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which bore her father's name; Druzhina Naumovich' Krenitsyn Orange-head. The ship rested upon the captains table, the bottle precariously balanced. Over thirty three thousand tiny pieces of wood had gone into making that ship, consuming most of her fathers spare time. Every night he would retire to the library upon returning home from his office down at the docks, where he managed the largest shipping company on the Caspian sea. She remembered her mother spending most of her time in the kitchen, as her father, while not suffering at all from cash flow problems, refused to open his purse to hire staff. When dinner was finished, her mother would give her fathers meal on a tray, and she would carefully bring it up the three winding staircases, down the hall with the red carpet her father had imported from Persia, and through the last door at the hall's termination. Father would never look up from the ship in the bottle, and would remain hunched over, concentration marking his face, intent upon the myriad strings running from the ship in the bottle to her fathers fingers.
She hated that ship. That ship was the other woman in her father's life. For twenty years he worked on that ship, a masterpiece of modeling. When she turned sixteen, her father brought her down to docks to introduce her to the family business. Having no sons, the job fell on her shoulders to learn the family business; the buying and selling of goods, the careful management of the local tax collector, and the care of, and the knowhow to run and sail the schooner that her father owned. That first day, her father sent her home early with one of the staff. She had fallen ill and claimed it was the milk she had at breakfast, but the culprit had been the schooner itself: it was the ship in the bottle her father had worked on all these years. Most disturbingly, this ship, the life sized counterpart to the ship in the bottle she had always thought of as the real woman in her fathers heart bore his name! Images were conjured up by this horrible fact she could barely stomach. Unfortunately, with time, she was to become captain of this ship. She was to travel from port to port on the Caspian, buying and selling fish, dyes, rugs, cloth and other luxuries. She had herself become trapping in the ship, like the smaller twin was trapping in the bottle. And she would remain trapped for the remainder of her days. Trapped no longer by her father, but by the small ship in front of her. By that small ship that had consumed so much of her father's life. That small ship that had so strained her parents relationship, that when she had returned from a voyage on her twenty-fifth birthday, she had learned that her mother had finally decided to take payment for her wasted life. That she had taken that small, small ship down to her father's office and placed in on his desk, and when he looked at her, had proceeded to terminate their relationship in a most permanent fashion; utilizing one of the knives she had often used to cook his meals, having done so quite vigorously, in a manner that the papers had gleefully reported as a bloodbath.
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