Dead Reckoning
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 1
They will bury me without my name.
Not the name I was born with — that one was taken early, before I had use of it. I mean the name I made. The one I carried through Flanders mud and Caribbean salt and a dozen ports where men twice my size stepped aside without knowing why. That name will go into a prison ledger as a curiosity, a footnote to Calico Jack’s story, and then the sea will take it the way the sea takes everything.
So I am writing this down.
My hand shakes. The fever comes in waves, each one higher than the last, and between them I am cold and very clear. The child is quiet now. I think she understands there is no hurry. We are going to the same place at the same time, she and I, and she has the better of it — she will arrive without memory of this room, this heat, this smell.
I have no priest. I would not use one if I had. I have paper, a decent nib, and perhaps three days. That is more than most women of my circumstance are given, and I have never been a woman to waste what is given.
My name is Mary Read. I was born in England in a year no one thought to record. I lived as a man for longer than I lived as anything else. I loved two people in my life and outlasted them both, which is its own kind of punishment.
This is what happened.
My mother was not a bad woman. I want that written down first, before anything else, because what she did to me looks like cruelty from the outside and was not. It was mathematics. The cold arithmetic of survival in a world that had handed her nothing and taken everything.
My father was a sailor. He went to sea before I was born and did not come back, which was the most common story in Plymouth and the least sympathetic. The sea took men constantly. Wives were expected to absorb the loss and find a way forward. My mother found one.
She had borne a son before me. A legitimate boy, first child of her marriage, the apple of his grandmother’s eye. The old woman — my father’s mother, a merchant’s widow with more money than warmth — had been sending regular payments to support her grandson. It was not generosity. It was investment. The boy carried the family name forward and she was purchasing her place in his future.
Then the boy died. Fever, I was told later, though my mother never spoke of it directly. He was perhaps two years old. The payments stopped the week after the burial.
My mother was already carrying me when she stood at that small grave. Already understanding what my arrival would mean. A girl. A second child, illegitimate, no claim on anything, worth nothing to the grandmother and less to the world. Another mouth when there was barely food for one.
She made her decision before I could speak.
By the time I was aware of myself, I was him. I wore his clothes. I answered to his name. I was taught to stand the way he might have stood, to speak with the bluntness the old woman expected from a boy, to meet her eyes directly when she visited, which girls were not supposed to do. My mother coached me carefully before each visit. Sit like this. Walk like this. If she asks you a question, answer plainly and do not elaborate.
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