Ship in a Bottle

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A family vacation to the coast was all it took to change Billy’s life. Billy had grown up with a love for all things pirate. He dressed as a pirate every year for Halloween, he read books about pirates, and he even watched movies about pirates. For years, he always wanted to see the ocean and hear the roaring of the crashing waves. As a kid growing up in the middle of the country, he was nowhere near a coastline so he had never laid eyes upon one before. For his tenth birthday, his parents surprised him with his dream vacation, a trip to see the ocean.

His parents booked a vacation property that sat right on the beach so they would never be far from the ocean during their trip. They packed up and headed off and Billy could not have been more excited. It was during their second day there that everything changed.

Billy and his parents were taking a walk along the beach. His parents talked quietly while they watched Billy run around and gather shells and anything interesting he found that had washed ashore. As Billy searched the sand he came across a glass bottle. This bottle was fully intact and not even slightly cracked, which Billy found surprising considering how strong the waves looked as they pounded onto the sand. What surprised him the most was the contents of the bottle: inside was a fully assembled miniature pirate ship.

Billy ran over to his parents to show them what he had found. He thrust the bottle up into their faces and told them that he had found a pirate ship. His parents were surprised to see what he found but encouraged him to keep the item none the less.

For the next couple of days, all Billy could do was look at his ship in a bottle. He spent so much time sitting in his room staring at the ship that he began to imagine what it must have been like to be on a real ship like that. He imagined what it would be like to steer it or to raise the mast. The more he stared into the bottle, however, the more he began to notice that little details would change every day. One day the ropes were in one place and the next day another. The same for other items like the anchor. He figured that these changes must be happening while he was sleeping so he decided to stay up as late as he could to figure out how this was happening.

That night, he lay in bed with a flashlight to the bottle and watched, waiting for signs of movement. Sure enough, as time went on he began to see what was causing the changes but never in his wildest dreams did he expect to find this. Inside the bottle, on the ship, small pirates emerged from below deck and they began raising the sails and prepared the ship for a voyage. Billy was so surprised! He could not believe that there were real pirates on the ship and that he was able to see them. All Billy could think about was opening the bottle and trying to get them to come out so Billy grabbed the bottle and his flashlight and raced outside towards the ocean.

As soon as he got close to the waves hitting the shore he ripped the cork from the bottle. Right before his eyes, the ship began to grow. The glass of the bottle shattered as he watched the ship double and then triple in size. Soon enough it was too big for him to hold in his hands so he set it down in the sand as it continued to grow. After only a minute or so, the ship had reached its full size and was swept into the ocean big a particularly large wave.

Just as the sun was rising, Billy watched from the shore as the pirates continued to move about the ship while it sailed away. After a little while, Billy could no longer see the shrinking ship in the distance so he returned to the vacation house to tell his parents what he saw. Billy’s parents did not believe what he told them about the ship that was in the bottle, but Billy knew what he saw and forever remembered that trip as the best birthday of his life.

Author's Note: This story was inspired by the story of the wax crocodile in the ancient Egyptian Myths and Legends stories. In that story, a man uses a wax crocodile that comes to life to get revenge on his lover and the young boy she is seeing. I wanted this story to reflect that same idea of something coming to life in the same way but instead of an animal, I used the idea of a ship in a bottle. This story really stuck with me because it reminded me of a story my mother used to tell me when I was a kid. We had this small glass jar with a cork on the top that was filled with little shells and rocks and sea glass. Also inside this jar was a small metal figurine of a soldier. I was so fascinated with this jar that I would always take it off the shelf to stare at it. After my mother had caught me several times, she told me that if I ever removed the cork and opened the jar the small figurine would come to life and grow to be the size of a normal man. She told me that when this happened he would be so angry about being trapped in the jar for so long that he would attack the family. As a kid, I believed this story and even though I continued to ogle the jar I never once opened it. I still have the jar to this day and I still have never opened it.

Story Source: Egyptian Myth and Legend by Donald Mackenzie (1907)

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