In Honor of Pirate Day:

With a deft swing of his cutlass, Clancy slashed free the tattered rope into which he anchored the sole of his right boot. With a heave of his left leg, he swung out over the churn of the rumbling ocean between the two vessels. Abandoning the port side of his own ship, his rope swing glided him gracefully to the starboard edge of Captain Dink’s own tug.

Two dozen furry, smelly mates charged upon him as he perched himself atop the weathered cedar railing at the ship’s edge. “Give me back my lover, you scurvy dogs!” Clancy shouted at the notorious band of sea thieves, brandishing his cutlass menacingly as he glared down on them from the high ground.

With puffy, white linen sleeves fluttering about like the wings of a fallen angel beneath the constricted, bodice-fitting black, center-weaved leather vest he was wearing, Clancy dexterously dispatched each man who attempted to meet him in open combat.

Vanquishing Captain Dink’s miniature maritime army single-handedly, with a series of carefully timed ducks, twirls, pirouettes, and plies, Clancy’s vicious, vengeful slashing of jugulars and opening of men’s bowels looked less the brutal, chaotic, fight of a man set upon freeing his lover, and more the delicate choreography of a deity dancing evil from the good earth.

His sweat-glistened chest heaving mightily with the deep, gasping breaths of a man who had just swooned an entire ship full of the sea’s most savage citizens, Clancy stood atop the bloody pile of dismembered denizens of the deep with a look of mild contentment and steely conviction on his face as he jerked his head to cast free the tangles of long, damp hair that clung to his face and forehead.

One man and one man alone stood now between him and Georgie, the greatest lover he’d ever known. That man was none other than Captain Dink himself, the most feared man on all the seven seas.

Dink lurched about the mast at the center of The Tenement Gazer, the sailing ship he called home – the sailing ship other men called the most frightening sight on all the world’s oceans. Secured at the base of this mast was Clancy’s lover, tied upright to the wooden pilum, gagged about the mouth with dirty strips of linen.

“I’ve come to reclaim what is rightfully mine, Dink!” Clancy stated with an air of indignation. “Your plundering ends here!”

“Arrgh! Ye filthy sea-dog. With your tressled curls and your chiseled man-pecs. I’ll have ye walkin’ the Gazer’s plank before the sun sets, I will! To Davey Jones’ locker you’ll descend, sent there by my blade! Heard not the name Captian Efemeral Dink is the foolish man…”

Clancy sort of slumped his shoulder and twirled the tip of his cutlass in the little swirls as a gesture to get Dink to hurry up and finish his little speech.

In an instant, the two men squared off. A lowering sun bearing down on them, forcing their eyelids down into a piercing glint, they each stared each other down for one, nerve-wrenching, interminable moment. And then they unleashed fury. In a blur of flailing forearms and swooshing swordblades, the two swashbucklers made at each like rabid badgers defending their holes.

And in the end, it was Captain Dink’s cutlass that hung dry, and Clancy’s that dripped wet with a trickling red drop of Dink’s blood. Run through, the dying captain collapsed to