Hawgdriver
01-06-2014, 07:15 AM
Been sharing some of my creative bullshit tonight. Here's some more. Short story about a couple on a yacht in the Pacific that goes all Crichton. Some folks liked it, curious what others think.
Table for Two
"Fill me, would you?" she asks Erik, holding out her wineglass.
"More wine then? This white is as bright and cool as the sun today," Erik says, theatrically, as he obliges. "The shimmer and sparkle of the sun's rays on the ocean match the wine's dazzling hues."
"So you're thinking about giving up your mariner's avocation to become a hack sommelier?" Her eyebrow is raised.
"Of course not. I'll do both."
After a pleasant fermata of silence, during which her hair was gently teased by a Pacific breeze, he speaks. "Well, at least the weather's nice today. Another five days and we should see another uninhabited island chain. Ternbones Archipelago, it's called."
"You mean another five days of Pacific Ocean from horizon to horizon."
"Is that a hint of resentment I detect?"
"No. Yes. Well, kinda. It's just that. . . Erik, four months in a yacht on the ocean is a lot different in reality than when I imagined it back home."
"Hey, don't forget the best part: four months of me, all to yourself."
"I better drink more."
"You better get naked more."
She doesn't immediately respond. "I have to admit, that is one of the perks of being on the open sea, no one to offend if I decide to go naked all day."
"I could say something that would turn this into the longest four months known to man. Instead, I'll say you should rather decide to go naked all month."
"What were you going to say?"
"I was going to say your nakedness could offend me. I mean, you know, it's a logical possibility is all."
"That wouldn't result in the longest four months known to man. It would result in the shortest four seconds known to man, so I'm glad you aren't suicidal. They say it's the thought that counts, so here's a little token of my appreciation of your gesture."
"Ow."
She continues. "So, spending four months with you scores highly on the yay-scale, can't lie, but I am more excited about all the reading I've been able to do. It's been forever since I've had a chance to read. I used to read so much."
"Wait, I'm still back in nakedsville. Are you really going to topic shift like that?"
"You are nakedsville's mayor and citizen emeritus, and we both know you will never leave. Yes, I'm changing the topic. Besides, what would be the fun if you didn't have garments to peel?"
"She makes a good point," he says, picking up his book.
***
"The stars are beautiful," he says, while laying next to her atop the deck of the yacht, slightly rocking.
"The stars are wrong."
"What do you mean, wrong?"
"I mean, they are wrong. The constellations look malformed. Ok, look. There's Cassiopeia. The W. You see it?"
"Hand me see the iPad. Ok, yeah. I see it. Yeah. That's really. . .unreal. The angles of the W look wrong. And there is a bright star in the sky within the W that isn't in the app. I wonder why? Maybe a satellite? But that doesn't explain the deformed angles."
"It's probably just something in the atmosphere. A magnetic storm or sunspots or something."
***
"Wake up. Do you hear that?" she asks.
"Hmrm?" He is groggy. She shakes him.
"Wake up."
"What is it?" Alarmed by her alarm.
"Do you hear that noise?" A loud intermittent animal or insect noise comes from right outside the yacht's cabin. The noise is a combination of a frog's ribit and a circada's song, although unlike either one.
ZzzzffffrrrrbbbbtttTT!
"Yeah, what was it?"
"It sounds like a bird or a bug or something. Go look."
"How about no." He pulls the covers over himself.
"Erik, I can't sleep. It keeps waking me up."
"You go shoo it away."
ZzzzffffrrrrbbbbtttTT!
"Erik, just go please."
"You owe me."
Erik rises, grabs the flashlight, and goes to the door. He opens it. The flashlight flares to life.
"Erik? What is it?"
Silence.
"Erik?"
"This thing," he says, "is weird. Come look. It's. Amazing."
She walks over. He points to a dark grey tubular organism perched on the white chest freezer just outside the cabin's bulkhead. It looks like a truncated, eel-shaped lamprey with wings, coated with a sheen of amphibian ooze, like a variant of flying
fish that could be described as a bird-eel.
ZzzzffffrrrrbbbbtttTT! Its mouth opens to reveal a grey orifice with two concentric circular patterns of minute, pyramidal teeth and tiny suction cups.
"Jesus Erik. Get that thing off the boat."
Erik stands, mute, hypnotized.
"Erik! I don't like that thing. I'm going back inside."
The thing lunges and its mouth strikes Erik's forehead. The report of the impact is a wet, flat, thack. It sticks to his forehead. It does not bite, and it does not hurt.
"What the hell?" He is not quite panicked, but dumbfounded. As if at a cocktail party and vainly trying to find the proper response to a well-crafted witticism at his expense.
Erik grabs the tail, grabs a fishing knife, and slices. He tosses the free piece in the sea. The front remains adhered to his forehead. Within a minute, the suction loosens and the piece drops.
"Wow." He says. He sits, in a drug-like stupor. "This feels great."
He passes out. She drags him to the bed. She cannot sleep. After several hours, he groans and stirs.
"It should be lighter out." She says, anxious.
Erik, still lethargic, "I wonder. It's 7:45. It's after sunrise. Why is it so dark?"
"I'll look. You get some rest. That mark on your forehead looks bad."
***
Erik wakes and asks, "Well?"
"We might want to put on vests."
"Seems fine right now. No wind, no swells. What did you see?"
"It's raining hard. There a tall stack of clouds like saucers in the distance and I've never seen the sky so black on the horizon. The sky above is filled with clouds that are all like jelly-filled sacs with sooty bottoms."
"Nasty. The weather radar didn't say anything about Armageddon coming when I looked at it yesterday. You see any horsemen riding the wake?"
"Maybe I should take my pirate's spyglass up to the crow's nest?" She is happy he is more jovial.
"Funny. Well. Let's ride into it! Who knows? It might be interesting." Erik says, with an odd twinkle.
"Erik, if that's a joke, I'm not laughing."
***
Erik stares at the chicken enchilada on his plate. He had asked again to steer the yacht directly into the center of the storm that now shrouds the sky overhead.
"Did that weird flying fish eel thing suck the common sense out of your brain?"
"No. I can't explain it. I just. . .know we need to go there."
Lightning flashes intrude into the yacht's well-lit galley. Fat raindrops continue to splatter the windows and roof.
"Erik, you are being creepy. If this is your attempt to add to the atmosphere, I think the atmosphere is more than enough by itself."
"Michelle, I feel different. I feel more transparent. More ephemeral. I know that makes no sense."
"Erik, get some sleep. Something in that bird-eel thing is affecting you and probably needs attention. I'll update the ship's nav to take us to the nearest medical facility. And I'll see what I can find online about those things."
"I love you Michelle."
***
The swell begins to rock the yacht, and the wind bares jagged teeth. The eerie storm twilight veils the daylight hours until true darkness revisits the lone vessel on the endless tract of undulating sea.
***
She enters the cabin. Erik is inside. She closes the door to the dimly lit cabin, and the howl of wind and rain is cut off. She is rain-soaked, refreshed, adventuresome.
"I couldn't find anything," she pants, "about that . . . flying fish bird-eel thing . . . online. We might have discovered a new species. I posted a pic in a few forums, but no one has seen anything like it. It's actually pretty exciting."
Erik does not respond, but watches, as the ship lurches over a large swell.
"So, the rain stopped, but the wind has picked up. And I think I can hear those things starting to chirp or croak or whatever it is they do. Oh, I set a course that should keep us clear of the brunt of this weather."
"Yes, they are coming." Erik's voice was expressionless, journalistic. Another large swell, another upheaval of the vessel.
"Erik, what are you talking about? You sound like an omen speaker from a horror movie. Who is coming?"
"They are coming to feed."
She braces herself against the rocking ocean.
"Who? Those bird-eels?"
"No, the flying lamprey are only a manifestation meant to allow physical contact, they are not the existence itself. The existence has no name. They require no identity. Identity is a concept they apprehend but do not use. There is no they. A human mind must project their existence into a pronoun, a they, because that is a limitation of human understanding. Perhaps you can call this existence a Voidharmony."
She nearly stumbles from a sudden and violent wave, but catches her balance on a nearby table.
"Erik, we're six days from the nearest medical care."
It does not register with Erik. Pulses of lightning are caught in his face. The light dissolves into the abyss of his eyes.
"They exist both collectively and individually at once."
Booming thunder.
"Jesus Erik, you are really freaking me out. I'll get you some Tylenol PM. I hope that doesn't have an adverse reaction to the LSD you are apparently taking." False, anxious humor.
"No, I must go. I will meet you again in the void." Erik rises from the bed, departs from within the yacht's cabin and goes onto the raucous deck, then walks into solar blackness, and is gone from her sight.
***
Minutes pass, and Erik does not return. Michelle cannot find him. She takes the flashlight with her to the engine room. Her hand controls the flashlight's circle that turns the room's black nothingness into visual objects. A diesel engine. Metal grates on the floor. The oval window of illumination scythes through the darkness, leaving darkness in its wake. She sees something but it doesn't register until her beam has passed it. It was Erik, looking at her. She brings the beam back. There is only a
first aid kit.
"Jesus, I'm starting to lose it now."
She completes her search of the vessel, and finds that Erik is no longer there.
***
She is returning, crossing the stormy deck, to the ship's bridge. Mere walking is a form of combat with the violent swells. Now she needs both hands to maintain balance. With her free hand she swats away a dumb bird-eel, like an oversized gnats.
She reaches the door to the bridge.
Once inside the bridge, she sits behind the wheel in the captain's chair. She sees bird-eels swarming around the ship's running lights, like moths. The hours pass and their number increase. There are now so many that they fill the sky like a plague.
Their chirping aggregates into a cacophonous roar that overwhelms Michelle's ability to hear herself think. Her mind surrenders, and she sleeps.
***
Sudden silence jerks her awake. It is bright outside. The ocean is still. The sky is empty.
The screen to a navigation computer shows Erik's face, staring at Michelle. He is waiting for her to awaken. He is sitting on their living room couch in Minnesota.
"Hello Michelle." His voice comes across the Bose speaker system in the bridge.
She does not understand how the nav display can show a video feed. She does not understand how Erik can be in Minnesota when an airline flight would have taken longer than the period since his disappearance.
"Erik? Is that you?"
"Michelle, are you ready to join us in the Voidharmony?"
"I don't understand. What is happening?"
"We require nourishment, like you. Just as you may eat an apple to sustain yourself, we must sustain ourselves by your essence."
"What do you mean, my essence?"
"What you call your soul. The will that affords your human identity."
On the preternaturally still ocean, she was capsized by a wave of cosmic fear.
"What are you?"
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. If that is intractable for you, then perhaps you will better understand that there are cracks in the human experience that cannot be put into words."
"Why me?"
"You might ask the same of the chicken you ate last night."
"This makes no sense to me. This isn't real. This isn't real."
Erik adopts a nurturing tone.
"You humans believe you understand nature. To an extent, you do. There are limits to your understanding. You believe the world conforms to a known set of laws. In physics, for example, you believe that there are four fundamental forces: the
strong interaction, the electromagnetic force, the weak force, and the gravitational force. This is not incorrect, but it is not complete. There is at least another fundamental force, that of independent will, and it is this force that allows our
existence. We can manipulate this force and project our being onto yours.
You want reason. You want logic to justify our existence and our purpose. Just as you scour your earth and find sustenance, we scour the dimensions of your existence for sustenance. Now, we have found a pocket of nourishment, and we must
feed. However, we prefer the consent of the essence we seek to harvest, or it is too. . .sour. . .when consumed.
Look outside, dear."
Erik sits on a picnic blanket atop the still ocean. It is the same picnic blanket from the joyful fourth of July evening when Eric made love to her at that secret spot no one knew while they watched the fireworks. She realizes this was her favorite memory. He waves at her, lifts a wineglass. Join me.
The Bose speaker system dances again, to hidden strings, but the voice is not Erik's, it is not human. "You will surrender your identity, but you will partake in all memories sacred and forgotten. Erik freely chose to join. Had he chosen otherwise, he would have chosen forgetfulness.
Now you choose."
Table for Two
"Fill me, would you?" she asks Erik, holding out her wineglass.
"More wine then? This white is as bright and cool as the sun today," Erik says, theatrically, as he obliges. "The shimmer and sparkle of the sun's rays on the ocean match the wine's dazzling hues."
"So you're thinking about giving up your mariner's avocation to become a hack sommelier?" Her eyebrow is raised.
"Of course not. I'll do both."
After a pleasant fermata of silence, during which her hair was gently teased by a Pacific breeze, he speaks. "Well, at least the weather's nice today. Another five days and we should see another uninhabited island chain. Ternbones Archipelago, it's called."
"You mean another five days of Pacific Ocean from horizon to horizon."
"Is that a hint of resentment I detect?"
"No. Yes. Well, kinda. It's just that. . . Erik, four months in a yacht on the ocean is a lot different in reality than when I imagined it back home."
"Hey, don't forget the best part: four months of me, all to yourself."
"I better drink more."
"You better get naked more."
She doesn't immediately respond. "I have to admit, that is one of the perks of being on the open sea, no one to offend if I decide to go naked all day."
"I could say something that would turn this into the longest four months known to man. Instead, I'll say you should rather decide to go naked all month."
"What were you going to say?"
"I was going to say your nakedness could offend me. I mean, you know, it's a logical possibility is all."
"That wouldn't result in the longest four months known to man. It would result in the shortest four seconds known to man, so I'm glad you aren't suicidal. They say it's the thought that counts, so here's a little token of my appreciation of your gesture."
"Ow."
She continues. "So, spending four months with you scores highly on the yay-scale, can't lie, but I am more excited about all the reading I've been able to do. It's been forever since I've had a chance to read. I used to read so much."
"Wait, I'm still back in nakedsville. Are you really going to topic shift like that?"
"You are nakedsville's mayor and citizen emeritus, and we both know you will never leave. Yes, I'm changing the topic. Besides, what would be the fun if you didn't have garments to peel?"
"She makes a good point," he says, picking up his book.
***
"The stars are beautiful," he says, while laying next to her atop the deck of the yacht, slightly rocking.
"The stars are wrong."
"What do you mean, wrong?"
"I mean, they are wrong. The constellations look malformed. Ok, look. There's Cassiopeia. The W. You see it?"
"Hand me see the iPad. Ok, yeah. I see it. Yeah. That's really. . .unreal. The angles of the W look wrong. And there is a bright star in the sky within the W that isn't in the app. I wonder why? Maybe a satellite? But that doesn't explain the deformed angles."
"It's probably just something in the atmosphere. A magnetic storm or sunspots or something."
***
"Wake up. Do you hear that?" she asks.
"Hmrm?" He is groggy. She shakes him.
"Wake up."
"What is it?" Alarmed by her alarm.
"Do you hear that noise?" A loud intermittent animal or insect noise comes from right outside the yacht's cabin. The noise is a combination of a frog's ribit and a circada's song, although unlike either one.
ZzzzffffrrrrbbbbtttTT!
"Yeah, what was it?"
"It sounds like a bird or a bug or something. Go look."
"How about no." He pulls the covers over himself.
"Erik, I can't sleep. It keeps waking me up."
"You go shoo it away."
ZzzzffffrrrrbbbbtttTT!
"Erik, just go please."
"You owe me."
Erik rises, grabs the flashlight, and goes to the door. He opens it. The flashlight flares to life.
"Erik? What is it?"
Silence.
"Erik?"
"This thing," he says, "is weird. Come look. It's. Amazing."
She walks over. He points to a dark grey tubular organism perched on the white chest freezer just outside the cabin's bulkhead. It looks like a truncated, eel-shaped lamprey with wings, coated with a sheen of amphibian ooze, like a variant of flying
fish that could be described as a bird-eel.
ZzzzffffrrrrbbbbtttTT! Its mouth opens to reveal a grey orifice with two concentric circular patterns of minute, pyramidal teeth and tiny suction cups.
"Jesus Erik. Get that thing off the boat."
Erik stands, mute, hypnotized.
"Erik! I don't like that thing. I'm going back inside."
The thing lunges and its mouth strikes Erik's forehead. The report of the impact is a wet, flat, thack. It sticks to his forehead. It does not bite, and it does not hurt.
"What the hell?" He is not quite panicked, but dumbfounded. As if at a cocktail party and vainly trying to find the proper response to a well-crafted witticism at his expense.
Erik grabs the tail, grabs a fishing knife, and slices. He tosses the free piece in the sea. The front remains adhered to his forehead. Within a minute, the suction loosens and the piece drops.
"Wow." He says. He sits, in a drug-like stupor. "This feels great."
He passes out. She drags him to the bed. She cannot sleep. After several hours, he groans and stirs.
"It should be lighter out." She says, anxious.
Erik, still lethargic, "I wonder. It's 7:45. It's after sunrise. Why is it so dark?"
"I'll look. You get some rest. That mark on your forehead looks bad."
***
Erik wakes and asks, "Well?"
"We might want to put on vests."
"Seems fine right now. No wind, no swells. What did you see?"
"It's raining hard. There a tall stack of clouds like saucers in the distance and I've never seen the sky so black on the horizon. The sky above is filled with clouds that are all like jelly-filled sacs with sooty bottoms."
"Nasty. The weather radar didn't say anything about Armageddon coming when I looked at it yesterday. You see any horsemen riding the wake?"
"Maybe I should take my pirate's spyglass up to the crow's nest?" She is happy he is more jovial.
"Funny. Well. Let's ride into it! Who knows? It might be interesting." Erik says, with an odd twinkle.
"Erik, if that's a joke, I'm not laughing."
***
Erik stares at the chicken enchilada on his plate. He had asked again to steer the yacht directly into the center of the storm that now shrouds the sky overhead.
"Did that weird flying fish eel thing suck the common sense out of your brain?"
"No. I can't explain it. I just. . .know we need to go there."
Lightning flashes intrude into the yacht's well-lit galley. Fat raindrops continue to splatter the windows and roof.
"Erik, you are being creepy. If this is your attempt to add to the atmosphere, I think the atmosphere is more than enough by itself."
"Michelle, I feel different. I feel more transparent. More ephemeral. I know that makes no sense."
"Erik, get some sleep. Something in that bird-eel thing is affecting you and probably needs attention. I'll update the ship's nav to take us to the nearest medical facility. And I'll see what I can find online about those things."
"I love you Michelle."
***
The swell begins to rock the yacht, and the wind bares jagged teeth. The eerie storm twilight veils the daylight hours until true darkness revisits the lone vessel on the endless tract of undulating sea.
***
She enters the cabin. Erik is inside. She closes the door to the dimly lit cabin, and the howl of wind and rain is cut off. She is rain-soaked, refreshed, adventuresome.
"I couldn't find anything," she pants, "about that . . . flying fish bird-eel thing . . . online. We might have discovered a new species. I posted a pic in a few forums, but no one has seen anything like it. It's actually pretty exciting."
Erik does not respond, but watches, as the ship lurches over a large swell.
"So, the rain stopped, but the wind has picked up. And I think I can hear those things starting to chirp or croak or whatever it is they do. Oh, I set a course that should keep us clear of the brunt of this weather."
"Yes, they are coming." Erik's voice was expressionless, journalistic. Another large swell, another upheaval of the vessel.
"Erik, what are you talking about? You sound like an omen speaker from a horror movie. Who is coming?"
"They are coming to feed."
She braces herself against the rocking ocean.
"Who? Those bird-eels?"
"No, the flying lamprey are only a manifestation meant to allow physical contact, they are not the existence itself. The existence has no name. They require no identity. Identity is a concept they apprehend but do not use. There is no they. A human mind must project their existence into a pronoun, a they, because that is a limitation of human understanding. Perhaps you can call this existence a Voidharmony."
She nearly stumbles from a sudden and violent wave, but catches her balance on a nearby table.
"Erik, we're six days from the nearest medical care."
It does not register with Erik. Pulses of lightning are caught in his face. The light dissolves into the abyss of his eyes.
"They exist both collectively and individually at once."
Booming thunder.
"Jesus Erik, you are really freaking me out. I'll get you some Tylenol PM. I hope that doesn't have an adverse reaction to the LSD you are apparently taking." False, anxious humor.
"No, I must go. I will meet you again in the void." Erik rises from the bed, departs from within the yacht's cabin and goes onto the raucous deck, then walks into solar blackness, and is gone from her sight.
***
Minutes pass, and Erik does not return. Michelle cannot find him. She takes the flashlight with her to the engine room. Her hand controls the flashlight's circle that turns the room's black nothingness into visual objects. A diesel engine. Metal grates on the floor. The oval window of illumination scythes through the darkness, leaving darkness in its wake. She sees something but it doesn't register until her beam has passed it. It was Erik, looking at her. She brings the beam back. There is only a
first aid kit.
"Jesus, I'm starting to lose it now."
She completes her search of the vessel, and finds that Erik is no longer there.
***
She is returning, crossing the stormy deck, to the ship's bridge. Mere walking is a form of combat with the violent swells. Now she needs both hands to maintain balance. With her free hand she swats away a dumb bird-eel, like an oversized gnats.
She reaches the door to the bridge.
Once inside the bridge, she sits behind the wheel in the captain's chair. She sees bird-eels swarming around the ship's running lights, like moths. The hours pass and their number increase. There are now so many that they fill the sky like a plague.
Their chirping aggregates into a cacophonous roar that overwhelms Michelle's ability to hear herself think. Her mind surrenders, and she sleeps.
***
Sudden silence jerks her awake. It is bright outside. The ocean is still. The sky is empty.
The screen to a navigation computer shows Erik's face, staring at Michelle. He is waiting for her to awaken. He is sitting on their living room couch in Minnesota.
"Hello Michelle." His voice comes across the Bose speaker system in the bridge.
She does not understand how the nav display can show a video feed. She does not understand how Erik can be in Minnesota when an airline flight would have taken longer than the period since his disappearance.
"Erik? Is that you?"
"Michelle, are you ready to join us in the Voidharmony?"
"I don't understand. What is happening?"
"We require nourishment, like you. Just as you may eat an apple to sustain yourself, we must sustain ourselves by your essence."
"What do you mean, my essence?"
"What you call your soul. The will that affords your human identity."
On the preternaturally still ocean, she was capsized by a wave of cosmic fear.
"What are you?"
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. If that is intractable for you, then perhaps you will better understand that there are cracks in the human experience that cannot be put into words."
"Why me?"
"You might ask the same of the chicken you ate last night."
"This makes no sense to me. This isn't real. This isn't real."
Erik adopts a nurturing tone.
"You humans believe you understand nature. To an extent, you do. There are limits to your understanding. You believe the world conforms to a known set of laws. In physics, for example, you believe that there are four fundamental forces: the
strong interaction, the electromagnetic force, the weak force, and the gravitational force. This is not incorrect, but it is not complete. There is at least another fundamental force, that of independent will, and it is this force that allows our
existence. We can manipulate this force and project our being onto yours.
You want reason. You want logic to justify our existence and our purpose. Just as you scour your earth and find sustenance, we scour the dimensions of your existence for sustenance. Now, we have found a pocket of nourishment, and we must
feed. However, we prefer the consent of the essence we seek to harvest, or it is too. . .sour. . .when consumed.
Look outside, dear."
Erik sits on a picnic blanket atop the still ocean. It is the same picnic blanket from the joyful fourth of July evening when Eric made love to her at that secret spot no one knew while they watched the fireworks. She realizes this was her favorite memory. He waves at her, lifts a wineglass. Join me.
The Bose speaker system dances again, to hidden strings, but the voice is not Erik's, it is not human. "You will surrender your identity, but you will partake in all memories sacred and forgotten. Erik freely chose to join. Had he chosen otherwise, he would have chosen forgetfulness.
Now you choose."