I wouldn't sail this ship if I were you
1. In a tree by a river, a green lizard coiled and sang.
2. A distiller passed underneath; hearing the song of the lizard, he became convinced that the world needed to be set to rights. But by the time he came home, only a vague sense of confusion remained. He took this confusion and brewed it into a rain-grey liquor which tasted of salt and cedarwood. There was only enough for three bottles. The first he knocked off his dinner table with a clumsy elbow; the distiller’s daughter used the second to kill slugs; and the third was mistaken for the whisky of a famous explorer and spent a number of years at the local museum, next to a stuffed polar bear.
3. At that time, five women who had formed a society dedicated to unusual food and drink visited the town. Hearing of the fabled whisky, they determined to steal it. An accompanying feast for lost adventurers was planned of gannets, shoe-leather and certain rare lichens. The theft was strightforward; the museum was not used to interest in its exhibits of any sort, let alone the interest of criminals. On opening the bottle, they were delighted to find that the alcohol content was high and the taste peculiar, because they sustained themselves in dull years on the stories they told of their great feasts and this felt like the start of a fine one.
4. Passing a junkyard, the drunk women found a bicycle which had once belonged to Adolf Hitler. In a sudden burst of inebriated patriotism, they threw it into the Atlantic Ocean.
5. The bicycle rusted beneath the ocean for three years. A black eel made its home in the seat post. When fish came to investigate the unexpected item on the sea bed, the eel darted out and ate them. One day, on smelling a passing fish, the eel surged out of the rusty post a little too forcefully and laid its side open on a jagged edge, whereupon its fellow eels set upon it and ate it.
6. The fish the eel had not eaten found that it knew something of the giddy joy of life after all (it had never been sure; fish are not often sure). It decided to leave its quotidian fish-life for something more exciting. And indeed it had many adventures, although they were of the quiet, heartwarming sort that do not often make stories. Finally, in the far Southern Ocean, the fish was scooped up from the surface of the sea by a frigate-bird who, as the fruit of a decidedly mis-spent youth, was able to converse with a variety of species. You cannot eat me, the fish remarked, because I am a good soul and by my goodness was once saved from an eel, and the same will happen here. For the truly good can do and be anything they want.
7. The frigate-bird ate the fish. But it had always harboured a suspicion that it was a fine sort of frigate-bird, definitely above the common mould. And so the fish’s final message stayed with it long after most of its languages had withered into word-dust. In its later years, the frigate-bird found a home in a Southern port city, where it lived on scraps of fish thrown to it by fascinated stevedores. Mostly it sang them half-remembered fragments of the joyously obscene squid-shanties of the deep sea, but when truly grateful (largely when given tuna) it would thank them for their goodness and tell them of the fish oracle who said that the truly good can be anything.
8. In that city, tiny green lizards lived in every room. And it so happened that some lived in the port as well. One day, ten of these lizards attempted to steal a large chunk of tuna from a cat, who in turn had raided a local fishing boat. The lizards were cunning and resourceful, and (to cut a long story short) the cat ended up in a locked lorry carrying washing machine parts, and the lizards ended up with more fish than they knew what to do with. In particular it was more fish than they could easily carry, and it so happened that they dropped some near the frigate-bird’s nest, and it thanked them in its usual manner.
9. I can be anything I want to be, though the sixth lizard. And it determined that it would be a bird. With some difficulty, it joined the great migration North when Spring came around again, and found a tree in a far Northern land, where it ate summer dragonflies and coiled and sang of the joys of being a bird from dusk to dawn.
