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They say, “Loose lips sink ships.” So too, as the brothers Glee knew all too well, do clenched jaws. Though reluctant at first to inherit their late father Forsythe Glee’s weathered whaling vessel, the once proud (A) Mere Maid, later a dingy spice transport and eventually, at the time of their father’s passing, a for-hire “Soiree Schooner,” Edmund and Albertine Glee ultimately warmed to the idea of a shared seafaring sunset to their lives.
Having married, alternately, into wealth and notoriety, the brothers Glee had neither want nor need of blubber or anise, and embraced the more enjoyable aspects of boating, economically unrestrained, as they were, from the fickle ups and downs of the commodities harvest and trade. An amateur cartographer, Edmund rarely tired of plotting coastline, and Albertine had long dreamt of catching at least one of every fish in the sea. Of course, all’s well when mapping and trolling, but clinging to an empty rum barrel, watching whilst the Mere Maid went belly up within the angry clench of a crazed Architeuthis, served to sober the Glee’s late love of the sea.
Albertine never mentioned what went into the bait bucket that day, which is generally agreed upon as to why he thereafter donned his father’s antediluvian dive suit each day to scour the depths for the Mere Maid’s sunken silhouette. After wandering the sea floor each morning, Albertine would return home to the Tudor cottage he shared with Edmund to read the just delivered newspaper. Ever the sibling rivals, the brothers would race to find the particularly good comic strips and recommend them to the other. Unwilling to give his brother a head start, Albertine preferred to read the paper in his dive gear, content to take his hot bath after sharing a few laughs. Edmund didn’t mind, as the sound of Albertine’s giggles piping out the top of his breathing tube always made the funnies that much funnier, the hardwood be damned.
Late in his life, after losing his sea legs, literally, to a teething coelacanth, Forsythe Glee often stammered, “No man may own thy ocean.”
But Albertine, ever the contrarian, was lately wont to say, “I’ve been walking around down there for years, and damned if it don’t feel like home.”
Edmund, for his part, wasn’t so concerned with the subaqueous, as the beagle he’d lost in the mishap had shown up on the cottage doorstep years later, bedraggled, certainly, but generally unaffected by the sinking of the family ship.
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