Ships of the City

yall i didn't put any ships in the damn city of them

the legendary fisherman of the Vezo!!!

1. Ship as Narrow Hinge: Fell Stitch. rusted creaking barge; almost folded in on itself by some abyssal pressure. Carries passengers unable to find any other crossing. Barely space to stand below decks; the crew and their human cargo all walk bent double on shore.
2. Ship as Cracked Snail Shell: Grave Periwinkle. low in the water; men with running noses and mucus-slick mouths bail with the shells of great molluscs. carries porcelain and grey meat
3. Ship as Blue Feather: Clear Land. impossibly light on the water, a flurry of sails and hydrofoils. the crew have a deathly fear of water and go without drinking for impossibly long stretches. carries government documents and birds trained to recite state secrets when given the correct token.
4. Ship as Bent Nail: For Want. a steamship, crumpled by collisions, smokestack bent such that it billows smoke on the crew, who go about sooty and cheerfully incompetent. They traffic exclusively in scrap metal and damaged antiques, heaped in great jagged piles.
5. Ship as Ampersand Keycap: Schoolhouse Rock. a tugboat, a black little thing curled on itself, incomplete on its down. There's always one more thing to do, or remember; the crew keeps lists that grow and grow and grow endlessly. Orderly, somehow, despite all this. Doors open and shut with a satisfying click. 
6.  Ship as Dried Flower: Three Tears from the Sailor Left Behind on Sunset Rock. faded, obnoxious, beautiful. an old galleon with pale pink sails that smell of lilac and rose. A crew of wistful romantics and souvenir collectors hauling reams of old photographs and boxes of tea. 
7.  Ship as Blade of Grass: Wild Lady. an outrigger canoe of woven grass and reeds; fast enough under full oars that its edges whistle in the wind. Far more crew than would seem possible, always underfoot, easy talked over, their revenge only ever small pricks and jabs. 
8. Ship as Dog's Tooth: Bileburner. a dirty white mercenary submarine, like a dish left unwashed in the sink. quarters are stinking and damp. the crew lingers on the verge of mutiny, but remains fanatically loyal to the ones who feed them. you can find them in diners, getting sloppy joe all over their faces and hands.  
9.  Ship as Pair of Scissors: Silver Shark. at a diagonal, the huge engine at the back of the ship low in the water, the front impossibly high. two prows; one nearly skyward, the other hidden below the water. both steel, both thin and sharp, held apart by coils of metal cable. they can shear shut, smashing through the decks of smaller ships. preys on the shipping lanes, gleefully severing supply chains. 
10. Ship as Red String: Fate and Faith. impossible web of delicate scarlet rigging that seems to be woven into the sails. leaves daisy chains of buoys in its wake, marking dangerous territories, reefs and sargasso. the crew wears uniforms woven of the same thin red rope as the rigging. everyone you speak with knows at least one of their number. 
11. Ship as Black Beetle: AWAY. a warship, half dome of black iron propelled by clusters of oars jutting out from its sides like legs. plating at the top lifts up like wings to reveal batteries of napalm nozzles. the inside is insane, tunnels and pipes through the thick gel that somehow keeps the thing afloat. no captain but a black block of computer, no crew but the oarslaves, each anonymous in black rubber to protect them from the chemical interior. 
12. Ship as Wren's Egg: Yuriko's Adolescence. a pleasure vessel for a child not allowed to set foot on land until her 19th birthday. Small and fragile and mottled, the interior all white silk and gold. She eats custard and passionfruit and oranges and bobbles about on the ocean like a bubble. Through the semi-translucence of the ship-shell, the world is all light and warm shadow, like a promise. 
13. Ship as White Cassette Tape: Poulsen, a little white plastic science ship, hardly big enough for two. she sways and lilts crazily across the water as those two travel from her one side to the other. her belly holds the reels; the two sleep uneasily above them. they are required only to hold the microphones; whatever is picked up from the grey horizons won't be heard by them. 
14. Ship as Beer Bottle Cap: a collection really, each thin-tin darling floating like a saucer or an inner tube. each one used to be part of something bigger, hole-punched from the flank of a scrapped ship (Five Whiskers, Greenbelly, Sunjumper, Mom's Ladle) and held onto by a sailor who couldn't sleep anywhere else. 
15. Ship as Fly in Amber: Sweet Heaven. flies coat the decks of the ship, which carries honey, pine risen and dinosaur bones. the crew moves among the the flies and the insects are not disturbed. the crews' faces and arms and chests are covered with flies, and the men are not disturbed. nobody speaks, but all have adopted permanent expressions that indicate their role on the ship, and perform it gladly. 
16. Ship as Mouse Skull: a derelict little dingy. water runs into it and water runs right back out again. it has the air of the sacred. it's hard to believe it could ever go under. crewed only by a fat black cat, recognized by some as the ship's cat of the Butterlily, a humongous yacht which sank horrifically not far from shore. The next ship the cat boards will do the same. 
17. Ship as Grain of Sand: Summer Vacation. the barge pulls up to the beach and the crew leaps ashore with buckets on their heads and beach shovels brandished like the fingers on a hand and horrifyingly quickly they have stripped the beach down to a stony pit of gravel rapidly filling with water, and the barge is full of sand for them to play in. 
18. Ship as Lighter: Favorite Brother. a floating refinery, improbably tall, like an office building with a dirty flame burning off the flare stack at the top. no single crew, changes hands at every birth. the employer is unknown. most of the product feeds the flame the same as the waste. the work rarely pays; the ship finds that people need it nevertheless. 
19. Ship as Lizard: Christrunner: a spry little pirate schooner with a false prow that can splinter off after a ramming maneuver. white sails that they change for red ones to intimidate, big billowing sheets of scarlet fabric far too large to be useful. the crew lick each others eyes clean of salt, cut off fingers (yours, each others, their own), with a jittering abandon, scale masts and rigging with freak speed.
20. Ship as Small Knife: Miss Slip. little motorboat with a knife-sharp keel. piloted by a little old woman with engine grease on her hands and a thick notebook she jams full of indecipherable charts, written with a carpenters pencil. her boat changes things; the sea is not the same in its wake. wave patterns broken do not mend. even deep, deep below, currents are curved and cleft. little by little, she is getting it how she likes it. 

really dig how they say " gave over 25 years of his life to the illustration of children’s books" like yeah!!!! he was was breaking a SWEAT