‘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’.

‘The Gilded Edge’

Photographer - Tobi Brun

The Gilded Edge

Wispy fingers partially prise themselves free of a glass shield of a framed family portrait:  translucency acting as a barrier. Elsie is stuck, yearns, longingly so, to reach beyond gilded edges.

Haunting the circumference of the portrait frame, depicting her once whole family, she is curiously feral - a wild cat. Each, and every moment, she casts into possessing framed distance, bullying her way to thinking, that she holds some power, even though she is perpetually lost in a gold-kiss of forgetfulness as a sepia shadow.

Her curse.

His punishment.

Elsie’s spirit tracks perpendicular sides, haunting an enclosed box of a world. Blearily, she eyes and is cognisant of, there being more to life than smudged, charcoal tendrils, for she is a wispy trail of a ghost.

Her lived years as an infant and young woman, within the very bones of Ordsall Hall, are her only memories, tinged with each passing of a dusty year. Filmy relics of truth, exist as echoic remembrances.

If she garners enough strength and bitterness within her prisoner soul, she can, it has been known, fling her portrait from its hanging place in sheer defiance. Such a freakish occurrence is often blamed by servants as the work of a draught. For months, Elsie has endeavoured to conjure ways to allow vexation to purge like water released from a hard pressing dam, but in countless ribbons of flimsy time, a flung picture is all that she has mustered. An almost silent form of revenge, not parallel with the palpable venom that pulses, pushing at framed edges.

All such puce curses are directed at one hated figurehead: her stepfather, Esquire Jeptha Lindquist.

In his lifetime, he bore an elaborate name, titled, wealthy, pompous and full to the brim of prestige, allowing flouncy cuffs of lace to flatter the minds of others, duping their senses. Elsie’s mother, more than most, came to know of certain truths and the extent of his powers of forgery before she met the grave.

When Elsie’s beloved father died, the estate passed to Elsie’s mother. Her mother having given birth, painstakingly, to two male babes whose rosebud mouths never opened, christened with a blue veil of woe. The loss of each having done something irreparable to her mother’s soul, chinked and gasping, it always remained after these tragic newborn deaths.

Once Clara was the talk of the county: a rich, carefree maiden with bounteous waves of auburn hair. When she fell into the arms of Elsie’s father, Samuel Ellington, an orchestra of men had been equally bewitched by Clara as Samuel had been. Samuel loved greatly, willingly, always putting affairs of his estate behind attentions placed upon family. The Ellington family were small in size but perfectly formed and well protected by its patriarchal figurehead.

The last Christmastime spent together as a family had been in 1882. Frigid, fanned faces of ice implanted against parlour windowpanes as Elsie sat upon her father’s knee watching a steady snowfall outside. Her mother handed her a stocking from the fireplace containing small opulences. The first gift, a glass bauble, bore handiwork of a painted poinsettia; ruby-red petals reaching out. Inspired by sublimity, she took the trinket, proudly placing the orbital beauty on the Nordic spruce. Its pine aroma filling Elsie’s nostrils as she did so.

Outside, the view was wintery, picture-perfect. Elsie gazed, mesmerised by plains of virginal snow. A soundlessness attended Christmas morning – not even a stir from servants was discerned. The silhouette of the moon flung on its back, lingered in the stillness of dawn– soon to be erased by golden stretches of lifting sunlight. The sun: a gilded rose buoying in the distant horizon above fields of skittish stags.

Dear Diary,

The Christmas of 1884 has passed drearily. I write tonight to alleviate troublesome stirrings. My new stepfather, Esquire Jeptha Lindquist, is a devil.

Eyeing me over his glass of dark-amber brandy, he toys with peace-hood. Winking when mother is not looking or stroking my hair. His closeness and cloying breath are enough to stifle my once clear senses.

I hear him in the stables torturing the mares with liquid whips of anger. They have learnt, like me, to cower.

I fear for mother.

This new marriage, in haste, and cloudiness, was not wise. I think she knows not what she does, losing grip on tangible workings of life. A sweetness hangs too often upon her lips since the untimely death of father; a sickly vine weaves itself deeper, day-by-day. I note it in her glassy eyes, dilated but barren of life.

Sometimes, he laces her drink with it. He thinks I note him not.

I must hasten. I hear his footsteps, hellbent ones, creaking floorboards…

From infancy, Clara would read to Elsie, it fast becoming a favoured pastime. Nestled within the downiness of her mother and father’s bed, Elsie thrived. She had listened to classic tales from Greek mythology, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Austen’s novels and a host of other literary laces, wove themselves, bolstering Elsie’s enkindled imagination.

There was one particular proverb that had always remained, disregarding woe cast upon her. It was the words of Leo Tolstoy from Anna Karenina:

"All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow."

As a growing young woman, Clara encouraged an academic mind-bent, greatly praised by private tutors of her daughter. Astute, perceptive and intellectually intrigued, Elsie was. Being read aloud to, whether huddled by fireside warmth of the parlour, or cocooned in bed, Elsie never forgot her mother’s lyrical tones of voice, nor the truth that resonated, crystalline-clear, from Tolstoy’s written words.

Under the clutches of her stepfather, a horse owner and gambler, she learnt only too doggedly the malignant alacrity of darkness and its silent savagery. She had escaped such darkness as a child, standing tall in pools of puddled light, when under the protection of both her parents. But life had changed, shapes known and comforting, now morphed to discernible sneers as gargoyles; wide smiles tormented themselves into fanged promises whilst her stepfather steadily took charge of Ordsall Hall, demolishing all that once flourished under its roof.

Dear Diary,

I fear my life is in danger. Mother sleeps more and more during the day. Gloaming afternoons sweep her up into tight shrouds of despair, as corrupting drops of opium continue to lace her teacups. She moves farther from me as her eyes glisten over with false animation. Once ensnared, she sleeps as if dead upon the couch, leaving me alone – exposed - to him.

He has not, as yet, found my journal, and I rejoice in small pleasures, for his eyes track all, following me to lost recesses, in an attempt to try and free myself of his unwanted attentions.

Today, he groped his manhood whilst stood a-front of the fire, drunk with brandy; puffing ominous rings of smoke as cloudy nooses towards me as I sat, doing my best to escape his hold by reading.

I hate the very bones of the man.

I believe he is in league with Beezlebub: smiting blessed memories of father; he acts as lord in the same places where father once placed his true, regal feet. A moral, good-natured man that loved both mother and me.

A most blessed father.

I am always yearning for his paternal attention, feeling its keen, sharpened absence.

Again, he comes. I smell the waft of putrid cigars: the smoky, leathery tang creeps into my senses, strangling fast any pure air and free breath.

His coarse hand is on the doorknob. I hear it shudder intrepidly at his cold, inhuman touch.

The horses whinny in fright in the stables, using a sixth sense to detect my darkened peril – a peril that they are I both share.

He is here again.

The handle turns…

Clara gave birth to a healthy baby son but bears no memory of such a trial. A dream-like, haunting mask coats all she does, gliding from one room to another over the years since Samuel’s death. The forced betrothal to Jeptha has sucked away at her life force.

Her father had wanted the familial line of Ellingtons to continue, in hope that a male heir would fruitfully bless her womb, therefore ensuring longevity of the estate at Ordsall Hall but she had long ago forgotten about any such duty. Laudanum had, by the time of birth, quite eclipsed Clara, taking her to an underbelly of grey chimeras and taunting faces, keeping her firmly bedridden. She held the bundle within arms, barely cognisant of the weight that she dimly sensed was a son.

Jeptha had been swift to steal new life from her quivering arms, securing a wet nurse. If he had allowed lamenting drops to diminish their rigid hold upon Clara, she would have perhaps had a chance to regain motherly instincts, softening blows that the child would have to bear with such an untamed beast for a father. But, if anything, ghostly drops increased, vining her blood with nightmarish, waking visions, and painful memories of Samuel and Elsie, when they had been a most loving and united family.

I fear my life is limited. He stalks me day and night around perimeters of the hall, oftentimes inflamed by drinking. Servants scurry at the sight of him, female ones in particular, and I have taken to attic rooms, piercingly inhabitable as they are, to escape him.

Fast Rider died today, his prized racehorse. I know he beat her to death for losing a race. She was such a gentle soul.

I write this sat atop of a worn portmanteau bearing initials of my father: S.E. I spend time coursing my fingers along raised, stitched markings, remembering his open face. I crave his presence - so very greatly. It is a sorrow almost unmentionable.

Finding woven coverlets from generations before, I curl into a tight C shape, shivering but mildly safe under their warmth, hidden between foist-ridden, dust-soaked detritus from previous ancestors.  Here, in this oubliette of an attic space, there exists a shard of protection - a little edge of comfort.

Days pass. I am cold. Lifeless. Husks of sourdough bread lay stale. The only comfort I have is in reading when daylight finds me, funnelling light, from uppermost rooftop panes in bent shafts towards wobbly lines of fiction.

Dear Diary,

Mother has gone. Laudanum stole her. He cares not. The fiend. Time is draining for me too. I feel a further tightening of my breath; a skip in each heartbeat, unsettled as adventurous kittens; feverish as burning coal. I keep a fixed monitoring of the attic door. Perhaps he is too drunk or too stupid to calculate that I hide here, believing me dead or vanished?

Ordsall Hall shall then be his, falling exactingly into his sharpened talons, as he always planned. It was clearly a marriage forged with deceit: a falsehood that allowed him to claim her inheritance from father – nothing more.

The nib of the pen scratches so tonight - mirroring my distracted frenzy.

Ennui. 

Fear.

Palpable fear is a heavy lozenge on my tongue, stoppering any free passage of breath. My breaths are laboured, ragged as ripped cloth.

Christmastime of 1871 had been the best. Samuel had commissioned a local artist to paint the family. It was a gift to Clara, my beloved mother, but also one to the hall, claiming their rightful placement as a growing family in the long line of Ellingtons that preceded before them.

The morning of the first camera shots bode well: a northern flung light cast stoic rays across dew-dusted pastures of Ordsall Hall. Pin-pointed dewdrops appeared as diamonds, glistening in sunbeams. It was on this stage that the staged family photographs begun – Samuel, Clare and Elsie positioned before the grand windowpane of the finest reception room; scarlet damask curtains helping to frame the contented family within the fold of the house.

Immediately, Clara fell in love with the dappled light: the stretching fields of cast jewels that dazzled amidst elm and oak trees. Elsie’s face, aglow with a joyous smile, shined forth. All were full of festive spirit – a marvel it was to behold.

The chosen family photograph was then chosen, processed, framed in gild, before it was placed, in prideful position, above the roaring fire of the parlour. The heart of the hall.

Diary,

Daylight hours shorten and I sense dreaded footsteps nearing ever closer to my attic bolthole – each, and every, damnable and sleepless night that I must endure.

I dare not write more in case the scribblings of ink and nib alert him to my hiding spot.

My mind misgives. The root of paranoia has already settled within me, funnelling a thwarted anchor to hook my soul.

There is no longer time left for me here, the truth of such knowledge trills up and down my spine as a constant alarm bell.

I can write no more.

Elsie

The night of fate presses its heinous face of arrival against heaven- tilted windows, near blinded by cobwebs – webs formed from centuries of spinning silk threads of spiders.

In spite at being played a fool, he storms the attic, hurling boxes and trinkets as he enters. 

“You have kept me waiting, Elsie. You useless brat – just like your mother. What a curse she was until the drops took her. You women are thorns in my side. I have tired of your games,” he bellows. Spittle hangs repulsively from his chin with bedevilled, hot-coal eyes burning within in his anger-framed face.

In haste, Elsie runs from the attic, up the spindly staircase to the rooftop, pushing heavy walls of cobwebs that have weaved tight tapestries across the stony walls.

Eventually, she reaches a door, and throwing all of her weight into its firm hold, Elsie releases herself into a heap onto the stony ledge: the tallest part of Ordsall Hall.

Stumbling, as drunk in her wake, Jeptha catches up, flaring hot crimson with rage. Grabbing the scruff of Elsie’s collared dress, he raises her from the ground, shaking her meagre body in frenzied pulses of aggression – a part punishment for the days and weeks that she has eluded his detection.

“You shall pay for evil doing, Elsie,” he slurs before biting a chunk of tender flesh from her cheek – his feral attack mimicking that of a savage beast - devoid of humanity. Heady fumes of port drench each exhalation, near enough to drown Elsie in a suffocating stupor.

With blood dripping profusely onto her pale rose dress, she takes no note of pain. Without delay, she boldly steps over the walled rooftop precipice, choosing to simply fall to her death.

All Jeptha can do is to sway with building Arctic winds, howling, chiding in protest at evildoing, not daring to look down to witness the bloodied, mangled corpse of his stepchild.

With blood-soaked lips, he returns to the ice-cold stairwell, making his way back into the empty shell of Orshall Hall, bereft of life and a now bereft of its beating heart: Elsie.

Weeks pass with Jeptha drinking his fill of the hall’s fine vintage wines; beating the horses into stupefied frenzies. One day, he decides to gather nobles and the elite from local villages, eager to capture a new wife for himself.

On one particular evening of April, he had been entertaining, before returning to the parlour, to drink a brandy and smoke a cigar alone. Placed above the fireplace, he failed to remove the family photograph. The girl’s eyes, bear down upon him, unblinking in a fierce, nocturnal glow. Fully diluted in knowing of his evil, stretching each twisted, jarred memory. He tries to dispel the notion as ridiculous, drinking heady gulps of swirling nectar, that he holds ever so slightly tighter, in a crystal glass.  

Alarmingly, glass within the framed photograph of the Ellington family begins to shatter, cracking into duplicitous shards; sharp edges lift from the matte surface. Without being able to rise from his armchair, afore the fire’s flames, a thick shard, with a fanged, gilded pinpoint, spins in strong swoops, flinging itself at full pelt, gleefully lacerating his throat. Gurgles of blood well into thick puddles, coursing into his upheld glass and lap. A scarlet slash tattoos itself across his white shirt.

And there, in the photographed picture, Elsie smiles.

Revenge is wholesomely hers.

A chanting lilt of “Happy Christmas” echoes, as her released spirit dances. It is a celebratory occasion. With ghostly fingers dipped into Jeptha’s deadened blood, her smile widens, stretching as taut elastane. For in this moment, Elsie has finally found her revenge and it is golden like the gilding of her family’s portrait. It gleams in the fireside flames as Elsie courses an outstretched, silent fingertip over the faces of her much-missed mother and father.

“I am home,” she whispers to their flickering silhouettes as they ghost the parlour doorway in search of Elsie, a truly loved daughter.

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 fifth novel. Emma won Wingless Dreamer’s Bird Poetry Contest of 2022 with her poem ‘Carbonito de Sophie’.