The fishermen who worked the early hours told the story so often that it had stopped sounding like a story and started sounding like weather, something you mentioned in passing without expecting anyone to doubt it. Somewhere between three and four in the morning, the hour when the water goes flattest and quietest and even the gulls seem to know better than to call out, a basket would appear at the end of one of the docks, and in the basket, a baby, calm and dry despite the damp, never crying, only watching the sky with an attention that unsettled anyone who looked too long.
Nobody had ever caught the moment it arrived. Boats came and went all through that hour, lines checked, engines idling, and still no one had seen a boat pull up to leave it, no one had seen footsteps on the dock boards, no one had heard so much as a splash. By the time someone noticed the basket, the baby was simply there, wrapped in cloth that smelled faintly of salt and something sweeter underneath, like driftwood left too long in the sun.
The old song the dockworkers sang to it while they waited for someone official to come had been passed down so many times nobody remembered writing it, soft and rocking, rock-a-bye, dock-a-bay, out where the deep tide rolls, when the boat comes in, we’ll bring you home, back where the water knows. The baby never cried during the singing, only blinked slowly at whoever held it, patient in a way that infants weren’t supposed to be.
By sunrise, every single time, the basket and the baby were both gone, no trace left on the dock boards, no cloth, no smell of salt and sweetness, just the ordinary business of boats coming in with their catch. The workers stopped trying to explain it to newcomers after a while and simply taught them the song instead, the way you teach someone the words to something they’ll need to know eventually, whether they believe in it yet or not.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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