Floating in a Void of Liquid Salt

I wake from beneath the surface. There is thick mucus growing in my eyes, ears, sprouting out of my nostrils and my mouth. I pull at it and feel the tug of its roots deep inside my head. I spring towards the surface, suddenly having the terrible urge to suck in oxygen. My head breaks the water and impacts the air, but I cannot breath. I grip the mass of mucus in my mouth and tug violently, feeling it slide out from inside my throat, its endless, I keep pulling, this thick, warm tangled mass of mucus and snot is two feet long, I feel my lungs start to clear out, I can take a breath finally, and I scream backwards, sucking in all the air I can, my arms flap and my legs kick to keep my head above the water and I watch the intestinal-like rope of mucus float away in the splashing waves.

Once the overwhelming urge to breath was out of my mind, satisfied, another thought formed in my mind. Where the hell am I? I massage the salty grime out of my eyes and flick my head around, looking for a shore.  There is none visible, the waves are rising to high and not falling low enough. Is this an ocean or a lake? It has to be Lake Wontogii. That’s where I was yesterday. With April. Yes, and we were on the Yacht, the Yacht with the bedroom bigger than the one we own, and all the bottles and cans of alcohol. Forty year old Red-Wine, spider web-cracked and waiting to be swallowed. At that thought a salty gulp of salt water invades my gulley and I cough and splash more. I’m not going to be able to keep this up much longer. There has to be a boat around here somewhere, I had to have fallen off at some point. They're turning around right now. They’re coming back to get me. But that’s impossible. I can’t be in Lake Wontogii. We left two nights ago.

A bird flies above me, close to the surface, and dives under water to grab a fish. I peak my head under water, watch the bird snatch a small glowing fish and float back up to the border. There are small fish tickling my feet, and I kick them away. My arms and legs are getting tired; I can’t keep this going much longer. In the fibers of my muscles I feel the tension burn as if alcohol was poured onto my exposed muscle. My joints pop and crack, and the waves continue to splash. I can’t breathe out of my right nostril, and I close the left one with a finger and blow more salty mucus out of my head. The bird flies away after successfully swallowing the fish.

Another slap of water coats me like a blanket, trying to suffocate me, drown me out.The waves grow higher, like mountains of cold salty snow, melting into shape of canyons and forms of valleys and peaks and cliff sides. If only I could find a cliff side. And then, like a splash of water to the face I wake up from my daze and remember the scene with April, on the side of the cliff, her yelling at me, yelling, You never loved me! You tried to take away my children! You sonofabitch!

But that never happened. I was never pushed off a cliff. That would never happen. April would never try to kill me. Just the other night on the yacht, we were embracing in each other, warm under the cool sheets of the bed. But her eyes, you remember something about her eyes don’t you?

Yes, her eyes, her eyes could whisper lies to you in your sleep and you would wake thinking that they were true. When you would wake in the bed of the yacht and find her standing in the corner of the room, staring into the mirror triple nailed to the wall, naked, you watch her stare at herself in the glass, her reflection seduces her, she’s seducing herself, or she’s seducing you. Yes, of course, she’s seducing you, and then her eyes flicker and in a fragment of a second, she is watching you, her cold eyes right on yours, and she gets up and floats towards the bed in the yacht floating in Lake Wontogii, and she falls, making a salty splash into the sheets and into your arms. She puts her mouth on yours and sucks the life out of it, you can feel her draining you, but you can’t resist, it’s too good, it’s like a drink of cold water on a sweltering day. And then when she was finished she would look you in the eyes and you would both smile, but there was something about her eyes that made you feel nauseous, as if you were going to puke up salt water.

The waves begin to calm, slowly and steadily, and in about half a minute, the entire body of water is still. With the waves silent and calm, I can strain my sight for miles in all directions; there is no shore, no sign of land anywhere. The entire circumference of my surroundings is water, water, water…

My legs are kicking and my arms are wading, the cold is something I now realize about the water. Its hilariously freezing, I have to let myself laugh. I laugh out my breaths into the sky of more water, endless, vast, and deep. The sky and the ocean are very similar. But I would rather be in the sky right now, falling. But here I have no choice to fall, my body will not let itself fall, naturally I cannot let myself sink; if I was in the sky I could fall comfortably, with grace. I could breathe easily, devoid of drowning, and there wouldn’t be any water to grab ahold of to pull myself back up. I would be floating to my death, beautifully.

But here there is no sky to fall from, only to stare up and gawk at, to scream at and question the heavens. My mind is gradually quieting itself, my sympathetic nervous system is taking control of the situation, I could not stop my legs from kicking and my arms from wading if I wanted to. The water has frozen my sense of nociception. There is no more need for pain right now. Right now, this floating instance, this wet moment, where I am being taken out of my body and placed into my head, my eyes shut, closed, stitched up. Now I can float freely in the endless void of my memories.

...

There is a slick movement under my feet, warm and fast. It goes away. Another feeling of movement stirs around me, but this time not as slow. I feel a protruding fin of whatever is below me. I stick my head under water but the water is too dark now, for the sun has gone down. Or was the sun ever out in the first place? No, I don’t think it was. The sky was just blank, a reciprocal of the vastness around me, no sun. The feeling of the swimming fish below me returns, yet I can feel more bodies, flickering and jittering about below the surface, dancing around my feet. I try not to open my eyes. Dying blind, deprived of sight, would that be more frightening than actually facing your death?         

I keep my eyes closed as my body works like a motor to keep the captain in my head above the water. The water is still and quiet, but underneath the surface I feel the energy grow around me, there is a ceaseless stirring, a sliding. The fish around me convulse in a frenzy, I am amazed I have not been consumed by a demon fish, and at that moment the surface of the water opens up around me and I am swallowed into the gaping mouth of a whale. I am sucked into its warm cave, there is more water inside, but I am blind, even though I am staring into the belly of the beast I cannot see and then all at once I feel like my head is going to burst, the pressure is building up around me, like I am stuck in the vacuum of a tornado, and I am shot out of the whale, like a bullet out the blow hole, falling backwards into the sky, flying upwards into the blank clouds of my mind and then all at once I wake up and I am finally dry.

 

Reviews

[KlineXcreed]

I love this short piece so much! This is my favorite piece out of the
Why Write? contest I created. I love the intensiveness, the passion, and the fury. It is bittersweet and gives my imagination a whole load to chew on! Thank you so much for sharing!

[Chadvonswan]

Thank you for taking the time to read!! (:

[Naraly Godinez]

Sirens ... The mermaids call...
The mucus though seriously , best description ever and that ending brilliant it wouldn't be a max shirt without it.

[Chadvonswan]

Definitely, haha(:
Thanks for the Salty comment Miss!!

[Anthony Gerrard]

I was enjoying it until the end. It's all just a bit 'and then I woke up and it was all a dream' for me. It isn't a very satisfactory way to end it because it feels like you have run out of ideas and thought , 'Oh I know!'
If you took the whole last paragraph out and just ended it there, it would read so much better. It would leave me with a does he doesn't he survive question.

[Chadvonswan]

The concept that never made it on the finished product was that the protagonist was drowning in a pool and in his unconscious state he thought he was in an ocean, and at the end when he says hes finally dry, that's him being saved and he wakes to reality.

[Anthony Gerrard]

Hmm, I see, but it doesn't read like that.

[Anthony Gerrard]

I suppose the difficulty is that you know what is happening and I have to infer it. The 'and then he wakes up' means I can stop inferring because it was all just a bad dream.

[Chadvonswan]

Ah whatever it means, its just some stupid short i wrote in the library

[ZackOfBridge]

If I had a nickel.
I have become accustom to your cooky a*s endings and I really enjoy them. Makes me wonder if the story was only a nightmare. Anyway, nice short Max, I like the way you can make me cringe with your descriptions like the mucus for example.

[Chadvonswan]

Haha thanks Zak, I appreciate the commentary, and thantcha for reading my nightmare.