Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine #6

Manchuria.

Peter folded the letter and tucked it in his Boston Bag. He expected his mother would want to know about Francine. His parents knew he had been much involved with the Cincinnati girl and assumed they were engaged. But Peter would arrive home alone; no bride to share the joys and challenges of enlightening the unenlightened about the road to salvation. Peter smiled at the formulation. She refused to go to Japan. Perhaps this long separation would provide a measure of their relationship.

Perhaps she wasn’t the right one at all. And now Maria Federoff, the enticing Maria Federoff, had entered his field of vision.

----Near the bow, Peter leaned forward and rested his elbows on the ship’s rail. He gazed toward the west where the sun, crisply defined against a blue-black sky, lingered over an unbroken horizon. The sun hung there for a time and then plummeted from sight.

Ever since his first transpacific crossing Peter had remained in awe of the ocean’s vastness, sometimes even dreaming about it in landlocked Ohio. Peter imagined that if you could go up in space and look down, the ship would become a mere speck and the people on it specks on the speck. Such musings rendered him conscious of his insignificant place in the great universe of time and space. Hardly profound or original thoughts, most ocean crossers likely experienced them at one time or another; still, they made him uncomfortable. He preferred to be ashore where the scale of things proved more manageable, less menacing. On his previous crossing, and again on this one, he’d been troubled by an ill-defined sense something bad was going to happen. In fact, nothing bad happened; nonetheless, his discomfort persisted. He looked forward to walking down the gangway in Yokohama.

A handful of passengers in deck chairs basked in the fading glow of the disappeared sun, while others paused to smoke or take one last turn around deck before dinner. The engines hummed reassuringly, propelling the ship through the sea like a living creature. For a time, a pair of porpoises bounding in the bow wake garnered Peter’s attention. As quickly as they appeared they disappeared into dark blue water that seemed glazed by the gray-white reflection of the ship’s hull.

An elderly woman submerged in a cotton shawl shuffled by, momentarily