Post Card from the Bermuda Triangle

   I have been sent here to the tropics to collect information for a ground report to be given to the oil company that I work for. Today the rains have been pouring unrelentingly since before dawn and as twilight eases down it shows no sign of ceasing. I wish that it would finish because until it does I cannot conduct my final tests until the weather clears, so I cannot go home and I miss my wife.

    We are meant to be moving from the house we rent and on the telephone she has told me that every one else who lives there has left today and they helped her put most of our furniture into storage but they have all left now and she is alone.

  The walls in the room of this shack the company has rented for me to stay in are peeling as the rain runs down them and drips from the ceiling. The water boiling in the saucepan on the stove fogs up the window, through it the palms and shrubs twist and writhe in the squalls outside.

    There has been a cat prowling since the day I arrived. I fed it scraps from a meal and it came inside. It is sitting on the bench watching the bubbles rise in the water. As I look up from these notes I see it put its paw into the saucepan and spit as it jumps away. It has obviously not been in many domestic situations. It is a young tabby cat and I have named it ‘Ginger’.

There is really very little to do as I sit here trapped by the elements. I turn off the stove and watch the steam diminish and wonder what comes next, looking from the walls to the window. I have already rung my wife and the cat is only licking its paw by the cupboard.      

   Later I go to sleep and have a few dreams which I can’t remember having. When I wake up the rains have gone and it is a bright, steamy day. I go out in the land rover and spend the day taking core samples and driving.

    I am smiling when I get to the airport, handing my boarding pass to the hostess and picking the pickles out of the in flight sandwich. It is midnight when my wife is waiting for me at the other airport and we cross the city through the many lights on the either side of the car and find our old house on the side of the hill in the factory part of town.

   They are only little factories and they squash houses out of existence when ever a new one rises.

After tea we sit on the end of our bed and kiss passionately. We are asleep then.

   In the early hours of the morning while it is still thick with darkness I am shaken awake by a sound in the street.

It is like a multitude of bells being turned on a wheel, ranging from the kind hanging from a budgerigar’s mirror to those used to let school kids know that play time is finished.

I pull back the drapes to see into the street as I sit upright there in our bed.

At either end of it there is no sign of movement except the flicker of a sick street lamp.     

   The sleeping form of my wife has not stirred. I put my ear to her mouth to check to see if she is still breathing.

Her breath is like the petals of a flower opening and closing.

After this noise I can sleep no more, excited at the thought that I am back and I leave the room, walking through the house and looking into each of the rooms, now devoid of people or furniture. In the dark there is no colour.

As I mount the stairs I approach the Moon in the window on the landing.

    In the attic bedroom there is only one piece of furniture hulking the corner in shadow, its varnish bearing watery reflections from the city lights.

I feel very still as I reach to open its door.

It is a very cumbersome wardrobe and is huge and heavy with a morbid architecture, this is why it has been left here. Some empty coat hangers are grouped at one end of the rail. It has the feeling about it of daisies that have turned black.

    I catch sight of something inside it resting on the floor. It looks like a folded note.

When I pick it up I have to hold it close to my face.

It is not a note but a postcard. There is a stamp obscured by many post marks. I try to read the writing on the back but it is only very faintly written in pencil as if it has been erased. I turn it over. There is a faded technicolour scene of a beach on its glossy side, with some models waving out in sunglasses and hats and puffed up rubbery yellow letters reading,

  ‘GREETINGS FROM BERMUDA’.

But I am too tired, and am soon asleep.

    'Geneva, Friday, March the sixth: Oceanographers have released a report indicating that a certain part of ocean, commonly known as the ‘Bermuda Triangle’, may have once been the site of the famed city of Atlantis!

  Boats and planes have frequently disappeared from this area with no apparent explanation and this forms the basis of another of the theories contained within the report, that the Atlanteans, an ancient, yet highly technologically developed civilisation, when threatened by the sinking of their oceanic platform by an imminent earthquake, built spacecraft and left to colonise another world.

  “Perhaps”, suggested one scholar, “they had not taken the time/space continuum into consideration and so have been ‘rescuing’ any vessels that enter this sector. Not realising that many thousands of years have passed since their sudden departure?”

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[Brett Hernan]

This story was written when I was seventeen.