Ships At A Distance Have Every Man's Wish On Board

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. Ships within spitting distance, however, are filled with the laments of this life—poverty, prostitution, power hungry men desperate to enslave the first and take advantage of the second. The Anne Marie was a boat easily within any expectorator’s range.

As if in direct opposition to the dirty deeds and shady tendencies of her passengers, the Anne Marie's hull was strong as Mr. Obel's investments, her decks as spotless as Ms. Fumio's new skin. Her master, Captain Hollen, kept his boat as clean as young Mr. Kell's newly wiped record. Though his customers didn't care so much for a tidy ship as they did closed lips and blind eyes, Hollen found it impossible to take pride in his ability to ignore injustice. He chose to forgo the subject of his opulent and unscrupulous clientele, instead boasting about the bleach-induced

shine of the Anne Marie. It was ironic, he thought, how his conscience was often the dirtiest place on this sparkling ship.

Despite his every intention, his ship had managed to become a place where the worst of the best and the best of the worst came to mingle and exchange—to put it delicately—services. Only once had he tried to turn his ship from its course of moral decline. For the whole of two months, the Anne Marie had been purged, cleansed, and rid of every trace of the entitled, immoral men and women who had inhabited its cabins. It docked on a muddy river bank and shuttled farmers across a small tributary, its captain making small talk about crop yields and radish size. Captain Hollen had been happy for those two months. Truly at peace with being a simple ferryman, he could have stayed content with his honest, upright livelihood. But his wife decided she wanted a bigger house. And better shoes.

A ferryman's salary couldn't provide the luxuries his wife demanded. She made it explicitly clear this was a test of his devotion, and that his decision held the weight of their marriage and her social standing. She also explained which was more important. 

"If you really loved me—" she screamed into the night, "—then you wouldn't let me suffer like this! I look like—no, I live like the wretched women outside of Mart's Bar! Do you KNOW what those girls do? You're blushing, of course you know. Did you know that I look just like them? Holes in my clothes, holes in my house, soon there'll be holes in my reputation big as those girls' pathetic desperation!"

Hollen tried to calm the raging sea that was his wife, realizing defeat only when she started listing the men in town who would be happy to take her in. He sat tiredly in his chair as his wife berated him, making a mental note never to shop at Harry's again. Once the squall had settled into passive-aggressive grumbling and badly burned grits, he sighed and stood. Then the Captain went to confession, received damnation, and reopened his ship.