Written to the prompt B is for Bottle
The Bottle
My Nana had two mysterious things in her house – a locked cupboard and a ship in a bottle. I was never allowed to know what was in the cupboard, but I was allowed to look at the ship in a bottle, as long as I didn’t touch it. I spent hours staring at that ship – or at least one side of it, because the bottle was clamped in a wooden frame screwed to the wall.
The ship was called The Melville – a three-masted merchantman, all sails and ropes, like something out of Pirates of the Caribbean. She sat in what looked like a sea, and on the other side of her, the surface of the inside of the bottle showed a background of the weather she was sailing through.
But here’s the thing. Each time I visited Nana, the scene inside the bottle would have changed. Sometimes the background was a brilliant blue sky dotted with pillowy white clouds. Beaming down was a smiling sun, and a little chubby cherub face with bulging cheeks blew a fair wind into all the sails. There’d be white caps on the waves as The Melville sped on her course, and tiny busy sailors clinging to the rigging, holding the wheel, swabbing the deck or hauling on ropes.
Other times, the face of the wind was missing, and The Melville stood spikily stark against the background, unclothed as a skeleton, as the sails were furled because the ship was becalmed in a flat glassy sea under a fierce yellow sun. The tiny sailors would be inspecting and repairing ropes and woodwork, and some hung in cradles over the side, painting the planks with tar to protect the hull.
Now and then you could see that a storm was on the way, as dark clouds were bubbling up on the horizon, threatening to overtake the fine weather.
Occasionally the sky was all gunmetal grey, and the face of the wind would be vicious, eyes screwed tight, blowing a typhoon towards the ship which pitched and rolled in violent waves. Rain lashed onto the tiny sailors who desperately hung on for dear life, and the inside of the bottle was spattered with water spray from the tempest.
I never wondered about how such a big ship could pass through the small neck of a bottle; I wanted to know how the weather could change in this bottle, locked tight in its wooden frame.
‘Can I get The Melville down and have a look at it, Nana?’ I’d ask.
‘No, girl, you can’t,’ she’d say. ‘Theym all right where they be, now you leave ’em to their work.’
I spent my childhood worrying about whether the tiny sailors were all right in all the weathers they had to endure. Because, it seems, Nana and I were the only ones who knew they were real.
© Carol Carman 2025
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