2nd Prize – David Parker with:

Liberty

23 May 1885

I often wonder what she will look like, finished; all we have seen of her is abstracted parts – severed limbs, curves pressed up against our faces, destroying all perspective, the smooth, grey-sheened skin already turning green where cold damp has seeped through the packing crate and settled against her flank. And of course, she’s not really a she – it’s an it. A disassembled it, travelling in hopeful, suspended animation, waiting to be reborn. Counting down the days, hours, minutes. We count along too, sleeping when possible, talking sometimes or just thinking. Whenever I try to stretch out my damned, throbbing legs they butt up against Claude’s ample behind. I sometimes wish that I could cut them off, pack them in straw in a crate of their own and forget them. That’s the way to travel.

24 May

I say that its skin is turning green, but this transformation has occurred mostly in my imagination. Little light enters here, only what can squeeze through the gaps where the wood has been nailed askew. We receive but half an hour of illumination early each morning, when the sun rising over the sea pierces the portholes and strafes the hold with pale yellow. This is when I write, aligning the page with the glowing slats and scribbling fast before our personal dusk falls. Claude grumbles that I am stealing the days, blocking out the light with my damned papers and consigning him to never-ending gloom. I tell him that he could have chosen my place – Claude had first choice, after all. It’s too late to change places now.

25 May

America stands with its arms wide open, ready to welcome the world. That’s what we were told, back in Le Hâvre. Every seaman in every bar on the Rue Laperouse told tales of New York, of the women and the whiskey, the chaos and the life; every businessman, lecturing grateful guests with a fat-slathered duck leg while we ferried course after course to the table, held forth on the riches to be made by trading with the New World. (Import and export, the future for any man with half a brain and half a soul. Well, we are in the import business now!) America, the place where any man, however they were born, can grow to become great – or to become happy, at least. Plant your feet on the dry, still soil, find an honest plot to build on and exist in your own way. Create your own republic, or crown your own King and Queen. A true paradise of liberty and enlightenment. Claude will settle for a cot in a gutter as long as it has no roof and doesn’t rise and fall with the swell. And as long as the neighbours mind their own business.

27 May

Today we were woken by a fat, black rat, tail as thick as my thumb, coarse hair standing wetly on end, sniffing through our meagre supplies. There must be a hole on the other side of the crate, forever beyond our reach. In truth, the rat woke me and I alerted Claude through the method of screaming, kicking and flinging my fists about. The rat escaped, but Claude received some hefty blows. We were not discovered, which is a blessing despite what Claude may say.

30 May

I tire of writing this journal. Claude said that instead of wasting space on papers we should have brought more spirits to flavour the foul liquid we collect from various unsavoury sources, but I insisted. It would preserve our sanity, I said. My eyes are poor from squinting. I will write no more.

2 June

Claude travelled to Paris once when younger, on a trip with Uncle Ludo to sell Russian tallow that they had salvaged from a wreck off Le Casquets. They fought for that tallow, Claude said – an English lugger had got there first – so the trip to Paris formed Claude’s reward. This story Claude never tires of telling, thinking it makes him seem rough and manly.

Paris, the summer of 1878 and the wonders of the Universal Exposition …, well, of course Claude aimed to sneak away and explore. Not the avenues of fine art, though, or the terrifying Gallery of Machines; no, Claude scurried straight for the Fairgrounds. Something on the way caught his attention, however – Claude always had an eye for a handsome face. Outside the Trocadero sat the most massive disembodied head of lady Liberty herself, staring blankly but defiantly like one of Madame Guillotine’s less repentant subjects. Claude gazed up at truly the most magnificent woman, copper-plated, shining in the July heat, a majestic giantess.

The crowd’s gossip excited Claude further; additional body parts were on show across Paris and the remaining organs necessary to breathe life into the Lady were even then being forged. Delight turned to disappointment, however, then anger, as Claude heard that far from watching over the city of its birth, the finished statue would be parcelled up and packed off – banished overseas in shame like an English pick-pocket. It would stand on an island in New York, protecting the harbour, welcoming importers and exporters, sailors and stowaways, the rich and the desperate. Seeing this noble Lady must have planted the seed of an idea in Claude’s mind. Later, when circumstances, families, fate turned against us, the seed drank up salty water, began to grow.

5 June

I am ill. The stench fills our tiny cell, permeating our clothes and the thick, dead air. Claude, disgusted, will not speak. The boat rolls constantly. I cannot face the biscuits today, although that is a small blessing as biscuits are running short. I think our friend the rat has been an uninvited dinner guest.

7 June

We have been in this wooden crevasse for two weeks now. My bones itch, my joints burn. My dreams of sinking, bound and gagged, into an inky deep are only a leaky plank away from reality. I would toss and turn if I had the space.

10 June

A Bad Day. Half of the food is eaten already, and the back of Claude’s neck supports a boil the size of a quail’s egg. I trace its curve with my fingertips, press gently against its yielding mass. It makes me retch, but Claude laughs. It tickles, apparently. Who could not help but love this man? Greedy, though I had never noticed before. Big men are used to taking more than their share of sausage – that’s how they become big, I suppose.

Each time I hear a sound I imagine that we are to be discovered. A creak of the boards is a suspicious crewmember creeping toward us, knife in hand, ready to prise us open. An animal scream is the cry of another stowaway being tortured for his audacity. Two more weeks and we should reach land. We must keep our minds intact until then. I have already lost hope for our bodies.

12 June

Last night we were dead men. The storm met us with unholy ferocity, tossing the ship like a toothpick in a bathtub. Our section of statue crashed around the crate, splitting the planks above us but miraculously sparing our skulls. And then the water swilled in, washing all manner of filth through the knotholes and spoiling or carrying away anything we could not pocket. We were battered for an hour, or five – after a while we became insensible to anything past the next terrible, crashing second. It’s quiet now. I would think we were in heaven, if my feet were drier.

17 June

Land! No time to write, I hear the hold being cleared. Soon we will be out of this damned box. There’s a scraping, and rough voices – things are being moved. Hush.

18 June

Yesterday I felt, for the first time in weeks, that this voyage would come to some good. First light brought noise and bustle; the slow, nauseous rolling of the high seas became sharper, choppier. We heard men’s voices – shouts, cheers, obscenities. I believe Claude cried. Then, in an instant, the sky above us burst open and we were flying, blinding blue light and cold, salty wind blasting through every knothole. We were thrown, swung and shoved for an age and then finally dropped back into darkness. It is still dark, but… but for how long? We must have been unloaded.

I’m not sure what we will do when the lid is lifted and we are discovered. Could we run? I think my legs would buckle if I tried to stand on them. Will we be arrested? Sent back where we came from? Be gentle, America! I don’t care, I can’t think. Soon we will be out of here.

19 June

More movement last night. We were slung violently, lifted and carried, by rail or another boat. I smell oil and something burning. We try to push at the lid ourselves but the nails are thick, bent over and rusted too. There is no way that we can break out, not in our current enfeebled state. More chance of us wasting away to nothing and slipping between the planks. We are both very sick. It must be the excitement.

20 June

The crate has not been opened. I have but an inch of pencil remaining, and where we now are, we see even less light than at sea. Yesterday Claude spoke out loud what we both have feared – that we are sealed in a coffin. He told me to write our obituaries in my damned stupid book so that they will be able to identify our yellowed bones. I told him not to be so gloomy and desperate, then I told him to shut his mouth. Then later I hit him. Claude is wrong.

21 June

The crate has not been opened. I wonder if we are held by customs officials, for unpaid duties. Or are stacked in a dockyard, at the bottom of a heap? I don’t know how much longer we can exist. There are insects on us and in us. Claude says to pick them off him and swallow them, to replace the soaked and stolen rations. Eat or be eaten. We shout when we can, but are so weak. There are no more biscuits.

24 June

I, Frederic Clairvaux, aged twenty five, born May third 1860 in Sainte-Adresse, a failed Catholic, and Jean-Claude Augustin, twenty-six, born in Fontaine-le-Mallet, kitchen hand and noble spirit, confess to stowing away in this crate on board the Isere amongst the various parts of Bartholdi’s great statue, Liberty Enlightening the World, to begin a new life in America. We stole in to the Rouen dockyards in the still, tar-scented May night and levered open a box that took our fancy. We dropped our hard biscuits and harder cheese, our bottles and books, into the straw and slid ourselves after. Our friend Robert struck the nails back in and then ran for dear life, driven I suspect by the confused guilt of a man who has buried a willing victim alive. Some twisting and we were fixed in position. Fixed, one behind the other in a niche the width of a man’s forearm, knees up against our chins like galley slaves, no space to stretch or turn. There is more room now – we are so much thinner.

That is our confession, but it is not our obituary. We will not die in this cheap wooden mausoleum. We will emerge, arms aloft and free, into a new world that doesn’t stink of piss and shit and rotten food and rat droppings. They say that America is a land of vast open spaces. When we get out of here, Claude is going to eat beefsteak and oysters for a week. I just want to stretch my arms wide. When this crate is opened, we will receive our liberty. Any day now, surely. Any day now.

29 June

The crate has not been opened.

Thirty-seven and from Leicestershire, David Parker works in the Medical School at the University of Leicester. He is married with a young son to whom he (happily) devotes most of his free time, but he manages to squeeze in some writing when he can – mainly short stories but also the odd poem and the bones of novels yet to be fleshed out. In the few minutes of leisure he has left, he likes to run, watch the sports that he used to play, argue with his wife over Spotify and fruitlessly rotate stair gates in gaps that they don’t fit. He will read anything.