Dagger through a rose design

He carried it home in a sack and kept it under the bench where the nets were mended. Every spring he took it out and asked the sea what it wanted. The sea never answered, but the roses did. Old Mrs Pell kept a bush of white roses behind her chapel wall, and she said the sea took a rose every time it took a man, and so the roses were the sea's own purse. Tomas laughed at that. Then one April he cut a bloom from her wall without asking and laid it across the blade on the bench, and the petals went soft and dark where the steel touched them.

He took the dagger back out to the water that same week and did not come home for two tides. When he did, he had no fish and no sack, only the dagger, and the rose had gone from it. In its place the grip was wound with a little green leaf, pressed flat, as if the sea had been mending something of his. He never said what he'd traded. He just hung the dagger on the chapel wall beside Mrs Pell's roses, point down, and every morning after, a fresh bloom came up through the blade where the sea had put it.

So when you're drinking your tea and wondering whether the sea owes anybody anything, think on that. Nobody's ever paid it back. They've only been asked to plant something.