‘Maltese Smuggler’
KJ Hannah Greenberg uses her trusty point-and-shoot camera to capture the order of G-d's universe, and Paint 3D to capture her personal chaos. Sometimes, it’s insufficient for her to sate herself by applying verbal whimsy to pastures where gelatinous wildebeests roam or fey hedgehogs play. Hannah’s poetry and art collections are: Miscellaneous Parlor Tricks (Seashell Books, 2024, Forthcoming), Word Magpie (Audience Askew, 2024), Subrogation (Seashell Books, 2023), and One-Handed Pianist (Hekate Publishing, 2021).
Maltese Smuggler
I’m a smuggler. A female smuggler. Disguised as a man in the year of 1780, I accrue lucrative bounties, guiding helpless ships to dash apart against Malta’s rocks, believing they are close to shore and safety. A weaved beard hangs from my face, disguising my feminine wiles, stitched together from the hair of shipwrecked bodies, bearded men thrown against rocks. I’m heartless. Ruthless. I brandish a true smuggler’s heart, charred and blackened by sinful greed.
My name, San Pawl, is deceptive, duping others to believe in a holiness and devout religion that I shall never bear. My crew of male smugglers trust me, unconditionally, for I have brought them many bounties, riches that far exceed what they could make selling caught fish at local Maltese markets. Within me, they see a saint, one made from rock salt and the turn of tides. A symbol of constancy and fortuitous pathways. I’m fluid, bending in their wake, fulfilling desires of wealth and power.
Smugglers’ Cave is where I wile away daytime hours, readying to attract ships to false light at night. I bob within a tied fishing boat, brightly painted in red, yellow, green and blue: the Maltese colours of fortune, but I’m hidden by the black cloak of the inlet caves, obliterated from view. I sleep in the boat, tucked in a cocoon of blankets, dreaming of freedom and love – tendrils of daytime pleasures to weave amidst my hungry hands, enclosed and sheltered as I am within a floating womb of wood, boasting primary hues. Green for vegetation, yellow for sun, blue for water and red for the soil of the island and its russet flares like a hare’s fear as it dashes to save its life. These colours protect me, ensuring ships with high bounties, sail, without suspicion, into my awaiting clasp.
Translucent blue is my sea blanket, protecting me outside the caves, surrounding as a watery halo. My band of smugglers return to the mainland by day leaving me mostly alone except for my odd trips for supplies, but I am blissfully alone. Harbouring wives and children, they seek to sell their illicit wares, but most hold a candle for me, a dim one, for it is not easily forged, a love affair between men, not in strict Roman Catholic households. They do not suspect me a woman. A woman knows such things. So, I buoy myself to sleep, left to guard our stolen treasures from chests that glint in streaks of sunlight like opening eyes, when the sun strikes its blade, as they tend to human duties.
My recent shipwreck belonged to Italian royalty, bringing great wealth to Maltese shores. To me. Crowns, diamond rings, pearl necklaces and pendants line the perimeter walls of the cave, seeking a new wearer, feeling unseen in charcoal shade next to absent human flesh. I sleep turning a ruby ring, a bright large stone, within my thinking fingers, turning in repetitive circles as I drift to realms where I imagine the life of the true owner. Regal robes, grand feasts, awaiting servants, palatial courts, performing jesters, and pomp emit an aura, telling me a story of the ring’s past. I imagine that a young queen bore its gilded circle upon her slender finger, eyeing her reflection in its pomegranate sheen, ripe and fresh at court, betrothed to a much older, grey-haired king, finding only dissatisfaction in its reflection.
Such trinkets speak to me, channelling a new lifeline of sorts. For this ring, the wearer is shackled by familial bonds to a king she can never love for her heart is already locked to another, left behind in a land she can never return to. I sense its yearning as a pulse within my own veins, channeling a passage to my beating heart. For I, too, love an unattainable other. A woman. A siren. A maiden of the sea. By night she visits me here, as I ready to smuggle after an afternoon of mostly rest. Her tail powers her to this exact cave, shimmering with iridescent slices of the sun – a travelling light, is she. My own lamp.
On her arrival, the cave illumines instantly by her presence, dancing glimmers of metallic skin reflect on the ceiling, beautiful spots of colour. Holding a large pearl held within her hands, she sings the song that I have grown to know, like a childhood lullaby. I have no semblance of her language, but am lulled by her dulcet notes, becoming synchronised with her as she emits a siren call. The melody laces my throat, spiralling into my essence: every bone, vessel and organ reverberates, enlivens with each note she brings into being. Securing herself with her anchor tail, she presents a closed shell, large and pearlescent, wearing a coral peach sheen; she slowly opens it to reveal its hidden treasure. An illuminating pearl, ethereal and mythical – nothing like the pearls I catch from shipwrecked boats. Its light permeates each cavernous space of me, filling my watery home, radiating to ships, far into the watery distance, far flung from the island.
My men await the nightly light which beckons a new shipwreck, positioned strategically as we are as a band of smugglers along the northwesterly coastline. They know nothing of her sorcery, her dark magic upon me, nor do they care, as long as bags of coin become theirs to spend.
As a particularly large ship fastens on her emitting light, it steadies its course towards the shards of sharpened rock, its unbeknown stony shroud. Duped, it courses straight, drawn as a fish upon a meaty lure, headstrong and determined to secure its safe passage to sandy shores. As of every night, once a ship is doomed, placed on its path of irreversible destruction, she lifts herself to me, weaving her ebony locks into the boat. As is tradition, she invites me to kiss her, undressing my false beard, peeling back masculine layers that are not rightly mine. She knows too much, always has. I too, like a fish on a hook, succumb to my fate: her damask soft lips as velvet meet with mine, whilst her caressing hands hold my head. Instantly, I’m spellbound, intoxicated by marine beauty. Her eyes lock upon mine, deepest emeralds of the sea, telling me soundless tales of her origin and otherness. I drink each tale in, wishing for her to be truly mine, to lift her into my fishing boat, and for the world to stop spinning, with only the two of us locked in a timeless embrace.
Yet, the kiss is always curtailed, distracted by the commotion of crew and ship, both blasted into the fangs of steel, the rocky outcrop of Smugglers Cave, and not as the sailors had hoped, onto the expectant slope of sand. Hollers and panic cries of help resound, ricochetting off the walls of the cave, until my love can bear the din no longer, quickly shutting closed her pearl, and disappearing into inky waters, swimming swiftly out to the deeper Mediterranean Sea.
Back to seclusion. Back to her safety. Her kind.
Sunken without her, left in echoic darkness, I tuck my feet to my body, rocking myself gently in the boat’s bowels, trying to break myself free from her happy bewitchment of my soul. Reapplying my façade of a beard, I ready to oar my way to the detritus outside, picking the ship’s great wares of wealth from atop the sea’s surface. My men await me, all hidden within the dark mouths of caves, readying to swim to claim barrels and treasure chests.
The process repeats, night after night, week after week, until one-night changes my fate forever.
As soft dusk, bruised purple skies, fall upon Smugglers’ Cave, I awaken, readying to prepare for another stolen meeting with my siren of the sea. I sit and wait. Plum sky forming to ebony rolls outside my cave, eradicating any last wisp of pearly light from within the cave. Hollow and alone, I continue to wait, summoning her from my soul to quickly arrive and begin our lovers dance as is nocturnal ritual.
Time passes.
More time passes.
It stretches like malleable love.
Bereft, I wallow, sinking into the underbelly of the boat, desperate to find a means of light, wanting only to search for her. My absent siren. So embroiled in love have I become that I nearly forget about the ensuing shipwreck, so fixated have I become on her lips, her tender kiss and caress. Everything that is her has poisoned my mind.
Fumbling carelessly in pitch black waters, I find a disused gas lamp, and light it with shaking fingers, sweat streaming into my eyes from the blind struggle. As the oil ignites, a familiar world undresses itself to me: my rocky lair.
Yet, alas, all is not as it once was.
The cave’s walls and stores are no longer lined and filled with treasure but lie empty, hollow from theft. Theft of the most grievous kind. Nausea rises in my throat as my heartbeats treble in speed as the sad realisation dawns: my love, my siren of the seas, has taken all from me and my merry band of smugglers. Our wares are depleted except for one object that glints lamentably as if in apology by the struggling light of the gas lamp. A tear instantly falls from my eye as I see what is left: the mark of the thief, wanting their identity to be known.
On a single outcrop of rock lies her empty shell - without its pearl. Devoid of its heart and light source, my trade is over. No gas lamps could ever emit the same fantastical light to beckon ships to these traitorous rocks. Oaring my way shakily to the empty shell, I gulp away intense guilt and embarrassment of my gullibility to fall for her lies and deceit.
Yet perhaps we are more suited than I thought: both thieves, stealers of others’ hearts and wealth. Clasping the shell, I tuck it into my c-shaped body, leaking sorrow onto its pearlescent glow, dimming now in her absence and abandonment of me.
Slowly, the nighttime waves lull me to broken sleep where I dream of her ghostly fingers caressing my face: the true Maltese smuggler.
A lover that I shall never see again.
Emma Wells is a mother and English teacher. She has poetry published with various literary journals and magazines. She writes flash fiction, short stories and novels. She is currently writing her sixth novel. Emma won Wingless Dreamer’s Bird Poetry Contest of 2022 with ‘Carbonito de Sophie’ and her short story entitled ‘Virginia Creeper’ was selected as a winning title by WriteFluence Singles Contest in 2021. Recently, she won Dipity Literary Magazine’s 2024 Best of the Net Nominations for Fiction with her short story entitled ‘The Voice of a Wildling’.
