the bright inn, your legs struggling to find the stairs beneath them. The ground is even less stable here and you don’t think you can make it without being supported by the man next to you. You have to look down just to fight the vertigo that rocks your stomach. Words of cheer and laughter warp and splinter around you as the sounds fight each other in your ears.

“She all right?”

You hear a familiar voice. The handsome man at the bar. You would much rather marry him than the other man. You open your mouth to speak and tell him so, but the room lurches once more and only vomit comes out.

“Yeah, just drunk.” Whose voice is that? Is that the man with the mutton chops? Didn’t you avoid him? You’re so confused. You feel a drop of something roll down your inner thigh under your trousers, but it feels insignificant next to the spinning of...everything. Those same feeble legs continue up the endless staircase and get blurrier with each step they take. Your able pace is a lie perpetrated by the man with his arm around you, helping you up. Should you thank him? For some reason, you don’t feel like you should. Why? Another drop rolls down.

The sound of people doing and saying things fades away to a muted buzz as you cross the threshold of a room, door closing behind you. You land face first on a hard bed, just as you were really getting sleepy, and the world fades. Your trousers slide down and you begin to dream the oddest dream; that you’re going to the privy. In the dream, as embarrassing as it sounds, your excrement seems undecided; it enters you rather than leaves as it should, forcing its way inside of you. It hurts so much. It tries to leave but keeps forgetting something every time. In, out, in, out, in, out. It really hurts. You feel betrayed. Dreams shouldn’t hurt so much. You try to open your eyes and wake up but the dream just changes setting. The bed swims in your vision worse than ever before, its ruffled sheets cresting like waves on a stormy sea. Again, the man with the green eyes is there; you can’t see him but you hear him grunting, working hard at something. Is it him? Maybe he’s a carpenter, like your father? He could make some wonderful things.

A loud smacking sound fills the room, a crack of thunder for the stormy sea. The right cheek of your behind stings like when you misbehaved as a girl, but it’s your rear hole that burns like fire. In, out, in, out. You smell blood. Why do you think of your first time? Why now when you’re trying to sleep? Maybe you can’t sleep because you knees are still on the floor. You try to reach out across the sheets to calm the waves but your arms betray you and the waving storm rages on, growing and shrinking as either you or the world slides back and forth. You feel large hands grip your hips as your hole is pulled and torn by unseen forces. The pain convinces your beleaguered mind to step out for a moment. You close your eyes.

Sound and sensation returns and you feel something very wrong. Whatever is buried inside your anus is squirting liquid inside it. You hear a man cry out in pain or pleasure from behind you. Your head hurts so much and whatever is in your back door feels like it’s done massive damage as well. You try to open your eyes but the confusing image of darkness and shooting stars forces you to close them again. The image lessens, but it doesn’t go away.

The spurts invading your colon cease, and after a moment, the blockage begins to slowly remove itself from you. Your torn ring is in agony as it’s pulled by the leaving shaft it was speared by. Eventually, the invasion is pulled free and the scent of blood, sweat, faeces and semen fills your nose. It makes your headache worse until it disappears, your failing brain simply no longer registering smells at all.

You think you hear panting and the squeak of a door opening, and then a voice cutting through the room.

“What the fuck is going on here!”

It’s the handsome pirate! You open your mouth to talk, to ask him to take you away from the pain, but nothing comes out as your mouth weakly opens and closes like a sea starved fish.

“Now look ear. She ain’t one o ours; tryin ta sneak aboard I recon. Concked er ead real bad an now she’s all cross-eyed like. Prolly never wake again like.” The horrid bearded man’s voice takes on a more conciliatory tone. “I know you was talkin to er an tryin ta get up in er, so er’s yer chance. She’s only good for fuckin now anyway.”

Silence once again fills the room and you feel your consciousness falling away from you. Pain fades, still present but somehow beyond your feeling. Voices return, but echo through distant walls of mental fog. Argument, resolution, negotiation; human sounds you leave behind.

After a moment, the feeling of the sheets beneath your hands becomes duller, less important somehow, and at the edge of all your ties to this world, you feel it; hard length sliding into you as a woman, hand on your shoulder, hips pressed to your own.

Back and forth like the tide.

It’s the last thing you ever feel.