The crowd that had gathered on the quay to watch the departure of Shadow Rose held no collective opinion as to whether she would return. Now that the chronology of those events has become so jumbled, it might be said that she never left.
 
She was a topsail schooner, with three masts. Her hull was filled with bales of fleece. Had a core sample been taken and examined using an optical fibre diameter analyser or a Laserscan, it would have been discovered that the strands had an average diameter of ten microns but nobody needed instruments to tell them that Shadow Rose was filled with very fine wool. Microns meant nothing in those days.
 
There were questions as to what she would be carrying on the way back. Rumours circulated. Would it be opium, or silver, or guano perhaps? 
 
The Master knew but would not tell. He came from patrician stock and was not in the habit of conversing with anyone beneath his station. This caused him great loneliness and he was prone to fits of depression, especially on deep sea voyages. He spoke only to give orders, and only through intermediaries. He could become garrulous, particularly about the way his meals were served. He required his food to be exactly centred on the plate. Asymmetry was punished by the lash.
 
At times when his depression was acute he could become irresponsible, as when he drew imaginary continents on the ship’s charts and plotted a course by them. This resulted in the chance discovery of an island inhabited by giants only three inches tall. After this the officers learned to gauge his state of mind and tactfully assumed command of the vessel when necessary, without him becoming aware of it.
 
Upon the urging of the merchants who owned the ship, he grudgingly agreed to employ a man with whom he could dine. And so it was that Norbert Thornton was signed on as Naturalist. The merchants hoped he would keep their captain on an even keel, since he could not be dismissed on account of his pedigree.
 
Thornton belonged to the same class as the Master, though he was not of the same means. He came from a good but withered family. Furthermore he had an insatiable curiosity about everything. He had dedicated himself to a life of study, which provided scant remuneration. He sometimes had to work as a tutor for children who did not share his interests. The opportunity presented by a voyage on Shadow Rose with its potential for discovery, and that in addition he should be paid for the privilege, was an offer too good to pass up.
 
The Master and the Naturalist dined together, twice a day. The Master was reactionary, irascible, narrow-minded and ignorant. Thornton was patient, knowledgeable and liberal in his political opinions. He cared little for rigid elitism and was open to new ideas. The months passed. Their shared meals became each man’s private hell, though they maintained a formal and frosty civility.
 
Another source of annoyance for Thornton was the Surgeon. He had previously fulfilled two roles on the ship, that of Doctor and of Naturalist. He had now been relieved of the latter. In truth he had no ability or interest in the subject. Neither the Master, nor the owners of Shadow Rose cared much about the paucity of his reports or the poor quality of what he did occasionally produce. Their interest in the natural world was only concerned with the effect it might have on their business. 
 
Another man would have been happy to be relieved of the position which meant so little to him but the Surgeon was of a jealous and vindictive disposition. His wounded pride required that he flout the usurper at every available opportunity. Thornton could only hope that he should not fall ill.
 
What he really wanted was land. If they set ashore he would wander into virgin forests, observing, sketching and taking specimens.
 
There had been no evidence of land for months. They were becalmed, adrift on a vast ocean under a cloudless sky. The dinners continued.
 
The Master would not reveal their position. It was a point of contention between them. Thornton thought it was wrong to keep everyone ignorant. They all had a right to know where they were and where they were going.
 
The Master thought that no one had a right to anything. He considered himself to be the ship and the ship to be him. Anyone else on board was an unfortunate necessity. The right to knowledge was his alone. He would suffer no obligations.
 
After that Thornton no longer raised the issue. The Master’s logic was so deranged as to be immune to reason.
 
To occupy himself, he studied the heavens at night and took instruction in sidereal navigation from Mr Dawlish, the First Mate. He intended to determine their location. He also wished to continue his study of barnacles but having no specimens at hand, he offered to pay the cabin boy, Tom, to go over the side and see if there were any he could scrape off the hull.
 
The Surgeon, Dr Foyle, got wind of this offer and in a fit of spit-speckled, bilious rage informed him that should he wish to retrieve crustaceans, he should go over the side himself and forbade Tom from doing so.
 
The Surgeon had the tendency to place his face unnaturally close to his interlocutor while talking. The man knew no bounds.
 
So it was that Thornton, with some trepidation, was lowered over the side with a chisel and a specimen bag.
 
As he dipped into the water he was shocked to find that it was not water. The sea was not the sea. He remained as dry as he had been on deck. There were no barnacles. He looked down but could not make sense of what he saw, just an undefined greyness. He thought he detected motion but when he focused his attention upon it, he felt nothing more than the gentle swaying of the rope he was attached to. He felt a tugging and realised he was being hauled back up on to the deck.
 
The crew had been expecting to reel in a dead man. He had been under too long they told him. He looked himself over and appeared to be dripping wet. He was on board a ship floating on the ocean just as they were. It was what they all believed, as he so recently had himself. He knew now that it was not true.
 
At the same moment as Norbert Thornton was hauled back on board, the wind suddenly picked up. The crew rushed off to make use of the opportunity and soon the unfurled sails were billowing and Shadow Rose was moving again at last. Thornton did not share their relief. He was in a state of nervous exhaustion as he grappled with the realisation that everything he knew was wrong. He could no longer vouch that the wind was the wind, the ship was the ship or the Surgeon the Surgeon.
 
Two hundred and twenty-eight fathoms below them sprawled a large metropolis. The streets were busy, full of delivery carts and stamping, snorting horses.
 
A man was walking with a determined stride. Large sideburns covered his fleshy cheeks and a lustrous moustache his upper lip. He had a sensuous, curling forelock that bounced as he walked. His thick neck protruded from his starched collar. He believed he had left his wallet at a brothel and was going there to retrieve it before anyone else did. He would be late for his work at Gibbons and Conroy, which would not be well regarded. It was early and the day was already difficult.
 
The most striking thing about him, of which he was completely unaware, as were the people he passed, was that there was a ship attached to the top of his head that looked like a schooner.
 
It takes a writer to notice such things.
 

***

 
The inamoratas crossed over the mountain and came down into the valley. 
 
The valley, a cleft carved by a glacier in distant times, was filled with the sound of traffic. 
 
They paused, the barren beauty of the mountain at their backs. There were nine of them, each one leaving an old life behind. Nothing much grew on the other side of the mountain, which was why they had crossed it.
 
The town was full of bee keepers and long distance runners. Once a year the sun rose at the end of Word Street and beamed its rays straight down the thoroughfare. The exact time of this event changed slightly from year to year due to the precession of the equinoxes, which caused the perceived motion of the sun on the ecliptic. It would occur at the same time once every twenty-five thousand seven hundred years.
 
Anyone touched by that light was transformed. It turned shopkeepers into poets, cantankerous old codgers into gallant lovers. It turned minutes to seconds and hours to years. Word Street was always packed with a crowd that day, shoulder to shoulder, waiting to be bathed in the morning light.
 
Woe betide anyone who tried to take a photograph. The consequence of that was severe. Its effect was similar to the tale of the wind changing, and would etch upon a face a grimace that lasted for life.

***

The moon was one hundred and seventy-two thousand eight hundred minutes away from fullness. It was to be a harvest moon, a circle aglow in cyclical time. Fields of wheat and grasses were drenched in its light, their stalks bent under its weight, caressed by a gentle breeze, their hairy ears full of grain and promise. 
 
Bisecting the fields was a road that preferred to be a river. When the people who lived nearby were in their beds, distracted by dreams, the surface would melt and flow into the distance. As the solids became liquid, hundreds of fish, moments earlier only sleeping stones, now jumped and dived in the water with the sheer unconscious happiness of materialisation. 
 
Through the course of the long night all the water in the river evaporated into steam and gas, rising ever upwards through the atmosphere to feed the hungry moon, greedy for affection and nourishment, lonely in the sky.
 
Long before the shadowed fields had turned gray-green and morning was not yet a thought, the residue of this feast fell back down and congealed again into the solid road, ready for the first foot and wheel. This whole process caused a peculiar vibration, which was the music of crickets and frogs.
 
The first feet to step on to the freshly hardened surface, now disappearing into forever, belonged to farmers, up at dawn, shouldering their scythes. The first wheels belonged to the cart they were dragging behind them. Their blades cut through the air to reach the stalks which they slashed and hewed, tying the fallen ones into great bundles, and tossing them on to the cart. 
 
The fields of grain were soon to be pounded and ground to dust.
 
While the miller was grinding and the farmers were resting from their toil, either sleeping or drunk on an amber nectar that shimmered with vibrant bubbles, there was a man who had just turned twenty, wide awake and sober. He never worked in the fields, as the farmers would have nothing to do with him. He had a shock of hair which fell across one eye and caused him to flip his head back from time to time. People found it disconcerting. The threat of repetitive movement in random bursts troubled them deeply and so they left him alone with his thoughts. Only one person did not avoid him, and that was an old woman, who was blind and could not see him toss his head.
 
She was wise but lonely, everyone she had loved had long since departed. Her wisdom was a stream with banks of stones, some covered by slick green algae just below the surface, which was never in the same place twice. No one appreciated this wisdom except the young twenty-year-old man. They alleviated their loneliness with friendship.
 
The old woman told the young man about the right moment. He decided then that he would find it. This was not an easy task as there were so many moments. The first step would be to discover what a moment actually was, otherwise he would be stumbling in the dark. The old woman never stumbled even though she could not see. She made him scones and presented them to him on a plate covered with a cloth of faded stripes reminiscent of summers long passed. Sometimes she would turn him away from her door without explanation. Whenever this happened he would wander through the fields, listening to the flies.
 
She had said that although there were many moments, usually only one was correct and it changed everyday. On rare occasions there could be two or three in a day. The matter was further complicated because the moment he was looking for was not the same for everybody. The shifting uncertainty excited him. She had sometimes described the right moment as a gateway—two heavy wooden doors supported by stone columns that were three times the height of a man. The doors were decorated with symbols made from beaten metal and nailed in place. They formed ideograms, which were thought to describe the pleasures of the right moment and all its possible variations of bliss.
 
Success depended upon reading this script. It was more important than crossing the threshold. Any fool could go through a door. It was second nature. People had been doing it for years.
 
Instinctively he knew that the writing on the doors had to be read by touch as well as sight, for the message was emotional and could only be understood through physical sensation. He would let his hands run gently across the raised symbols, his fingertips receiving details of such delicacy they could not be perceived by his imagination. The correct moment must be tactile. While his hands brushed the surface he would let his eyes flit over it without focusing, experiencing only wholeness, but first he had to find it.
 
Twenty-one years had passed since he had turned twenty. All that time must have been comprised of many moments, none of them the right one. He berated himself because he had not yet been able to decide what exactly constituted a moment. There had been distractions, red herrings, false starts, disasters and loose ends. Still he did not know. He had raised his foot to take the first step and after all those years had not put it down to take the second.
 
The fields in which the farmers had swung their scythes had become a town. According to the old woman, this was the result of one thing being placed upon another. He remembered everything she said, though he could never be sure what she had meant, or how she had meant it.
 
Those doors with their mysterious script suggested the gates of an ancient walled city, which had gone the way of empires—destroyed by war or time, or by the earth itself. Nothing remained but the entrance to nowhere, or the exit. It was possible that there had been other gates when the city had existed, one for each cardinal point. Now only one remained. But was this city Mesopotamian or Mesoamerican?
 
Time had its own geography. The moment was a place. The quest to find it bordered on futility. It had to be approached without the usual rational comprehension of things. Objectivity and subjectivity needed to merge and become each other. That required self-knowledge. He had looked deeply into himself and seen nothing there. The idea of selfhood, seemingly so foundational, was just a convenience, a tool for discerning the differences of perceived objects. 
 
The other foot was coming down, displacing particles of giant rocks eroded into sand by the weather over unquantifiable numbers of seconds arranged as aeons. There were no creeping vines, no giant rodents, no sloths meditating among branches, no birds which saturated the eyes with colour. This meant the city had been Mesopotamian.
 
The ground was strewn with dice, pockmarked by invisible forces and so small their existence was uncertain. Among them were the bones of dinosaurs, bleached by the sun which gave them the impression of whiteness. But the white was yellow or ochre, in various shades of density. It was a whiteness that contained all colour. The dinosaurs had been drinking at the shore of a large lake when time had moved on.
 
The wind came through the dunes carrying pages torn from bibles. It spoke in the voice of the succubus, Meridiana, calling out to travellers blinded by the swirling sands. Supine from her beauty they would love her in their dreams and she would bestow febrile and unimagined delights in exchange for the semen she needed to survive, as was the way of mammals and demons. Her dainty feet bore the talons of a bird. The incubus was jealous.
 
The wind departed suddenly, impatient and bored with the dunes, wishing to visit somewhere else. The grains of sand it had lifted were now free to fall back down to the earth where they belonged. These events—the forces and the landscapes, the clearing of the sandstorm, the voices of demons, the hypnosis of pleasures, the bones, the sky and the planets beyond it, the empty spaces—all of it was an expression of love, declared in one exhalation, a love both divided and whole.
 
When the air cleared and the sand settled, the right moment was revealed against the sky, two columns the height of three men and between them the two wooden doors—the gateway to a city that no longer existed. The doorway had been liberated from its original purpose and was able to assume a loftier significance. It could be inspected from both sides without the encumbrance of entry and exit, of acceptance and denial. The symbols gave themselves up to the fingers that tickled them, excited and relaxed, basking in the pleasure of touch. In their abandon they felt generous and allowed their meaning to be understood.
 
On the doors was written:
 
The moon was one hundred and seventy-two thousand eight hundred minutes away from fullness…
 
 
© Tom Newton 2025
 
This is three stories from the collection The Right Moment and Other True Stories by Tom Newton, Recital Publishing 2025.