Another Kind of Pirate

“Be off now.”

Why do I wish so desperately for someone to say this to me? I picture myself leaping from the steps of a wonderfully mush-bodied woman wrapped in fabulously slant-matched fabrics. She hands me a basket of French smells, and I skirt away as if I am one of her textile layers, disembarking from her busy bosom into the roomy breeze.

And I itch.

Being off is so different from going on. And when she tells me this, I know that I will shortly find myself on cobblestone, chugging whiskey, catching the drips from a pirate’s beard so that I may present a proper hangover to my sober self as evidence that I licked the bottom of the barrel, and it was grand.

Where does one find such a woman?

To send you off on adventures? To stomache it with a tsk and emotional shake of her rag before she turns and goes back into the house, to go on? Surely, such archetypes are the most underrated features of every pirate story.

She may be known as Mrs. Fitzgibbons, Nanny, or Bess. She is soft and strong. Nay -- strong by way of soft. And the dutiful sound that her broom makes is the only reason that anyone ever gets to yell into the wind as they swing from the mast of a ship.