Strong enough
The rope is going to break. It's inevitable. Why hadn’t he bought a new rope, something made out of synthetic fiber, white interwoven with blue strands, a miracle of modern technology? A rope that would never break, that you cauterize with a lighter or with a long match in order to melt the strands together forever. Something that would last through the apocalypse.
“This is an heirloom rope,” he told me, smiling as though he was joking but I knew he wasn’t really joking. “My grandfather gave me this rope when I was a boy.”
“So why don’t you put in a frame? You know, box it up and stick it on the wall? Why did you leave it on the boat?”
“The rope is fine. It’s a good rope. Strong enough. And if it breaks, what’s the big deal? We drift for a while. Our plans change. We adjust.”
He drove us here in a car the color of the sky before the storm, a car of no color, another heirloom piece passed down to him when he graduated from college twenty-five years ago. His shoes were hand-me-downs and I could see his heart beat, the quivering in the neck, underneath his frayed shirt collar. The man could throw nothing out, held on until the emergency, the car dead in the middle of the night, the sole of his shoe lapping up the rain.
I grasped the rope with both hands, pulled hard, willed the inevitable. The rope didn't break. It burned my palms, punishment for my lack of faith. I l waved them through the air, dipped them in water as absolution.
"See? Strong enough." 
Image by Jane Underwood.
The image was the prompt.
Note: As was brought to my attention by an experienced sailor, on a boat one calls ropes "lines." This sounds vaguely familiar (I haven't been on a sailboat or motorboat since 1990 and even though I grew up around water, I know zip about boats. Read Would you like bloodworms with that? to get a sense of the extent of my knowledge). I just can't bring myself to replace the word "rope" with "line" here. So my apologies if the use of it is grating.