Flash-fiction by Shane Ryan Bailey

Previously published in DASH.

We observed in horror from the dock as she floated past us and the other flag-waving sightseers, watching her float through the harbor and out toward the sea on her maiden voyage, riding the waves created by the navy flotilla and the parade of sailboats, and then we gasped as she became caught in a violent eddy from one of the larger ships, causing her to sink into the depths.  It wasn’t until after she had been hauled to the surface and an investigation was undertaken that we learned how she, too, like a ship, had been christened by a champagne bottle, smashed upon her head by her drunken, angry husband during a heated argument aboard their yacht, and just before he launched her unconscious body facedown into the water.

Shane Ryan Bailey‘s fiction has appeared in Corium Magazine, Salome Magazine, BULL Men’s Fiction, Evergreen Review, The Linnet’s Wings, and elsewhere.