The Prison Ship - Part 3

Continued from Part 2

Part 3

Decay doesn’t begin with a scream — it begins with an echo.

First came the cough. Nothing serious — light, dry, almost trivial. Maria took it as a result of damp nights; Stefan, as the trace of too much laughter. Laughter that, even then, sounded too sharp in the silence.

But soon the cough began to wake the darkness. It came at night, tearing through the stillness, clinging to the walls — an echo of something falling apart. Not just a body, but the collapse of two lives, one dream, and no salvation.

Then came the weakness. The heaviness of mornings. His hands — once strong as ropes — turned uncertain, unfamiliar. His eyes no longer searched for the horizon — they looked for something steady.

Then came the diagnosis — cruelly common: cancer. It fell like a lid. Not from a coffin, but from reality. That sly reality, waiting quietly behind the curtain of dreams. And when it appears, without asking, it simply reaches out and turns off the light.

He didn’t accept it. She didn’t say it out loud. But both began to talk in long pauses — eyes fixed on the horizon, with half-finished cups of tea beside them.

The ship bent with them. Even the deck began to creak differently. The wind no longer rocked them — it tested them.

“Sell the ship," said their friends. “Buy an apartment." "The ship needs care, strength, maintenance. You can’t anymore. In an apartment, everything will be level — the temperature controlled, comfort within reach.”

Friends always come with solutions. They like giving advice, because they’re not the ones in pain. They push pain away with logic — into a frozen order where feelings line up and fall silent.

Stefan nodded, thanked them, turned their words over in his mind, then went back to the pain. Because pain is real. Rational decisions are not. They are worse than death. They don’t kill — they erase. Quietly.

Advice came like slaps from people who had never held the wind in their hands. Stefan hated them. Maria too. Not because they weren’t right, but because they were.

And yet — how do you sell your life? How do you trade the deck for a balcony? Exchange the sail for a curtain?

Then the wheelchair appeared on deck. Sinister. Not as help, but as a sentence.

At first, they laughed. "What a farce,” they said. Then they fell silent.

Maria began to push. Gently. Fiercely. Day after day. Night after night. She became his hands, his legs, their last hope.

But the ship doesn’t forgive weakness. The stairs became impossible to climb. The cabins closed in, turning into traps. The space kept folding inward until the sound of the sea became nothing but memory.

Every movement was a battle. Every night — defeat. Whirlwind was no longer a home. She was a prison.

And the sails? Oh, the sails had long been taken down. Dead. And without them, nothing moved anymore.

Except the illnes.

To be continued in Part 4.