I wouldn't sail this ship if I were you
1. There was once a giant who lived in a tower by the sea. Life was not easy for giants in those days and she had lived alone a long, long time. One morning she woke from a vivid dream, full of whisperings and fumblings and gasping cries, to find the roof of the tower had split in the night, and the room full of wet birds fighting and jostling at the windows and shitting on the bed. It seemed she had been taking her pleasure to the gulls’ clumsy wingtips and to the suggestively susurrating sea. In frustration, she took off her clitoris and rolled up all its tendrils until all that was left was a smooth, round pebble. She went out to the beach, where a light drizzle was falling, put it down among the million other clay-coloured pebbles on the sea-wet foreshore and stepped away; and when she was certain that it was not findable again, she went back to the tower, pulled a tarpaulin from the cupboard, and went back to sleep under it.
2. I do not know what became of the pebble or the giant, but fifteen years later only the tower’s ruined stump and the rumour of what had happened remained. There were three lovers who had heard the rumour, and they travelled to the beach and made a bonfire in the ruins. That night, when they had drunk a good amount of whisky, they took three pebbles from the beach and gave them to each other as a pledge of love (for they had also been reading about the love-gifts of Adelie penguins).
3. In later years, the lovers were forced by circumstance to live on different continents. They wrote each other thyme-scented letters and spent larger proportions of their hours flying and moping than they would have believed ideal. One of the thyme-scented letters was lost in the post, causing a minor romantic bust-up. They did not know it, but the lost letter had slipped out from a broken crate at the airport and was blown by a force 10 gale over the wet, flat fields all the way to the sea, where it sank and was used as an unusual-smelling breeding site by starfish.
4. An old man gathered the baby starfish up and sold them in a round fishbowl to a woman who collected stars. In her dark and glittering house, the starfish grew and grew, eventually ending up in a black-painted tank that had once been a bath. Once a year, on the longest night, the woman would wheel her chair into the bathroom and sing songs to the starfish about how their life would be when they returned to the stars (for she seemed to be under the impression that that was where they were from).
5. There was a widow who lived in the same town, and every day on the way to work she went past the house of the woman who loved stars and peered through its shrouded windows. She thought that she was in love with the star-woman (though this was debatable, as they had not even met). She thought that she would like to keep the star-woman in her house and feed her glittering broths. She thought sometimes that she would like to rescue the star-woman from her house after a fire and tend to her wounds and comfort her gasping pain; and sometimes she thought of causing the gasping pain in the first place. But the star-woman did not take lovers. So the widow instead drew a picture that represented in her feelings in perfect and pure and unchallengeable geometry, and she felt much happier once she had managed to abstract them from the messy and unsuccessful human level. Then she had the picture tattooed on her back.
6. The picture was published in a magazine and became famous. Indeed, the widow soon found herself not short of would-be lovers wishing to touch it, and even entertained a brief but disastrous tryst with the star-woman herself, who was a great reader of magazines. After her death, some of her younger lovers sneaked into the funeral home and stole the tattoo, which they had made into the cover of a fat book of blank paper. It seemed that some curse hovered over the book, or something of that sort, for no-one could ever bring themselves to write in it. Eventually a rumour arose that it was already written in, if only one could find the way to reveal the words, and a community of esoteric scholars grew up around it.
7. The scholars met every year by the sea; they did not have the book itself (only a few had ever seen it) and so, in an effort to understand it, they took it in turns to draw the book’s cover on their own skin. And sometimes this was done in great seriousness in well-lit lecture halls; and sometimes this was done beside bonfires on the beach at night, with the air thick with pot-smoke and the pebbles sticky with kicked-over margaritas. And had the mystery they were investigating existed, I think the second set of methods would have come closer to understanding it.
8. One year, without knowing it, they met on the giant’s beach; but by then the tower was long gone and only the clay-coloured pebbles remained.