Supreme Day 

Chipped light wrapped the ceramic kimonos. Their phosphorescent four inches stood out like gravemarkers on the dark shelf. Japanese faces, soft as chalk, glowed under alabaster ribbons and stabbed hair in the moonlight. 

Below the contemplation of their incised with sticks eyes, a seacaptain's desk lurched against the oak bulkhead. Multifaceted eyes sparked above the green ink blotter in a tiger's shrunken face. Velvet ink rolled in lush pulses from an unstoppered bottle. A swarthy portrait of a frilly lady tilted port, athwart the stiff rush of the paneling's grain. An ocean roared at intervals beyond a banging door. 

The frittery edges of a ripped letter feathered back and forth under a salt night wind. Scimitar curves of a blue fountainpen alphabet clipped out the words: "the lions... in China... are everywhere..." in breathy pauses. Leaked ink dripped its shadow under a flustered sheet of the unfinished letter, gluing it darkly down. 

A starch moon remained distantly clear in the porthole's lens. 

Through the blinking doorway, a swinging lamp's orange eye was guttering against the blue evening uselessly, spilling yellow in sharp spurts on the cabin's contents, and was accompanied by a stout stomp. It was the Captain. Troubled echoes opened under the rocking deck, as if the thudding boat were riding high and empty. Over a thick desk in a dark corner, the grainy photograph of a girl slapped the heavy panelling with a repetitive click. She was a ticking miniature of the painted lady, leaning dimly above her in her ornate frame. Her tintype face had the deep texture of a charcoal rubbing from a stone above a flat dress. 

Contrapuntal gusts of wind, timed to the light's cessations, banged the porthole's pane of glass, angry to enter. The white ceramic figures, male and female, shocked as spectators in the lamp's repeating spotlight, flared and faded with the door's stiff indecisions. Soft air, heavy with humidity, made the creases in the costumes look worn down, like a watercolor reflection of water, while the blank bulk of the sleeves themselves gathered at the wrists to displayed a mirrored and diminished set of hands, small and fat as a child's. Then the spigot of light swayed away and the glass rattled blackly. 

A blunt wind broke through into the tight space. Hurried papers chafed into impatient speech. Slits of the lamp's light flared the detached black letters on the received and reread pages alive. They were a girl's words politely penned to a stranger at sea. "Dear Father: Graduation is coming (!)... oppressive summer of freedom... willows & John... some work for fall and winter... Julie arranged job and apartment... here's the gilded invitation... June 3." 

The instant infirm lamplight quavered over her unshaking script and went out. 

Bamm! 

Metal light began to creep around the shut edges of the cabin door, like the bright rip edge of a postage stamp. Silvery dust started to filter through the dim smudge of the renewed porthole. The ceramic man and woman, uncertain in their dark niche, had skittered to the rim of the shelf when the clumping Captain or absent hand of the sea had slammed the paneled door shut with a exact, splattered noise. Stiff in their starched kimonos, they balanced delicately as paratroopers hunched in the steel punchout of an airplane in the cabin's resettled moonlight, listening with touched palms to the broken repetitions of the sea's engines before the final shout to jumpoff.