Storm at Sea
I lay on the bowsprit, my favorite haunt at sea, willing phosphorescence to appear in the navy blue waters of the Atlantic. Mom’s words rolled around in my head, Do you think I should divorce your dad? Our family could use a little luminescence. Wind danced around me...
Phoenix Writers’ Workshop
Phoenix Area Writers, Are you savoring the last of spring like I am? I watched sun glint off the Salt River yesterday from my perch under a tree. The beauty refreshed my writer’s heart. Immersing ourselves in a positive writing community and sharpening our skills can...
Saturday at the Swap Meet
I shoved my dollar and twenty-five cents deeper into my pocket and piled out of the backseat, R.J. right behind me. I had to work to keep my face from smiling. It didn’t pay to smile around Dad. He’d find a way to squash happy like a mosquito. Dad slammed the...
E-mail From God
Station wagons puttered past me, hauling my classmates from St. Hugh’s. I scuffed my saddle shoes along the sandy berm of Charles Street, the only kid walking home from school. Pines rustled and puddled shade on the pavement. I had never outrun the solitary feel of...
Sleeping With The Nuns
A rubber band nicked my arm between my elbow and my St. Hugh’s uniform sleeve and fell to the floor beside my desk. I turned around and shot a glare at Harry Ferguson, but he and the rest of the class stared, slack-jawed over my shoulder. I twisted forward in time to...
The Night The Shrimp Ran
I stood on the aft deck, rising and falling with the bounce of the boat, letting the cool night air slough off sleep. Pier 1 glowed like a Martian ship was about to land, but only stars spattered the sky. Our neighbors buzzed along the pier armed with a bevy of bare...
Girl Overboard
I stood on the bowsprit as we sailed Biscayne Bay. The wind swept the swelter of the sun from my skin. A bucket of Noon rain had dumped and now steamed up from the decks of the Annie Lee, taking my troubles—real and imagined—with it. “Annie!” Dad hollered from the...
The Barnacle Scraping Hoo-Ha
Saturday dawned sunny and sticky like every other day in Miami, but a cloud of misery sat on my head like an anti-halo as I anticipated a weekend scraping barnacles off the Annie Lee’s hull. R.J. perched in the cockpit. At four years old, even today’s fifty-yard...
My Brother’s Boat Days
Careening off the end of Pier 1 on his trike and going overboard in cowboy boots, my kid brother learned to swim the hard way. But he owned Dinner Key Marina in a way I never would. I focused on flying under Dad’s radar, but R.J. stacked up father-son adventures,...
Di’s Summer of Sailing Reform School
My cousin Diane landed in deep doo doo for mouthing off to my Dad’s sister one too many times and got shipped from Ohio to reform school—i.e. my life. We sailed to Key West, fetched Di from the airport, and anchored off Marathon Key. Di made a tiny haystack of fish...
Dangers Without and Within
The three-foot hammerhead shark lay writhing, white belly up, on the Pier 1 planks while we kids gaped. Matt Canfield jerked his pole and the fish galumphed a foot closer on its fishing line tether. Kate, Scottie, R.J., and I shrieked and skittered backwards. The eye...
Grandma Still Loves Grandpa
I stood in the galley slapping together a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for my lunch at St. Hugh’s. Dad walked the length of the cabin and started up the companionway. I scrunched my nose. “Peew! What’s that smell?” Dad was full of smells, like a mid-Eastern...
Sun, Sandcastles, and Sin
I tip-toed across the deck, debating the chances I could disappear before Dad saddled me with some miserable boat chore he thought up while I was sitting in Sister Sheila’s sixth grade English class. I skirted the cockpit and ducked behind the aft cabin, not daring to...
Gone With The Wind
I’d had my fill of Saturday-Sunday cruises, but my family nevertheless stowed fresh water, powdered milk and pasta for a three week sail around Key West and home to Miami on our thirty-six foot yawl—though Dad added the bowsprit and called it forty. Regardless, a...
Escaping the Sun
Seven a.m. sun burned through the open hatch and baked my shoulder as my eyes blinked open. I rolled into the shade under the deck, the nape of my neck already damp with sweat. My feet hit the floor next to my swim suit bottoms lying in a sandy wad. I snatched real...
About Ann
Ann Lee Miller holds a BA and MFA in creative writing. She teaches writing online for Grand Canyon University. She’s lived in Ohio, Indiana, Arizona, and Oregon but left her heart in Florida where she grew up. Over 100,000 copies of her novels have been downloaded from Amazon. She is hard at work on a memoir-novel about growing up on a sailboat. When she’s not embroiled in a crisis–real or imagined–you’ll find her hiking with her husband or meddling in her kids’ lives.