THE SYMMETRY OF RUBY MARGOT

You can’t unfeel the kickback from the gun that kills your enemy. Its dark yellow weight rushes over you, where it stays, lingering at your back, living in the echo of your shadow. Ruby’s shadow was thick and hard against the docking bay at Porto Ercole when kickback climbed aboard in the summer of 1606. Had the sailor kept the hessian bag over her head, or indeed had he been beautiful or kind, her life may have taken a different turn. But beautiful and kind were rarely found aboard bounty vessels, docked off course owing to violent storms.

The captain took this opportunity to cut loose sick slave cargo and hooded Ruby appeared to be just that. Her still, tied wrists gave impressions of a woman nearing last breath, but under the hood, a twelve-year-old Ruby was starved and fear-ridden. Bolting horses ran through her mind, leaping from one wild electric panic to the other. And they did not slow when her eyes met daylight.

The sailor, not questioning why she was hooded, removed the hessian in one swift, unkind yank. Then quickly– a rush as her face hit its mark and the full weight of his own sharp grief gushed forth to greet him. He buckled. Tried to look away. That face.

Though she did not know it, Ruby Margot was beautiful. Her face held endless symmetry in all its angles– each a string of reflected kaleidoscopic questions, the types of questions that seep forth when the darkest places within us are called upon.

The sailor