Elinor sat on her freshly upholstered couch, the one that took up most of the pathetic living room purely by existing. She kicked off her shoes where they clattered artfully against the table leg before laying still, one standing and one tipped on its side, the handsome patent leather gleaming in the moonlight that streamed in the window. The woman leaned forward on the sofa, hunching over the glass coffee table while striking her thumb against her lighter, holding a cigarette to it.

Sucking smoke, she leaned back against the arm of the sofa and reclined, releasing the cloudy exhale with a low moan. She hated her life. It wasn’t even to say that she particularly hated life itself, or that she didn’t like being alive. Her life just sucked. It was nothing like she had imagined it to be, and certainly not the way she wanted it. But the sad reality of things was that in order to have what you wanted, you needed money.

Money was everything.

Unfortunately, she didn’t have any particular talents that made for easy living, and she had spent the last ten years of her life sinking to unfortunate extremes to support her desire for the finer things in life. Her favorite method of leisurely living was to marry rich.

It wasn’t that she married purely for the money; she wouldn’t have the tolerance to be married if she weren’t in some form of love with whoever’s ring was on her finger. It just so happened that she was attracted to men with muscles, money, and mojo. Her three favorite Ms. A lot of Elinor’s favorite things started with M, also, like ‘makeup’ and ‘mojitos’, or ‘murder’ and ‘mystery’.

Elinor’s most recent ‘M’ was Marcus, an ex-mariner who was in the midst of trying to settle a life on land when they met. In fact, he was the only man she had married who didn’t have a substantial amount of money, though he was far wealthier than she was, with barely five dollars to her name on any given day.

She had probably been more in love with Marcus than anyone else she had ever met, even as a disillusioned young woman who was easily infatuated. But the longer they were married, the further away Marcus seemed to be when she looked in his dark green eyes. It was on nights like this, where the moon was so bright that it had to be shining on him somewhere else in the wide world, that Elinor felt her carefully constructed apathy start to ebb away.

Closing her eyes and squeezing them tight, trying to chase the image of his strong jaw and gentle smile out of her mind, Elinor held her wrist to her forehead, cigarette dangling from her fingertips. Every night when she got into bed she remembered what it was like to sleep at his house, because the man always had to sleep exactly north-south, with his head to the north and feet to the south, even if that meant his bed was diagonal in a room.

She would get out of bed in the middle of the night and walk into a wall because she was no longer near a door. But it was those quirky things that she missed about him, his rough fingers and palms from the roughness of rope, his sun-bleached strawberry blonde hair. But they’d spent too many long hours on land staring into one another’s eyes, surrounded by skyscrapers in New York City, dodging taxis and breathing smog and living like machines.

Elinor’s deep blue irises that he had so fallen in love with three years ago now shot a pained look across his face when he gazed into them, reminiscent of the vast blue waters that he no longer saw on a daily basis.

They’d still been married when he decided he missed the ocean, when he’d set sail for Fiji or Bermuda or God knows where. And she wouldn’t have minded if he was away all the time, if he only came back to port once or twice a year, if she had to go all the way to New York harbor or somewhere in New England to catch him as he came in.

Except… he never came back at all.

Marcus and his boat and his crew vanished off the coast of Belize and were never seen again. Elinor always prayed that he had just sailed away, that he had fallen out of love with her and made up some complex story about an accident, so that he wouldn’t have to face her. Hatred and confusion would have been so much simpler for her to live with than pure, earth-shattering grief, the greatest pain she had ever known, which touched her a little less every day.

Her occasional masochistic ritual always took place when she thought she’d started to forget, and Elinor stood up from the couch, leaving her cigarette in the ash tray. She went into her bedroom, standing with her hands on either side of the doorframe for a long time, wondering if this would be possible in such a small apartment. She hadn’t done it in a while.

Elinor, formerly Mrs. Marcus Seville, went to her dresser and opened the small music box on the top, pushing her fingertips through a small collection of rings, some her own purchases, some discarded from previous marriages. At the bottom of the pile, was the sapphire-and-diamond embellished platinum band from Marcus. Elinor took a breath and slipped it onto her left ring finger, where it still fit flawlessly.

She closed the jewelry box and then turned to the drawers, squeezing her eyes shut again before pulling the bottom one open. Piles of men’s slacks and shirts lay inside and the scent of Marcus seemed to consume her as she sank to her knees and started to root through his clothes, finally pulling out a tiny bosun whistle and a compass on a chain. Elinor closed the drawer with her foot and went to stand at the foot of her bed, the compass in her hand.

She put the chain around her neck and watched the arrow twitch, and when it was finished, she rolled up her sleeves and leaned over, taking the foot of the bed and lifting it with all her strength, dragging it around in a semicircle. She went to the head of the bed and did some adjusting, then looked at the compass again.
Satisfied that it was in the correct position, the woman changed into her nightgown and put the compass on her nightstand table, holding her ringed hand to her chest. She flopped down over the blankets and tried to imagine herself lying next to Marcus, but the thought of sinking down so many leagues to rest beside him in ancient underwater sand dunes made her feel like she’d been punched in the stomach.

But even in her imagination, even underwater, in Marcus’s final resting place, he was lying north to south.