Rock

June 2025

Genesis 1:21 / Psalm 18:2 / Matthew 7:24-25 / Luke 15:24 / John 5:24 / John 4:14-15

 

I remember how, on a lovely bright Tucson morning, Shelly asked the question two days before everything changed. “Nicky, got any thoughts for the Memorial Day weekend?”

“Not really. You?”

“Let’s go back to Puerto Peñasco. We can make it in four, five hours. Find that little cottage again. Poke around the malecon. Eat in funky little restaurants. Go for a boat ride, snorkel. Do stuff. You know.”

“Sounds good, get away for a few days. Sure. Let’s do it.”

That set things in motion. Even today, more than thirty years later, I’m not sure I understand all of what happened. But that weekend made a difference in my life. Our lives. Our marriage. Big difference.

Sunup, Saturday morning, Shelly loaded everything we’d need in one carryall. Wasn’t much, shorts and tee shirts covered our wardrobe needs. Sandals, swimsuits, clean underwear. Toothbrushes. Left the razor in the drawer. Full tank of gas for the Buick. Snacks, a couple of bottles of water. Tossed in the tote bag with the dive masks, snorkels and fins in it, two sets of everything.

It was lunch time when we arrived. We’d eaten at Pollo Lucas on our last trip, returned now for tacos camarones. The shrimp were grilled, drizzled with lime, served with guac and the best salsa we’d ever tasted. Kick back with a couple of frosty Dos Equis, made for grateful ahhhs.

At work, striving to beat last year’ figures, hit my sales goal for this month and amputate ten tentacles from my departmental costs left me feeling like a humongous alligator had bitten off another chunk of my life. That was the cost of doing business. So what if every day took a bigger bite, the money was good. Who cares if I end each day tending to my rumbling stomach with megadoses of antacids. Who cares about the nightly toss and turn ritual that made Shelly boot me out to sleep in a separate room. Who cares if that’s what it takes. It is what it is. It works. Sort of.

But this day, my deep-gut sighs at just being in Puerto Peñasco gave me permission to relax. We could relax, both of us. If anything, Shelly’s work as an ER nurse was more demanding than mine.

Near the crest of Colina de la Ballena – Whale Hill – Shelly spotted the white stucco casita with a red tile roof. Same sunwashed sign out front, Espacio Para Dejar. Room to let. “Still charming,” she said.

We knocked and the mamacita’s smile warmed and welcomed us. “Buenas dias, bienvenido. Me llama Lupita. ¿Te gusta ver la habitación? Sί, sί, entrar, por favor, a sus servidad.”

Corner room, rustic, clean. Very clean. Nice cross-breeze. Fresh linens on the bed. Well-scrubbed tile bathroom, shower big enough for two. From the patio, the view of Cholla Bay was a nice extra. Breakfast in the morning was a bonus.

Check-in took all of five minutes. We dropped our gear and I bowed to Shelly’s desire to stroll the malecon. “I want to see if something I absolutely don’t need jumps out and asks me to take it home.’” Me, I was happy just to be there.

“Your wish is my command,” I said. “But tomorrow, let’s find a guy with a boat to take us somewhere terrific for snorkeling.”

Shelly agreed. She liked snorkeling almost as much as I did.

Somewhere between four and five o’clock, I said, “Hon, I’m hot, sweaty and tired. How ‘bout we go back to the casita, take a shower and a nap. Late supper after?”

“Sί, sί, senor. As sus servidad.” I always got a kick out of my wife’s laugh.

Rooster crows and church bells gently drew us from our sleep on Sunday morning. We dozed for a while, decided it was time for desayuno, breakfast. Lupita made her own tortillas, delicious, fresh every day. Her machaca was spicy, but not too. Café, don’t know what Lupita did to make it strong and delicious, but in a word, it was delectable.

After drinking two pots dry, Shelly, whose Spanish was far better than my high school leftovers, asked Lupita where we might find a charter boat, not too big, not too expensive. For snorkeling, not fishing. Lupita rattled off directions. With much expectation slightly diminished by a couple of wrong turns, Shelly finally directed us to the right pier, the right boat and the right capitán.

A man with very white teeth and a proud mustache greeted us with a cheery, “Hola, señor, señora! Me llama es Luis Soto. You wish to go fishing? My boat, Amante, she is ready for you. You tell me what manner of fish you wish to catch, Amante, she will take you to them!”

We liked the look of Amante, a 30-foot well-worn Grady White rigged for serious fishing. Four comfortable chairs, two at the stern for fighting game fish, two under a blue and white striped canopy for the more laid-back types like us on this sunny day on the bay in May.

I said, “Mucho gusto, Capitan Luis, we are the Apestias, this is my wife, Shelly. I am Nick. But we are not fishermen. We’re interested in snorkeling. Do you know of a reef somewhere not too far, where there is a fine reef and many different kinds of fish?”

“Oh, sί, señor. I know of just such a place, pero it is not nearby. It will take, ah, dos horas, perhaps more, to get there. Would that be aceptable?”

“Whatcha think, Nicky? I’m game if you are.” I liked that the smiling wife was game for almost anything.

“Sounds good to me.” I asked after his fee, which was reasonable and affordable, then added, “Capitán Luis, is there is a market nearby where we can buy food and drink for our trip? And tell us what cerveza to you prefer?”

Thirty minutes later with one cooler loaded with assorted snacks, a sack of tangerines and two pouches of frozen peas, another primed with Jarritos, Dos Equis and water, Amante headed south-southeast into open water. Under the canopy, Shelly and I sat side by side and popped the caps off icy bottles of pineapple Jarritos. Fresh sea air, warm sun, the steady drone of the boat’s engine – perfect for a morning doze.

“Shel?”

“Yes?”

“Pick a word.” It was a game we played: pick one word that best describes what we’re doing.

“Um. Lassitude.”

“I was thinking languor.”

“That’s good. Mine’s better.”

“Yeah. ‘Tis.”

Much of the Sonoran desert between Tucson and Guaymas is miles and miles of broad, flat land colored by a thousand shades of tan. The Baja peninsula that points at Puerto Vallarta like USA’s index finger is more of the same. There’s little to attract the eye other than here-and-there saguaros, tanque verdes, scorpions and an occasional coyote. Then, once you’re aboard a boat on the Sea of Cortez and landfall is far behind, there is even less to see; water, water, everywhere.

By the time Luis shut off the engine and dropped the anchor, we were ready for a change – but not for what lay before us. We’d anchored next to a rocky lump of shale, adorned with accretions of the ages yet barren of any vegetation. A steep bluff on one end mocked the fingernail-sized spit of sand at the other. Too small for an island, too large to be a rock, I settled on islet. If we played our word game, we would have agreed on ‘desolate.’

“Capitán Luis, this is the place you told us about? The reef?” Skepticism whinged my voice.

“Ay, sί, Señor Neek. Es esto. The moment you are in the water, you will see how el arrecife, it runs alongside to the isla and reaches beyond the point. You and your esposa, you will find very good snorkel here, verdad. Do not be in a hurry. I will have a cerveza y siesta in the boat while you swim.”

I looked at Shelly. She looked at me. “Well, Nicky. We’re here. Give it try?”

“Sure. What’s to lose. If it’s a bust, we can chalk it up to nice boat ride.”

We sat on the gunwale of the boat, put our masks and fins on and. Each armed with a pouch of frozen peas in hand, we tipped backward into the water.

Capitán Luis was right. In a word, the reef was glorious, forested with pristine elkhorn and pillar corals garnished with bouquets of  sea weeds that waved in crystalline water alive with fish, a flashing kaleidoscope of blues, reds, silvers and golds. Reef rock, carpeted with barnacles, hosted anemones and long-spined urchins, tube worms and spindle-legged seastars. Quintets of royal blue king angelfish bumped algae loose from rocks, their tiny gold pectoral fins flittering to keep them in hover mode. Yellow butterfly fish hurried by as if they were late for a very important date, shearing the water with their long, black noses. Schools of black-and-yellows wrasses tangled with the electric-blue-and-silvers, jostling for bites of whatever they could find.

Lolling in a crevice, a solitary rainbow wrasse, it’s odd royal blue-yellow-purple palette caught my eye. I gestured to Shelly, pointed down, you’ve got to see this!

Waving my pouch of peas, I signaled again, open yours. No sooner had we torn a hole in our plastic pouches than we were besieged by fish of all sizes and colors, bobbing in front of us, poking at us, impatient to rush in, grab a pea, swim away only to return ten seconds later for a repeat performance. Amid the flurry, Shelly managed to laugh – more of a bubble-snort, really –  through her snorkel. For some reason unknown to us, fish in tropical waters are mad for frozen peas. Five, six minutes later, our pea supply exhausted, our fairweather friends had abandoned us.

We surfaced to tread water, our excitement bubbling out of us like an artesian spring. “Nicky! This is wonderful! This is almost like being in a painting! That bright orange one, did you see it? … there was this pufferfish, came right up to my mask, I poked at it and poof, it turned into a spikey balloon … saw a moray down in a crack in the rocks, I think, maybe a wolf eel, don’t know the difference, a small one grinning at me …”

We swam together for another half hour or so. Shelly patted my shoulder, pointed up and we surfaced. “Done for a while, Nicky. I’m going to go back to the boat, drink some water, have a snack. You keep going if you want.”

I was like a puppy with a new toy, yes! The reef was addictive … so much to see, something different always beckoning … come, come, more to see … more to see.

In a sandy patch, I spotted an octopus garden marked by a spray of broken crabshells tossed like trash in front of a cairn of rocks. Peering in the opening, I saw the small octopus, poked my finger in. A tenacle reached back, wrapped around my finger and I felt the pull of the tiny suckers. Deciding I was too big to eat and maybe I wanted to eat it, the octopus made his opinion known with a cloud of black ink and shot off with a jet-propelled ha, ha, hee, can’t catch me.

Another twenty, thirty minutes or so took me further out and around the rocky end of the islet. On the way, a stand of brain coral came into view and as I floated by, I heard a chorus of pop-pop-pop-pops. A deep dive and a close look showed me a colony marked by tiny feelers and bug-eyes. Popcorn shrimp.

The reef came to an end. Beyond, I saw nothing but an expanse of sand and blue water. A feeling tiredness began to seep in and I decided it was time to get back to the boat. I turned and as I retraced my course, I was struck by the wonder of this place, how this piece of the ocean world wove and worked together. Fish and invertebrates, corals and snails, crustaceans, gorgonians that were neither animal nor vegetable, were intertwined in a marvelous matrix of food and support and nurture and shelter. Thought of a few words to share with Shelly, like glorious; astonishing; amazing. How was it, I wondered, that anything so intricate, so finely-tuned, so very beautiful could ever have happened without some sort of design. How could anything this spectacular come from random chance? Couldn’t happen, not hardly.

More tired now, I surfaced and looked for the boat. Didn’t see it, not yet, still too far around the end of the islet. I made a sun check, figured I’d been in the water for close to two hours. Fatigue was tapping on my door but the boat would be just around the corner.

Stopped short, saw a sand-bottomed crevice a few feet away, looked like a souvenir-sized conch sitting in the middle. I surfaced again, drew a deep breath and dived ten, twelve feet or so, found the conch was only a rock and that’s when this very large, very dark shadow flickered over me. Immediately, my lizard brain flashed shark! and the electric alarm galloped all the way past fear and landed in full-bore panic. With a spark of rational thought, I was able to look to what cast the shadow, saw a trophy-sized bluefin tuna but my panic didn’t care. Now shot full of adrenaline, mindless fear took on a life of its own. Gasping for air through my overworked snorkel, my lizard brain took over, locked on to the conviction that a monster shark with jaws the size of Chicago was closing in. I flipped onto my back and kicked my DuckFeet fins like they were motorized, turned and churned back the way I’d come.

Rounding the edge of the cliff, I stopped.

Looked for the boat.

Not there.

What? Can’t be!

Panic times ten!

Gotta be something wrong with my eyes. I looked again.

No Amante. No Luis. No Shelly.

Just me, the islet, and water, water, everywhere.

What happened! What could have happened!

Shelly got hurt, needed medical attention! Luis was insane, a pirate-kidnapper! The boat caught fire, exploded!

Whatwhatwhatwhatwhat?

Panic, hot and blind, boiled my brain as I power-kicked for the islet’s tiny beach. Gasping, I dragged myself ashore, tore off my mask and fins, spun my head from side to side, searching for something, anything to give me a clue. It didn’t take long for my adrenaline to flatten out, leaving me wrung out like a dishrag.

Nothing made sense.

I searched the crescent of sand, saw a handful of rocks, bits of shell, seaweed. Nothing helpful. Maybe if I climb up on the islet, look around, I could see something … my wife … the boat … something ...

The islet’s hogback offered nothing but shale and gravel, bits of moss, dead seaweed and feathers caught in seabird whitewash.

At the peak, an oddity: a solid chunk of limestone the size of a delivery van, white, mottled with grey, flecked with pyrites. Stuck in the rock like King Arthur’s Excalibur, a wooden spar jutted upward. A ruined ship’s mast? Drifted tree trunk? How did it get there? No clue.

North, east, south, west, I did three-sixty scans again, then again, searching for something. Found nothing. Boat? Wreckage? Shelly? Luis? Life jackets? Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

Worry logjammed my attempts to think my way out of this. A one-track loop of where’s Shelly? … what happened to her? … is she okay …? was the best I could do.

No answer gave way to no hope.

To the east, the nearest shore, a mile distant, more or less, was too far for me to swim without flotation of some sort. I clambered up on the limestone lump, gave the spar a shake. Wood. Wood floats. Solid. No movement, not even a wiggle. Not going anywhere with that.

I crabbed off the limestone chunk, sat, leaned against the shady side and tried to think. Kept coming up with the obvious: marooned … stranded … stuck … no water … no food. Inventory: a pair of swim trunks, fins, mask, snorkel. Islet. Mini-beach. Limestone chunk. Good luck with that. Oh, yeah – no shelter.

Made another sun check. Well past noon, not yet three. Hot, getting hotter. Dry mouth, dry eyes, processing thoughts like sludge. First signs of dehydration.

A black bird soared overhead, its broad wings angled like something out of the  Paleozoic past. A blood red pouch on its throat seemed to throb warning, warning, warning. Thanks a lot, frigate bird. No help there.

No help anywhere.

Is this where I will die?

Guess I’d find out.

I felt something shift inside, quietly, suddenly, like a gremlin had found the master switch to my dwindling reserves and shut the whole organism down. Breathing slowed. Eyes drooped. Exhaustion swallowed me whole.

When I awoke, the sun was closing on the horizon. Sprawled on the shady side of the limestone chunk, late-day heat pressed on me, leaving me feeling like I’d wrestled with King Kong. My mouth, cottonboll-dry, tasted of flint. The sea, the islet, the limestone lump with the spar stuck in its top, still there, no change. And me. And thirst. Awful thirst.

All my striving in the race of rats, reaching after my own grail of fool’s gold, there was nothing I had achieved that could rescue me now. Not sure where my laugh came from, nothing funny about this, but I thought about the word game Shelly and I played. For this situation? Well, abandoned, surely. Inert. Cast away. Deserted. Desolate. Stranded, for certain. Lost. Yeah, absolutely lost.

Got to find a way out of this … searched for an exit door, considered three … get the fins on and swim, swim, swim but the shore was so far away and I was never a strong swimmer … banging my head against the rock would take too long besides hurting too much … asking God for help was unfamiliar territory … didn’t know anything about talking to God … any other options were gone … besides, it was painless … give it a try …

Growing up, Mom and Dad packed us kids up on Sunday mornings and hauled us to Sunday school complete with Bible stories, cutesy coloring book pictures, singy-songs and four-line prayers while they went to ‘big’ church. Brother Ronnie and sister Kathleen took to it, became faithful church-goers, repeated the pattern with their own kids. Not so much for me. After high school, I made up reasons to ignore what little I’d learned about God, disregarded organized religion as meaningless, darkened the doors of churches only for someone else’s wedding or funeral.

But then, I’d never sat on top of an islet in the middle of the ocean-sea wearing nothing but a pair of swimtrunks, my skin frying in the sun, my head thundering with a killer headache, my gut snarling at me with cramps, my body dehydrating minute by minute, second by second. Like they say, no atheists in foxholes.

I was stripped down to absolute zero. Nothing left. Prayer was the only thing that made a grain of sense. Wasn’t sure if there was a format, some sort of how-to-pray rules, didn’t care, gave way to mumbling. “God, if you’re there, help me out here on a rock in the middle of the sea. I’m flat out lost, can’t do anything, can’t go anywhere. In a few days, I will die here if you don’t send some sort of rescue and bring this to an end. One way or another. Please. Oh, yeah. Amen.”

I waited. Listened, heard the lap of wavelets, my own breathing. Distant cries from a gull. That was it.

I tacked on a request for some water. Got more nothing.

Sharp points of the limestone hump-lump jabbed my back. I shifted, tried to find a soft spot … didn’t help … there weren’t any … this mega-rock thing had been here forever … so what, don’t care, still lost … Shelly, where are you … Jesus, find me … please … end this … was that a whisper? … a breeze? …

My head was leaden, too heavy for my neck. Sometime in past few hours, the gremlin came back to salt my eyes with hot granules of sand. Then he split my lips, one, two, three. Four.

Wondered what my obit would say … the husk of what once was Nicholas P. Apestia was found on a formidably barren islet south of Puerto Peñasco, victim of a shipwreck. There was no sign of his wife, Shelly, blahblahblah …

Jesus, I’m done. Got nuthin’ left. C’mon, Lord, take me wherever you want … just get me off this rock …

I lay down on my side, tucked my arm under my head … curled up … closed my eyes … thought how ironic it was to be in the fetal position, getting ready to check out the same way I came in … slept.

Chattering teeth and shivers woke me up … gasped for breath … slept again … woke … shivered, chattered … slept … all night, over and again.

One eye open, I watched golden splinters break the charcoal horizon apart … thought there should have been music … new day offered a speck of hope, took it … not dead … yet.

Dumpy clouds the color of coal dust tumbled overhead. The sunrise, not to be thwarted, painted their undersides the color of blood. Red sky at morning, storm warning … sure, thanks a lot, God … that’s all I need … end this … please. Amen.

Rain fell, gently. What little breeze there was felt soft, warm. Grateful. Puddles gathered on the rock. I pressed my face into one, kissed it, sucked it dry. Found another. Did it again. Is this how God answers prayer? Lord, end this. Amen. Please.

My back against the limestone rock, rain soaked, I gave my world another look. Same old, same old … why, in all the time I’ve been here,  haven’t I seen any boats … played my word game again … lethargic … shiftless … languorous … stuporous … yeah, that one.

I waited, didn’t know for what, couldn’t do anything else. Stomach griped. Head threatened to explode. Thought up a new rabbit trail, took a ramble … am I being punished for all the scuzzy, crummy things I’d done? … remembered how I chiseled the guy who bought my old car, told him there was nothing wrong with it, he’d found out soon enough … fudged on my taxes too many times … copped that box of discs from work, nearly got caught, now they’re obsolete … thought about the awful row with Dad and Mom the last time we were together, yelled at them, quit judging me! … all because I didn’t go to church, knowing all the while it was about their love … then there were those forays with Ellen … and Patty … and Doreen … and Janie …

Sorry I opened that door … laissez les mauvais temps rouler, let the bad times flow

… memories morphed into regrets … how I had perfected my skill at snap judgments, labeling the targets of my wrath as sub-standard so I could justify treating them with contempt … lies, little and big, poured out over a lifetime onto the ears of people I wanted to influence … insults and putdowns, manipulations, gossip … denying the wrong I had done, calling it good … excusing it with ‘well, okay, considering the circumstances … everyone does it’ … all the while letting my secret fears feed my resentment, calling it ‘rebellion’ and ‘iconoclasm’ … more lies I’d told myself, believing none of them … worse, were the litany of lies I told myself about myself, about how I was so much more than I was … desperate attempts to mask my clay feet and hardwood heart … and now, here I was stuck on a rock in the middle of an ocean, every opportunity for apologize, to ask forgiveness now gone, gone, gone.

 

Then there was the forbidden one, the one I absolutely could not would not revisit, not even admit … the one I kept locked in darkness … where it belonged.

No, I’d never qualify for sainthood … but I was no sinner … was I? … I didn’t go around hurting people (yeah, I did) … never killed anyone (killed relationships, tho) … never dishonored my mother and father (other than the too many timed I did) … adultery? stealing? … don’t go there, just pretend they never happened, la la la … no sinner me … not ever … not hardly … liar, liar, pants on fire …

Good Lord, wish Shelly’d never said let’s go to Puerto Peñasco … this time, this place … don’t understand … got to end this … please, Jesus … don’t want to die here on this … rock … alone … lost …

I felt like I was being swallowed by a boa constrictor named weariness … oh, no, it’s got my toe … oh, gee, it’s up to my knee … oh, my, it’s got my thigh … by the time I got to make haste, it’s up to my waist, I was asleep. Again.

Awake … rain stopped …. sky clearing … headache thunders … dizzy … can’t focus … tongue, a fat toad … bones ache, punishing me for treating them so badly … my life was a cocktail of bile, bitter tears with a spritz of lemon.

Searched the rock for another puddle I could suck dry. Found a small one. Tasted salt. Not much help.

The sun hit the rock, made it glow … funny … hadn’t seen that before.

“I can see clearly now, the rain is gone, It’s going to be a bright, bright sun-shiny day.”

Whuf! Now I’m really losing it … someone’s singing …

“Going to be a nice day, Nick …”

Great … now I’m hearing voices … losing my mind … I get it … dehydration … delusion … afflictions for the lost …

“Hey, Nick …”

I turned, looked over my shoulder. A man dressed in canvas pants and a faded tee shirt sat on the limestone lump, leaning against the spar. Headline on the tee said Pescador; underneath, a cartoon of a leaping sailfish.

Dark hair, surfer-dude long. Scruffy beard. Café au lait skin. Brown eyes full of life. Smiling eyes. Sandals on his feet, soles made from used tires. Huaraches.

I gave the spar another look, noticed a crosstree spiked near the top, canted at an angle. Shook my head. Sunspots spangled my eyes. Hadn’t seen that before, either. Odd.

“Where the heck did you come from? And how do you know my name?” Sounded belligerent, felt defensive, fearful.

“Well, Nick, you called, asked for help.” He had a slight accent, not sure what. Not Mexican. He handed me a liter of water. No label on the bottle. “Here. You said you were thirsty?”

The top unscrewed easily enough. I gulped it halfway down. “Thank you. Good vintage. Needed that.”

“Certainly did. You know, I have other water, too. Quenches your thirst permanently. Drink it once, you’ll never be thirsty again.”

A memory bell tinkled in the back of my brain. “Oh, please! How can that be?”

“Living water, we call it. Only comes from one place.”

“Oh, I see. You’ve got an exclusive spring, want me to buy stock in it, something like that.”

“Ha! Nick! You’re funny. No, that’s only partially true. My spring is exclusive. But the water is free.”

“So you heard me call for help, brought me some water. How did this happen? And where did you come from?”

“Nicholas, I have come from another kingdom. One that is not of the world as you know it.”

“Sounds like one of us is nuts. Probably me. Been on this rock too long, going whacko from too much sun, not enough water. I’m not even sure you’re real.”

He held out is hand. “Touch me.”

I looked at his hand, ran my fingers over his palm. Rough, calloused. Couple of broken fingernails. Working man’s hands. Fierce scar on his right wrist. Another on the left. “What happened?”

“I was wounded.”

“Sorry. Nasty looking scars.”

“They healed quickly.”
I did another scan around the islet. No boat. “By the way, can you, uh, rescue

me? I’d like to get off this rock. You know, go home. Get my life back. Find out what happened to my wife.”

“Nick, I would take great joy in your rescue. In fact, where I come from, rescue is my very purpose.”

“I think I understand what you’re talking about. I’m ready to get off this rock. Do I have to do something first? Pay some sort of price?”

“No, that’s all been taken care of. The price has been paid.”

He held his arms up. “That’s how I got these.”

The memory bell rang again, louder this time. I squinted, gave the man a sideways look. “I know who you are.”

His smile warmed my heart. “I know.”

“I … I think it’s time for me to come in. To the Kingdom, I mean.”

“You know the way, Nick.”

“I do. You are the way. Truth. And life.”

“Welcome home, friend.”

I did not need to see the scar in his side. I knew. For long moments, I could not see or hear or speak; I could hardly breathe. Yes, I knew who this was. I had known for many years.

My prayer for rescue? It had been answered in a way I could never have dreamed. Breath was hard to come by. A gasp stuck in my throat.

He put his hand on my chest and I could breathe. Light blossomed from somewhere within, grew and grew and grew some more, melding into an inexpressible joy.

Bending forward, I rested my forehead on my knees and my words were tears. “Lord, I believe. Help me in my unbelief.”

He scrabbled off the rock and sat at my side. I felt his hand on my neck.

“Ah, yes, the majesty of grace. Good stuff, isn’t it.”

He put his arm around my shoulder, drew me close.

With his other hand, he rummaged in his pocket. “Something I’d like you to have, Nick.” He put a small object it in my hand.

I looked at it. A wooden cross. Curious. Smooth. Warm. A hard wood, like oak.

Finely carved, with a grapevine and grapes. Branches.

He said, “Keep this in remembrance of me.”

“Forever. Forever, Lord. I will keep this forever.”

I leaned against him, put my head on his shoulder. Warm Secure. Safe. No, not just safe … saved. I closed my fingers around my new treasure, held it tight.

I closed my eyes. I slept.

A gentle shake awakened me.

“Hey, Nicky. Have a nice snooze?”

The boat rocked to, fro, to, fro. The blue and white striped awning overhead fluttered in the breeze.

“Shelly! What! How?”

There was that lovely, crystal laugh again.

“Hey, sleepyhead. Whatcha got in your hand?”

I unfolded my fingers.

“Hey, a wooden cross. Where’d you get it?”

 

Copyright © Peter K Schipper 2025

Artwork by Nig