The sea had no reason, no heart, no memory. It simply was—immense, ever-moving, and alive in ways men could not fully grasp. Alec Brandt knew this better than most. He was sixty-three years old and had buried two wives, outlived three dogs, and cursed God in six languages. He had left Cape Town three weeks ago aboard the Severance, a thirty-two-foot cutter-rigged sloop, heading east to Fremantle, across that blue expanse men called the Indian Ocean.
There was no grand mission, no farewell party, no dockside lover waving a handkerchief. Just a man and the sea—two old enemies too tired to fight and too stubborn to part.
He sailed alone. The Severance creaked with the memory of storms and held its shape like an old boxer, bruised but unbroken. Below deck, everything had its place: the brass compass from his father’s boat, tins of beans, two jerrycans of fresh water, a sea-stained Bible he didn’t read, and an old photo of his daughter, Sarah, who hadn’t spoken to him in fifteen years.
She lived in Perth now, or so he’d heard.
The first week brought calm skies and a steady wind from the southwest. Alec spent the days trimming sails, checking rigging, and listening to the groans of the hull. He didn’t trust calm seas. They were liars, whispering soft promises before the slap of the gale.
On the ninth day, he spotted a freighter on the horizon. He didn’t signal. What would he say? That he was a relic drifting east, looking for nothing? He felt more at home on this creaking boat than he had on land in years. The Severance asked nothing of him but vigilance.
But the ocean remembered.
⸻
It began on the fourteenth night, just past midnight, when the barometer dropped hard and fast, like a drunk slipping off a stool. The wind picked up first—a strange, whistling sound, thin and sharp as a blade. Alec came awake instantly. His hands found the foul-weather gear by touch. There was no panic in him, only a quiet certainty: the storm was here.
He moved to the cockpit, clipped in, and reefed the mainsail. The sea had turned mean, black waves rising in uneven rhythm. The wind howled like a thousand lost things. Rain came sideways, hard and cold.
The storm took its time, like an old enemy savoring the fight. For three days, it blew. On the second day, the tiller snapped. Alec jury-rigged a steering system using rope and stubbornness. On the third day, he lost his last dry clothes to a boarding wave. By the end, he was soaked to the bone, shivering, half-blind from salt, and smiling through cracked lips.
The Severance held.
When the sun finally returned, it did so without apology, as if the rage had been nothing more than a dream. Alec lay in the cockpit, stripped to the waist, skin like leather, hands raw. He stared at the sky, not in awe, but in recognition. The sea had tried. He was still here.
He fished for dinner—pulled up a yellowfin tuna as thick as his forearm. He cut it clean with a knife that had gutted seals and sharks and once a man in Mozambique. Salt and meat and silence. He ate in the sun and thought of his daughter.
⸻
He remembered her as a little girl, on his first boat, the Calypso. She used to sit on the rail, feet dangling, her hair wild in the wind. “Why does the sea sing, Daddy?” she had asked.
“It’s not singing,” he’d replied. “It’s warning.”
He regretted saying that. She was too young. He was always saying things too early or too late.
Her mother had left during a long job up the Skeleton Coast. When Alec returned, it was to an empty house and a custody letter. Sarah had grown up without him, or worse—against him. She became a nurse, a mother, and a stranger.
But she was still blood. And he had blood enough left to reach her.
⸻
On the twentieth day, he encountered a pod of orcas—sleek, black-and-white titans dancing in the wake. Alec watched them for hours, sipping stale coffee, letting the sun dry his clothes. There was something human in their play, something joyous and savage. One slapped its fluke against the water like a dare.
“Go on, then,” he said. “Try me.”
But they didn’t. They disappeared as suddenly as they came. That was the way of the sea. Gifts given without reason, taken without notice.
He checked his chart and position. The wind was fair, but it was shifting. Cyclone season clawed the northern sea. The skies had grown heavy again.
On the twenty-sixth day, the radio went dead. Not that it had mattered much before—there were no voices out here, no coast guards or fishing fleets. Just wind and current and time.
The swell grew. He began reefing early. Something was coming.
⸻
The next storm was worse than the first. The wind screamed like a wounded animal, and the sky turned the color of bruises. Alec sailed through the night, eyes salt-bitten, hands blistered, body aching in every old place. The Severance slammed into troughs that shuddered through her frame. More than once, Alec braced for the end.
He talked to the boat.
“You’ve got one more in you, old girl,” he muttered. “Same as me.”
A wave hit, lifting the boat sideways. The mast groaned. Alec thought he heard something snap, but the sail held.
He tied himself in, just in case.
By morning, the wind fell silent, but the sea remained a mess—whitecapped and spiteful. Alec slept where he sat, the tiller rope in his hand like a leash to the living world.
⸻
He dreamed of fire. Of sand and blood. The old war in Angola. Of a boy crying for his mother, and of Alec pulling the trigger because someone had to.
He woke with a gasp, his mouth tasting copper.
⸻
On the thirty-third day, he sighted a plane. It moved like a bird that didn’t belong. He didn’t wave. What was the point?
Land came on the thirty-seventh. A thin, low smear on the horizon. Fremantle.
He sailed into harbor with salt-crusted skin and a thousand-yard stare. The marina manager looked like he’d seen a ghost.
“You come from where?” he asked.
“Cape Town.”
“Alone?”
Alec just nodded.
“Christ,” the man muttered. “You look like hell.”
“I’ve looked worse,” Alec replied.
He tied off, stepped ashore, and felt the ground tilt beneath him. His legs didn’t remember how to trust land.
⸻
He found Sarah’s house through a name in an old letter and the kindness of a taxi driver with too many questions. He stood at the gate, the same wind still moving through him, only gentler now.
She opened the door with a child on her hip and another tugging at her hand. Her hair was grayer than the photo, her eyes harder. But he knew her. He always would.
She stared at him a long moment.
“What do you want?” she asked.
He swallowed. “To see you.”
“You sailed here?”
He nodded.
“Why?”
“Because I needed to.”
The child asked who he was. Sarah didn’t answer.
He didn’t ask to come in. He only stood there.
Finally, she stepped aside.
He walked in slow, like a man still aboard a boat. The air smelled of bread and lavender and something like peace.
Maybe the sea had carried him here not to drown, but to find a softer shore. Maybe some storms are worth weathering after all.
Broken Author 