Friday Fiction: 5 sentence story

Last week, Chuck Wendig challenged us to write a story in 5 sentences, which I didn't do because I felt like writing more. This week, I'm out of town, so here is the story. Chuck suggested 100 words. I took 98, including the title.

New Life

The cliché “It was a dark and stormy night” doesn’t begin to describe the conditions the night Alexander Solomons died and I became the man you know. It happened in a hurricane—a typhoon, strictly speaking, since we were in the Indian Ocean—and I was a prisoner aboard a sinking pirate ship.

I didn’t conjure the hurricane. I did curse the ship and steal the only seaworthy lifeboat.

From my perilous position in the tiny craft I smiled as the ship went down with all hands, leaving no one to say who I had once been.

©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2016