‘Spider Under a Glass’ – Runner-up in Our Short Story Competition

Published on: 5 Nov, 2025
Updated on: 5 Nov, 2025

Today we are delighted to publish another of the entries in our short story competition, run in conjunction with Guildford’s new independent bookshop, Paper Moon.

“Spider Under a Glass”, by Isabella Pakenham, was one of the runners-up in our competition.

The entry of the second runner-up will be published at the weekend.

Spider Under a Glass

By Isabella Pakenham

A ship is not at all like a woman. Yes, they both have curves and carvings. Markings, sometimes, from bad weather. A rear. They can both endure a storm without as much as a rudder breaking but when it’s still sapphire waters, the sail splits in two. She can be controlled, a ship. To a point. But when the rain comes in and the currents are pulling strong it’s best to let go of the helm or she might just break your wrist.

A ship is not like a woman. A ship has never told me to stop drinking. A woman has never broken my wrist.

They both have a soul. And, most dangerously, they both have desires.

But most distinctly, a ship is not devious. Nor is it evil.

They’ve locked her in the brig. A slender, tight room crawling with rats. Far nicer than our sleeping quarters, the rows of hammocks dripping with sea water from last night’s storm. Twenty-four men swinging asleep. Now it will be nineteen. After a catastrophe happens at sea, and it always happens at night, the next day is busy and dull and mending and salvaging and the bright morning drowns the flaming adrenaline of terror and leaves harsh reality floating upon the surface. I’d take terror over the demystifying morning. But today it is different. Terror has turned to dread and it collects around our bones like condensation. It does not feel like the morning. It is not bright, the horizon has not appeared as it usually does, boasting of balance and durability against the ferocious ocean below when mere hours before it had snapped like string under the weight of the storm and let the sea run rampant across the sky. No, this morning lies under the sea, caught in a net. It is dark like eels and lurks in the shadow of the catastrophe.

“N-not over yet, n-not over, aye we’re dead. Really dead, now, dead. It w-wasn’t me. I didn’t hurt her.”

If you wanted to know what ocean-borne diseases looked like, you’d look at Thomas. I can smell his wound when I sleep at night, it infects my dreams.

“The lanterns,” I say, the husk of my throat splintered and cracked. “Go and light them, mate.”

He shuffles away, mumbling into the collecting fog that settles in the nooks of the deck. We follow the lights as moths do, scrabbling entranced until we regain our composure as men, walking single-file along the dampened corridors to the hold. I know these men, I know them as boys that sat by the docks and helped bring in the fish. We’d all looked wistfully to where the moon paved a silver path towards the horizon and watched longingly as our fathers left our homes for it. I was among them, I am still among them. And now we are dying.

“We ain’t no long haul vessel, I ain’t carried nothing but coal for nine year – ”

“My old man was a shellback and even then they didn’t see nothing like – ”

“Your old man was a thief and a liar – ”

“He may’ve been a thief but he ain’t no liar – ”

“We’re a merchant ship, we don’t take no passengers – ”

“She’s a prisoner, mate – ”

“She’s a spider under a glass – ”

“When can I have a go – ”

“God damn bad luck, boys, unholy, it’s riddled – “

“ – what’s that about your mother – ”

“Don’t speak ill of the dead, boy – ”

“Where’s Thomas?”

It’s as quiet as it can get on a brig. There’s the creaking; the old bones of the ship as she rocks and groans left to right. The dripping of water and scuttling of claws across wood. The knives that chafe against the table, men who don’t realise they’re still carving up chairs and pallets between their legs. Wax that falls bluntly on to metal from the last of our candles. The sloshing of rum in barrels. And the relentless knocking of the sea. We look at each other around the table, those perched on barrels and the ladders. We look for his chin, the wide unblinking eyes. He’s most recognisable in the dark, the hollows of his face deep like caves. Thomas is not here. But there is breathing coming from the voice pipe, the one that is fed through the wall and up onto deck. At first I think it’s the ship. A crackling, watery breath. I expect to hear her voice, as I sometimes do at night, echoed, spoken into an oyster shell. But it is not the ship’s voice we hear.

“I’ve b-been found, boys. She’s f-found me.”

We look at each other, boys from our unmarked village. Boys brought up by their mothers on stories from their fathers. Our journey to manhood a path from the North East to London and back, and back again.

Like broken shells on a beach, we are alike. All sharp and edges. Thrown up by the tide and taken away again, the water chipping away at our hides until what is left? What have we become?

We ascend to the deck. There is the starboard side, there is port side. We have lights, now, so other vessels know one from the other. Me myself, the lights confuse me. Green for starboard, red for port. But the fog has thickened so the lights bleed, the line between them like the sea and sky without horizon. A man appears behind the coloured mist, standing port side on the taffrail. His legs spread and his hand around the halyard he is clocked in scarlet light. Thomas has never stood so confidently. Usually he’s hunched, he climbs the rigging and sits perched in the crow’s nest, shoulder blades like broken wings.

He turns his head and looks at us with an expression I’ve never seen before. He’s smiling, his mouth open and breathless, almost laughing, but his face is stricken with pain and he is shaking his head.

“It wasn’t just me,” he smiles. “They n-never told us n-not to touch her.”

“Thomas, lad, come away.”

He turns his wild gaze back to the dark water. I wonder what he is looking at. We’ve all seen things below the surface other than the mouths of jagged rocks and their frothing sea foam. Men disappear and reappear in the red of port trying to tempt our Thomas back onto the deck. There are few of us submerged in the green, distant, as though insanity is catching. We are the sceptical. I’ve always been the sceptical.

Almost six men dead. Almost six men drowned.

With no Captain, when we make port they will think it was a mutiny.

And one woman below us.

The cargo in replacement of coal.

Perhaps I’ll be dead before they can hang me for mutiny.

Before the figure on the taffrail is gone, as the others were so suddenly, I duck into the hatch. The candles are stumps, I’ve never had good eyesight. The stench of the hammocks as I pass our sleeping quarters. I descend more stairs, narrow and whining. The key is hung on string next to the door. It seems dangerous to put it so close to her despite the bolt and lock. My trembling grip, the scrape of metal against metal. A lightless room.

I cannot hear the ship. Her moaning as we drag her through another voyage. I can hear only my own breath and the blunt hammering of my heart against a sodden wooden chest.

“I have not seen you before.”

Her voice comes like freezing water.

“You are much bigger than the others. I’ve never met anyone so big.”

She sounds younger than I’d thought. Curious. I am holding my chain, the part where the cross used to be. I can’t remember when I lost it.

“My father is tall like you,” the sweet darkness says. “But he is slight. My mother says a stiff breeze could knock him over. I wonder what it would take to knock you over. Perhaps a storm.”

Her voice moves as though she is walking, but I cannot hear her feet on the ground. I think she was barefoot when they brought her aboard. So many hands on her body as she was carried across the deck. As though she might suddenly vanish.

“There was a storm last night,” I say.

“My mother cried when they took me away, cried out her eyes.”

I can’t see her, not even a silhouette.

“Something is happening to the men,” I say.

“Do you want to know what my father did?” Her voice draws closer until I can feel it. The presence. It is the same feeling before a storm. A quiet dread. That is what she feels like. And her breath is on my cheek. “Nothing.”

She smells of vinegar.

“How many more storms? Until we dock in London? How many more of our men?” I ask her.

“We will not dock in London,” she says. “I know exactly how many more men.”