Her Maiden Voyage Excerpt

An excerpt from an in-progress piece by Lee Ellis, which explores grief and mourning within Jewish Culture. 

Aboard the SS Joyce, Fall  1920

The sky was unnervingly clear after four days of nothing but fog and clouds. I wandered the ship's halls, learning and relearning the passages that wound through and around the heart, like veins pumping blood. As I wandered, tracing the patterns of the wallpaper with my fingers, I heard something thud behind me. 

I spun around and saw nothing, no person, no object, so I turned back around and continued my wandering. Then I heard it, a whisper right next to my ear. 

“Madmoiselle.”

I turned my head and saw nothing. My heart was racing, and I couldn’t help but spin around again. 

“Please.”

This voice felt further, weaker. Within moments, there was another voice, and another. They weren’t loud, not violent. They were polite, begging quietly, the kind of voices that feel like someone tugging at your sleeve in a crowded room. 

I kept walking, picking up my pace until I entered the main hall. The grand staircases wound up, the giant chandelier dripping down, reflecting sunlight like a million stars cascading down from the heavens. 

Then I saw him, a soldier standing with perfect posture, his uniform ruined, soaked in rain or seawater. He looked at me like an eager child, waiting for his teacher to give him a gold star. The man opened his mouth, then promptly closed it, as if he had forgotten what he was going to say.

Then: “Say it.”

I stared back at him, confused. 

“Please, say my name.”

Before I could open my mouth again, the man stepped back, engulfed in shadow, and disappeared as if he had never stood in front of me.

Later that Night

I had long since gone to bed, the lights were out, and moonlight was pouring through the small window in my room, lighting the furniture with a sickly, pale glow. I turned over, barely awake, searching for what had woken me. Then I hear it, a soft sound from the hallway. 

It wasn’t crying or wailing, not footsteps. It was a soft murmur like the hushed voices of the audience as the music crescendoed before a play. I slid out of bed, I grabbed my robe, and tiptoed to the door. I cracked the door open and peeked out. The corridor was dim, but I saw them, all of them.  Men. Boys. Nurses. Prisoners. Sailors.

Dozens upon dozens of them, they all crowded around my door, watching, waiting.

Their faces are blurred, water-damaged, distorted by death. Some are missing eyes. Some have bruises blooming across their throats like fingerprints. Many are missing limbs and are dressed in blood-soaked uniforms. 

And yet they are not threatening. 

They look desperate.

Hungry.

The closest ghost to me, a boy no more than 17 years old, takes a small but brave step forward. He’s shaking, and he looks at me with desperate, pleading eyes.

“Please, please don’t shut the door.”

I felt my grip tighten on the doorframe, my nails digging into the wood. 

The boy’s lips quiver as if the words hurt to form. “Say it for me.”

Confused, I blinked back at him. I wondered what he meant, and then he spoke again, softly. 

“My name, please, Henri.”

Then dozens of others start to speak up, softly, politely, not speaking over each other.

“Jacques.”

“Émile.”

“Samuel.”

Then they started to overlap, eager for me to hear their names. 

“David ben—”

“I don’t remember my surname—”

“Please, please, I had a mother—”

“Tell someone—”

“Write it down—”

“Say it—say it—say it—”

Each of them grew louder, trying to speak over the others, trying to speak their message to me. To tell me of their family, their spouses, their siblings. To tell them that they were out there, dead, but not wanting to be forgotten. 

The soldier, the one who begged me not to close the door, spoke again, “I can’t go until someone says it. Please, let me leave.”

His words hit me as if I had fallen on my back, and the wind leaves my lungs. Because it’s true. The ship is a graveyard with no headstones.

No one buried them.

No one marked them.

No one prayed over them.

And now they exist in the limbo between worlds.

They reached for me.

Not violently. Not to grab my throat or tear at my skin.

They reached like drowning people reaching for a rope.

Their hands passed through one another, through the air, through the edges of my doorframe, as if they did not fully exist. Their fingers were pale, swollen, and bluish. Some were missing entire sections of flesh. One hand had only three fingers, the bones gleaming white at the tips.

I backed into my cabin, trembling.

“No—no, stop,” I whispered, voice breaking.

But they only begged harder.

Not for mercy.

For recognition.

For proof.

Their voices rose, overlapping, frantic, filling my skull until it felt like my head would split open.

“Say it!”

“Say my name!”

“I had a mother!”

“I had a wife!”

“I had a child!”

“Please!”

I clapped my hands over my ears.

It did nothing.

The sound was inside me now.

Inside my bones.

I sank to my knees in the doorway, shaking.

“Why?” I sobbed. “Why are you doing this?”

And then, through the storm of voices, one voice rose clearer than the rest.

A woman. Her tone was not frantic. It was tired. Old. She spoke from somewhere deep in the crowd, where the shadows swallowed most of her body.

“We are not remembered,” she said.

The words cut through everything. The murmuring stopped. The hallway stilled. Even the ship seemed to pause, listening. The woman stepped forward.

She wore a nurse’s uniform, though it was so darkly stained with old blood it looked almost black. Her cap hung crookedly. Her face was lined, hollowed, as if grief had carved her down to the bone.

She looked directly at me.

“We died,” she said. “And no one said our names. No one buried us. No one prayed. No stone. No record. No letter delivered home.”

Her eyes narrowed, filling with something terrible. Not anger, desperation.

“So we are not dead,” she whispered. “We are only… lost.” 

My breath caught.

Something about her words struck deep into the part of me that still believed in God, still believed the world had order. That death meant closure. But on the Joyce, death was unfinished. A door left open. A prayer never spoken.

The nurse’s gaze dropped to my throat, to the chain I wore. The locket was resting against my collarbone. Her expression softened—almost pitying.

“You remember someone,” she murmured.

The crowd leaned in. They could sense it. Smell it, like sharks picking up the scent blood.

Grief.

Memory.

Attachment.

And in that instant, I understood: it was not only that they wanted their names spoken. They wanted someone to carry them. To keep them alive in the only way they could be kept alive. 

The nurse stepped closer, her voice dropping to a gentle tone.

“You can hear us,” she said. “That means you can help.” I shook my head, tears spilling freely now.

“I can’t,” I whispered. “I can’t carry all of you. It’s too much, there’s too many of you.”

A boy in the crowd began to cry, though his face did not move the way a living face would. The sound came out wet, like water bubbling from a throat.

“I don’t want to be forgotten,” he sobbed.

The words shattered something in me.

Because I knew that fear, I knew it intimately. I had lived it since Verdun. Since my brother’s disappearance. Since the world had moved on without my family. My lips trembled.

And before I could stop myself, I whispered a name. Not theirs.

His.

“Thomas…”

The moment the name left my mouth, the ship groaned. Not the ordinary creak of wood. This was a low, aching sound—like the Joyce herself had sighed in pleasure. The corridor lights flickered. The air grew colder. The nurse’s eyes widened. And the crowd— The crowd went still. Every face turned toward me. Their mouths hung slightly open, as though they had tasted something in the air.

The nurse spoke softly, almost tenderly. “Oh,” she said. “That one is important.” 

A sound rose from the far end of the corridor. A slow, dragging footstep. Then another. And another. Something was coming. Something heavier than the rest. The dead began to part like water, stepping aside in a silent, instinctive fear. The nurse retreated. Her expression was no longer pleading.

It was a warning.

I scrambled backward into my cabin, slamming the door. The moment it shut, the murmuring stopped. 

Silence. 

I stood there shaking, my palms pressed against the wood. My heart pounded so hard it hurt. Then— 

A soft knock came from the other side of the door. Not a fist. Not a slam. A gentle, patient tapping. As if someone was waiting to be invited in. 

And a voice—so familiar it made my blood run cold—whispered through the crack of the frame:

“Joséphine…” I froze.

My throat tightened until I could barely breathe.

The voice spoke again, warm and amused, like a memory from childhood.

“Open the door.”

I stood frozen on the other side of the door, not wanting to face the consequences of my grief so freely overflowing. Of voicing the fact that I still carried the pain of my brother’s death, and reappearance. Of the fact that I wasn’t sure if I’d even see him. 

I took a steadying breath and pulled the door back, and I saw him. Not Thomas. Not my father. But Julien. 

He looked disheveled, as if he had roused from sleep, as if the voices of the dead had echoed across the ship, summoning him. 

I couldn’t stop the tears from returning; somewhere deep in my chest, I hoped that saying Thomas’s name would somehow summon him to me. 

“Oh, I’m… I’m sorry, Joséphine.”

All I could do was sob as he held me in his arms. 

The Next Morning

Today, the fog was back.

It clung to the ship as if the Joyce had sailed into the throat of some great beast, and now we were trapped in its breath—cold, wet, and suffocating. The deck rails were slick with condensation, and the lamps along the promenade glowed like distant stars smothered behind clouds.

Julien and I walked in silence at first, our shoulders nearly brushing, though neither of us dared to close the space entirely.

The sea below was invisible. Only the sound of it remained—soft, constant, like whispering.

I kept my arms folded tightly over my chest, not from cold alone, but from the heaviness that had lodged itself in me since the night of the corridor. The voices. The names. The way the ship seemed to respond when I said Thomas’s.

I could still hear it sometimes when I shut my eyes. A murmur beneath the hum of the engines, as if the dead had crawled into my skull and made themselves comfortable there.

Julien slowed beside me.

His gaze was fixed ahead, but his face looked pale, sharper than it had in the dining room days ago. There was something drawn in his expression, as though he was holding himself together by force alone.

“You’re quiet,” he said softly.

I swallowed, forcing a small smile. “I could say the same.”

Julien’s mouth twitched, almost a laugh, but it never became one. He exhaled through his nose, then stopped walking altogether.

I stopped too, turning toward him.

The fog behind him blurred the lines of his figure until he seemed half-made of smoke. His dark coat hung too neatly on his frame, his hair slightly damp from the air. And his eyes—

His eyes looked like they had seen too much.

He stared at me for a long moment, and something in his expression shifted. Not charm. Not flirtation.

Something raw.

“Joséphine,” he murmured, and the way he said my name felt like a confession already.

My heart stuttered. “Yes?”

Julien’s hands flexed at his sides, as though he didn’t know what to do with them. Then he stepped closer.

Close enough that I could smell him—cologne and sea salt, something warm beneath the cold air.

“I’ve been trying,” he said, voice low, “to keep you distracted.”

My brows drew together. “Distracted?”

He nodded once, sharply, as if the word tasted bitter.

“From the ship,” he said. “From what she is. From what she wants.”

My breath caught.

I glanced away instinctively, toward the railing, toward the blank white nothingness beyond it. Even now, speaking of the Joyce felt dangerous—as if the ship might hear, might take offense.

But Julien’s voice held me in place.

“I thought if I could keep you smiling,” he continued, “if I could keep you dancing… You wouldn’t notice how wrong it all is.”

I looked back at him, my throat tightening. “And you? You noticed.”

Julien’s smile was faint. Sad.

“I noticed the moment I stepped aboard.”

Something about the way he said it made my skin prickle.

Not the words themselves. The certainty. The finality.

Like he had known this ship his entire life.

I forced myself to ask, “Julien… why are you really here?”

His gaze flickered—just briefly—like a candle threatened by wind.

Then he looked down at his hands, as if ashamed of them.

“I wasn’t supposed to meet you,” he whispered. A chill ran down my spine.

“Why?” I asked, but my voice came out thinner than I intended.

Julien lifted his eyes to mine. And in them I saw fear.

Not fear for himself. Fear for me. 

“I didn’t want you to become attached,” he said.

My lips parted, but no sound came out.

He took another step forward. We were so close now that I could feel the heat of him, or perhaps the illusion of heat. His voice lowered further, as though the ship might steal the words from his mouth.

“I didn’t want to care,” he admitted. 

I felt something inside me twist painfully. “But you do.”

Julien swallowed.

His jaw clenched. Then, very slowly, he nodded.

“Yes,” he said. “I do.”

The wind shifted. A drop of moisture slid down my cheek like a tear, though I hadn’t cried yet. Julien reached out—hesitated—then gently brushed it away with his thumb. The touch was careful. Reverent. As if he feared I might vanish if he pressed too hard.

And in that single gesture, something inside me broke because no one had touched me like that in years. Not since before the war. Not since before everything had been torn from me and I had learned to live like a ghost myself.

My voice trembled. “Julien… you shouldn’t.”

His eyes softened, and his thumb lingered on my cheek.

“I know,” he whispered. “That’s the problem.”

My breath came unsteady.

“I barely know you,” I said, though it sounded like a lie the moment I spoke it. Julien’s lips curved into something almost like a smile, but his eyes stayed sorrowful.

“You know me more than anyone has in a long time,” he said.

I shook my head weakly. “That isn’t possible.”

“It is,” he replied. “Because you look at me like I’m human.”

My stomach dropped.

The fog seemed to thicken around us, muffling the ship’s distant sounds until it felt like the world had narrowed to this small stretch of deck. To the space between his breath and mine. I stared at him, my heart beating so loudly I thought he must hear it.

“Julien,” I whispered. “What are you?”

His face tightened, and for a moment it looked like he might retreat—like he might vanish into the fog and leave me with nothing but questions.

But instead, he leaned closer. His forehead nearly touched mine. His voice was a ghost of a breath.

“I’m someone who should not be here,” he said. “And yet I am. And the only reason I can still feel anything at all is because you’re here too.”

My eyes burned.

I hated myself for it—hated how quickly I had grown to need him. How easily my loneliness had made room for him, like a wound reopening for the sake of warmth. But I couldn’t stop.

I couldn’t stop looking at him, because when I did, I remembered the corridor full of dead men whispering names. I remembered Thomas’s voice at my cabin door.

Julien was the only thing that felt real.

“You make me forget,” I confessed, the words tumbling out before I could swallow them back. “You make me forget everything horrible, just for a moment. And I know I shouldn’t, but… I want to. I want to forget.”

Julien’s eyes widened slightly, as though he hadn’t expected honesty. Then his expression crumpled into something unbearably tender.

“Joséphine,” he murmured, voice breaking. “Don’t say that.”

“Why?” I demanded, my voice rising with desperation. “Why not? Why can’t I have one thing? Just one—after all of this?”

Julien’s hands came up then, both of them, and he cupped my face as if he could steady me. His palms were cool. Not cold. Cool, like marble warmed by sun. His eyes searched mine with a grief so deep it frightened me.

“Because if you love me,” he whispered, “you will suffer.”

The words struck me like a slap. I froze, tears spilling freely now.

Julien’s thumb brushed them away, but there were too many.

“I already suffer,” I said hoarsely. “I’ve been suffering for years. You’re the only person who has looked at me like I’m still alive.”

His breath hitched. For the first time since I’d met him, his mask slipped entirely. No charm. No practiced ease. Only truth. He leaned in closer until his lips were a hair’s breadth from mine. And then he stopped, trembling, as though he couldn’t cross the line. 

“I love you,” he said, voice barely audible. The fog swallowed the words, but I heard them anyway.

I felt them in my ribs, in my throat, in my lungs. My heart lurched so hard I thought I might collapse. Julien looked at me as if he hated himself for saying it.

“As God is my witness,” he whispered, “I have tried not to. I have tried every moment since we met. But you—” His voice cracked, and he shut his eyes, forehead resting against mine.

“You feel like warmth,” he said. “Like a home I don’t deserve to return to.”

My hands lifted, trembling, and I placed them against his chest. Beneath the fabric of his coat, I expected to feel the steady rhythm of a heartbeat.

But there was only stillness. A terrible, aching stillness. And yet… he was here. He was real enough to hold me. Real enough to love me. I swallowed a sob.

“I love you too,” I whispered.

Julien’s eyes snapped open. For a moment, his face was filled with something like wonder—pure and boyish, as if he couldn’t believe the words had been spoken aloud. 

Then his expression changed.

Fear. Not of rejection. Of consequence.

He pulled back just slightly, his hands still cradling my face. 

“Don’t,” he pleaded. “Please, Joséphine. Don’t love me. It will only make her stronger.” 

“Her?” I whispered.

Julien’s gaze flickered past my shoulder, out into the fog, as though he could see the Joyce watching.

“The ship,” he said, voice tight. “She feeds on it. Grief, longing… love. Anything that binds you to her. Anything that makes you hesitate.

My chest tightened painfully.

I wanted to deny it. To tell him he was wrong. To cling to the softness of this moment. But the fog shifted. And somewhere in the distance, deep within the belly of the ship, something groaned—a long, satisfied sound, like a creature stretching in its sleep.

Julien stiffened. His hands dropped from my face. He stared past me with a look of pure dread. “Joséphine…” he whispered. I turned.

At first, I saw only fog—then, faintly, impossibly—shapes. Figures standing just beyond the railing, clustered at the edge of visibility.

Soldiers. Dozens of them. Watching. Silent. Waiting.

And in the middle of them, a single figure stood stiller than the rest, his face pale as moonlight—a young man with familiar eyes. My breath caught. The locket at my throat grew cold. So cold it burned.

 And then, from the fog, my brother’s voice drifted toward me—sweet, gentle, filled with longing. “Joséphine,” it called.

Julien’s hand shot out, gripping my wrist hard enough to hurt.

“Don’t answer,” he hissed.

But my legs had already begun to move. Not forward. Not back.

Just… drawn. As if the ship itself had taken my love confession and turned it into a rope around my throat. 

The fog thickened. The dead watched. And somewhere deep inside the Joyce, the hum began again. Like a heartbeat. Like a bell about to toll. Julien’s voice broke, desperate.

“Joséphine,” he whispered. “I meant it. I love you. But if you stay… You will never leave.” 

My eyes stung. My brother’s voice called again, closer this time.

“Come home.”

And I realized with sick horror that the Joyce had been waiting for this moment all along. Not for my fear. Not for my prayers. But for my love.

Because love was the strongest anchor of all.