Two in one day!
Well at least I am keeping one resolution today...kind of. Here is the first scene of version 3.0 of the shipwreck story.
Infinite red stretched ahead of me, reflected from the sky above onto the sea bellow. It was just after dawn on the day I believed to be Thursday. The water stood four inches deep in the bottom of the lifeboat. At the crest of every little wave it lapped against the back of my legs and burned the wound just below my knee. It smelled vile. If it really was Thursday I had been sitting in it for three days.
Maybe it was Wednesday, though.
I know what you are thinking, because if I were reading this account I would be wondering the same thing. What kind of a fool loses count of the days after only three? You must remember I wasn’t feeling well. I could be specific about it all; the sensations involved in dying slowly of four things at once, complete with disgusting similes and verbs like ‘festered’.
But I won’t. Let’s skip that part. My eyes were not on my wounds anyway, or my throat or stomach. I’d been practicing ignoring them for the last three days. I’d tried to go over words in Sanri in my head for a time in the vain hope that my calculations were wrong and I would wash up there. “The weather is lovely. Are you well? I will trade you three bags of rice for it.” When I was tired of that I had counted the nails in the side, attempted to bail the water out of the boat with my hands and laid back to look at the unfamiliar night sky of a new hemisphere, and make my own constellations by connecting the dots, like the children’s toy where you wrap the string around the nail pegs.
Today I needed no such diversions. All I could concentrate on was that sky.
“Red sky in the morning…” I whispered, leaving the rest of the weather truism unsaid. Sailor take warning. Another storm. I’d survived the first, the unexpected blast from the east that had blown us off course, weeks ago, and the second, which had taken the ship on Monday. If it really had been Monday.
I wondered, as I watched the horizon, if I would survive this one.
At least, if I didn’t, I would be saved the trouble of starving to death.
Infinite red stretched ahead of me, reflected from the sky above onto the sea bellow. It was just after dawn on the day I believed to be Thursday. The water stood four inches deep in the bottom of the lifeboat. At the crest of every little wave it lapped against the back of my legs and burned the wound just below my knee. It smelled vile. If it really was Thursday I had been sitting in it for three days.
Maybe it was Wednesday, though.
I know what you are thinking, because if I were reading this account I would be wondering the same thing. What kind of a fool loses count of the days after only three? You must remember I wasn’t feeling well. I could be specific about it all; the sensations involved in dying slowly of four things at once, complete with disgusting similes and verbs like ‘festered’.
But I won’t. Let’s skip that part. My eyes were not on my wounds anyway, or my throat or stomach. I’d been practicing ignoring them for the last three days. I’d tried to go over words in Sanri in my head for a time in the vain hope that my calculations were wrong and I would wash up there. “The weather is lovely. Are you well? I will trade you three bags of rice for it.” When I was tired of that I had counted the nails in the side, attempted to bail the water out of the boat with my hands and laid back to look at the unfamiliar night sky of a new hemisphere, and make my own constellations by connecting the dots, like the children’s toy where you wrap the string around the nail pegs.
Today I needed no such diversions. All I could concentrate on was that sky.
“Red sky in the morning…” I whispered, leaving the rest of the weather truism unsaid. Sailor take warning. Another storm. I’d survived the first, the unexpected blast from the east that had blown us off course, weeks ago, and the second, which had taken the ship on Monday. If it really had been Monday.
I wondered, as I watched the horizon, if I would survive this one.
At least, if I didn’t, I would be saved the trouble of starving to death.