Anchor and heart silhouette design

Her neighbours said an anchor was bad luck on dry land. The old women in the village said you could not hang one in a kitchen without something sinking in the house. Mira hung it anyway, on a hook in the boathouse. She scraped the shank with a knife until the iron showed black, then carved a heart from a lump of driftwood and bolted it over the shank, because she wanted something to hold on to that was not the sea.

Every spring the men went out past the breakwater in the salvage boats, and every spring some of them did not come back. Mira walked down to the slip each morning and tied a length of red wool to the rail. When the wind came off the water hard enough to make the wool stand straight out, she knew the sea was still listening. Her grandmother had said the anchor kept a boat from drifting, and the heart kept the anchor from forgetting who it belonged to.

One spring a boat came in with only one man aboard, a stranger who had drifted for nine days. He stared at the carved heart through the boathouse door and said his own ship's anchor had the same shape scratched into its stock, the mark of a crew that had sailed from a port no longer on any map. Mira said nothing. She untied the red wool, wound it twice around his wrist, and pointed him towards the kitchen fire, where the anchor's shadow lay across the floor like a closed hand.