The Oyster Girl

By Matt Mills · Estimated Reading Time: 6 Minutes

It was on the prince’s first voyage out, when he was only ten years old, that he first saw the oyster girl. 

It all happened because his father, the king of all the islands, decided it was time for him to get his sea legs under him. Up until then, the prince had lived on Pearl Island, the biggest of the islands, all his life: he’d seen its marketplace, its many harbors, and the aquarium where there were kept the most extraordinary species of fish. He’d seen every inch of the palace, his home, which jutted up from the center of the island like spires of coral. And, of course, he’d seen his father’s treasures, the greatest of which was the black pearl that sat in the very center of his crown.

But he’d never seen the other islands, and he’d never been to sea.

He had never been because his father would not take him. Though his father had once been a great sailor, he had grown soft and lazy. He loved his palace very much, and most of all he loved his treasures. So, the king put the prince aboard a ship with one of his captains and sent him sailing. They saw Coconut Island, and Starfish Island, and the little chain of Seaweed Islands. But finally they came to the very last island, furthest from the bustling harbors of Pearl Island. It was very big, and filled with ruins.

When they approached, the prince saw her, far out in the ocean: a girl, about his age. Her skin was dark and her hair darker. She had it tied back, but loose strands were blowing across her brown eyes, which were big and bright like twin moons. She was alone, carrying a basket. It looked like she was walking on the surface of the sea.

“Captain!” said the prince in wonderment. “There’s a girl, and she’s walking on the water!”

The captain looked. “Her? She’s just an oyster girl. This is Oyster Island.”

Then the captain was preoccupied with shouting commands, for the girl, as it turned out, was not walking on the water: she was ankle-deep in a shallow reef, which shone clear and crystal like a great blue mirror. The ship was forced to stay quite far from the island to avoid running aground. 

As they came around the reef toward the harbor, the prince saw many other women wading closer to shore, also carrying baskets. Over and over they stooped, dipping their hands into the glassy sea, plucking little white shapes out from pools and crevices.

“We will go into the harbor and load the shipment,” said the captain. “But we will not go ashore.”

“Why not?” asked the prince.

“Long ago, the people of Oyster Island were very powerful. They pillaged Pearl Island and set fire to the palace, killing your great-grandparents. But generations passed, and Pearl Island became strong. We crushed Oyster Island and razed their buildings. Now the island is nothing but dust and palm trees, and their women work all day collecting oysters for the king’s table. They are dogs, less than human. Pay no attention to them.”

But the prince couldn’t stop thinking about the girl in the water. Even when he returned to Pearl Island and the great coral palace, he lay awake in his bed, picturing her in his mind. He saw her standing alone in the reef, much further out than any of the other women had dared to go. He imagined her slender fingers slipping under the surface of the water, fishing for oysters under the brackish stones while the wind whipped at her hair and the seagulls wheeled by, calling to each other. Did the older women scold her for wading so far out, he wondered? Did her heart beat faster the further she walked into that wide-open sea?

The prince made many voyages after that. Over the years, the captain taught him to sail, to use a compass, to read the wind.

And always, whenever they came to the last leg of their voyage, he saw the oyster girl. She always stood apart from the other women, a lone shape like a single reed stretching up out of the water toward the sky. As his sea legs grew longer under him, so too did her legs grow, bearing her up a little higher out of the water, taking her further and further into the ocean.

Finally, when he was sixteen, he could stand it no longer. When their ship slipped around Oyster Island’s little reef, he wrote her a note, put it in an empty bottle, and hurled it out into the waves. He watched from the deck of the ship as it floated toward her solitary shape. She noticed it and, with those slender fingers so accustomed to collecting mollusks, plucked it from the water.

When she looked up, even from far away, he thought he saw a light shining in her eyes.

They began to trade letters. Every time he sailed to Oyster Island, he would throw a bottle into the reef. The next day, when they left the harbor, he would fish her reply out of the ocean. 

For years, they spoke this way, never once hearing the sound of the other person’s voice, yet listening all the more deeply to the rhythms of the other person’s heart. 

He told her of his father, who he did not love, and all the king’s wretched treasures. He told her how he’d grown to hate the once-familiar walls of the coral palace, how he felt nothing but disgust at all his father’s hoards of treasures. He also told her how his chest swelled whenever he heard the seagulls. 

In return, she told him how the sun glittered on the blue waters of the reef and how the villagers would dance with red and blue streamers in the hot summer nights. She told him of how hungry they were and how poor. And she told him of the feeling that came over her when she walked alone into the reef, as though she could reach out and touch the place where water and sky met.

By the time the prince was twenty, he knew he could not live without her. He wrote his plan in a letter and put it in a bottle: the next time his ship docked in the harbor at Oyster Island, he would take the rowboat out to meet her, and he would steal her away to Pearl Island. Then she would never be hungry again.

But the day before he was to sail, the king discovered the letter.

“You would bring a dirty oyster girl here, to our home?” he roared. “You would have her be queen?”

“Yes, father. She is smart and brave. She would be the best queen I can imagine.”

The king shook with fury. “If you marry an oyster girl, you forfeit the crown.”

The prince was shocked. He thought for a moment, then he said, with anger in his voice: “Then I forfeit it. But you cannot keep me from her.”

“We’ll see about that.”

That very night, the king ordered that all the ships in the harbor be burned. His entire fleet was consumed in flames, and the smoke covered the whole island. The next morning, the sea was filled with the charred remains, like corpses floating out in the water.

From the spires of the coral palace, the prince stared out at the wreckage. Then he went to the kitchens and found a long, silver knife. It gleamed as he strode to his father’s bed chamber.

The king was standing at the window when the prince arrived. He wearing only his nightclothes, and his royal robes lay at the foot of his bed, next to his scepter and the crown with the glittering black pearl. Without the weight of them, he looked much smaller, more frail.

“It had to be done, my son,” said the king. “I could not let you destroy this kingdom.”

“No,” said the prince. “You have done that yourself.”

Then he raised his knife, and with a mighty blow he struck the black pearl from the center of his father’s crown. Then he put the pearl in his pocket and left the palace, never to return.

Down in the harbor, the prince collected beams of wood and lashed them together with rope. He fitted a sail from bedsheets and secured it with a pole. Then he shoved off from the harbor aboard his raft, through the cemetery of ships.

The king may have languished in his castle for too long, but the prince was young and fresh and knew the ways of the sea. For five days he braved the open ocean. He speared fish and drank from a canteen. When he ran out of drinking water, he drifted for a long time, growing weaker and weaker. All the time, he faced the eastern horizon, where Oyster Island waited in the twilight.

Finally, just when he thought he may die from thirst, a ship passed by. He hailed it, with all the strength he had left. The merchants looked down at him with mistrust.

“Why should we bring you aboard?” called the captain.

In reply, the prince held up the black pearl.

Three days later, the oyster girl was waiting in the reef. It was evening, and she had been waiting there for days. The old men in the village murmured in disapproval, saying she had gone out of her mind. She’d always been a strange one, they said, wading far out into the reef beyond where the other women worked, exploring caves, climbing palm trees. Perhaps she would die out there, waiting for a prince that would not come.

But then, as the sun set in the western sky, a ship came sailing over the horizon. It let down anchor out in the deep water, and, as the village watched, a young man climbed into a rowboat and glided into the reef.

That night, standing together ankle-deep amongst the starfish and the anemone, the prince and the oyster girl heard each other’s voices for the first time. Many years later, when recounting the story to their grandchildren, she would say that he had sounded softer than she had expected, and she huskier. But it hadn’t mattered: they already knew each other’s voices, their true voices, voices that had floated back and forth in bottles on the waves, voices that had crossed oceans and braved the wrath of kings, voices that could not be kept apart.

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Story by Matt Mills

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