George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
In George’s body, though his veins and arteries, chemicals and elements flowed that had flowed through so many other living things over the eons.
Before that, the oceans… the fields… the sky… through space.
Blasted into the universe by dying stars, each atom made more complex and dense.
Generations of supernovas building carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, and gold.
George opened his wooden treasure box, and ran his fingers through the gold.
The stars also made arsenic.
But George was wearing gloves, unlike the pirate who tried to rob him.