A short story which only suffers from being short is about a repeat widow maker going on vacation and running into an old schoolmate who terribly wronged her when she was 14.

Stromatolite 'Stone Mattress"


photo from here: http://www.lagunabacalarinstitute.com/Stromatolite.html
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Available on line, The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/12/19/stone-mattress
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amidships definition: in the middle of a ship' well dur but I couldn't seem to work it out in the sentence she used it in.

fata morgana definition: an unusual and complex form of superior mirage that is seen in a narrow band right above the horizon'. another new to me term but i seem to remember a TV show regarding how the Titanic may have been difficult to get to because of mirages. Article from Smithsonian mag: "An unusual optical phenomenon explains why the Titanic struck an iceberg and received no assistance from a nearby ship, according to new research by British historian Tim Maltin. Atmospheric conditions in the area that night were ripe for super refraction, Maltin found. This extraordinary bending of light causes miraging, which, he discovered, was recorded by several ships in the area. He says it also prevented the Titanic's lookouts from seeing the iceberg in time and the freighter Californian from identifying the ocean liner and communicating with it. A 1992 British government investigation suggested that super refraction may have played a role in the disaster, but that possibility went unexplored until Maltin mined weather records, survivors' testimony and long-forgotten ships' logs. His findings-presented in his new book, A Very Deceiving Night, and the documentary film Titanic's Final Mystery, premiering on the Smithsonian Channel"

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