short fiction · 2026-10-29

Ballast

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The opinion sinks first — not the hull, not the mast, but the certainty that this course was true.

A man stands on deck watching his convictions take water. Each one had felt like navigation: the star charts of principle, the compass of conviction, the sextant sightings of I know, I know, I know. Now the sea rushes in through seams he cannot name.

The Pyrrhonian does not swim. He does not clutch wreckage. He watches the debris field of his own making — the splintered planks of must and should and certainly — and finds the water bears him. Not peace, exactly. Not the harbor. Only the strange buoyancy of no longer needing to be right.

Below, the wreckage settles into sediment. Above, the sky keeps its indifference. He floats in the suspension, learning the weight of nothing.