On the Wine-dark Sea

A short story

Photo by Ant Rozetsky on Unsplash

Brian awoke to heat and pain and the gentle rocking of the sea. That was nothing new. It was dawn on the fifth day he had been floating adrift. 

As he lay in the bottom of the little boat he thought back to egging on his brother, Danny, to take the boat out, the boat they’d found tied up on at the dock, to see if he could get past the breakers. He had said he was too scared, that it couldn’t be done. And Brian had said that he’d show Danny how. 

Brian had rowed hard, his young strength at sixteen serving him well. He had pulled over the white watered waves and shouted jubilantly back to Danny on shore as the boat rocked and heaved in the water, safe on the other side of the surf. 

Brian didn’t think about the fact that the tide was going out, that it helped him get over the waves, and he had ignored the ominous clouds getting closer, the wind picking up. 

And as he had stood and waved the rain lashed down and the wind picked up the waves and crashed them down onto the boat so that the oars came unshipped and fell overboard while he was holding on to the bench and wind and waves and tide took him far out to sea. 

And there he was now.

He had probably drifted for miles. He couldn’t tell since he had no equipment, no way of reckoning his position, not that he would have known how to use it. What did they have in the old days? A sextant, he thought, that sailors would use to take their position and determine longitude and latitude. He had always mixed those up in school and couldn’t remember which was which. 

Not that a sextant would have done anything other than tell him where he was going to die. 

Brian was now huddled in the bottom of the boat. His short brown hair was wet with sweat he couldn’t afford to lose, sweat that, when he sat up, ran over a short forehead into green eyes above a Roman nose and thin mouth. His shorts and a t-shirt had been dried by the sun but were stiff and hard against his skin from the saltwater. The little boat rocked and creaked around him, the hard bottom no longer an annoyance since he was distracted by his extreme thirst, cracked lips, purple sunburn. 

A cry from above made him look up even though it hurt to move and to open his eyes. 

A seagull whirled overhead. Maybe it thought he could be its next meal. More likely it was looking to scavenge what food he might have in his little boat. 

Jokes on you, bird. I don’t have anything. 

Dizziness overwhelmed him as he sat up and squinted at the horizon. 

All the same everywhere. An open cloudless sky blue as a sapphire pierced by the burning sun and beneath a flat open sea, constantly moving and changing but still the same all around. 

The sky and the sea formed two halves of a sphere. He wasn’t on a spherical Earth surrounded by limitless space. No, he was inside a sphere, right in the very center. Beneath him, a hemisphere of endless undulating water. Above him,a hemisphere of endless blue-in-blue sky. 

Like a fly in amber it seemed that he was caught in this unchanging sphere of water and air. There was almost no movement, no sound. Just the seagull that had long since flown away and the lapping of water against the side of the boat and the rustle of the breeze that danced through his hair and around his ears. 

There must be someone out there, right? A fishing boat, a cargo ship, a rich guy out on his sailing yacht with his yacht club buddies. Someone had to be somewhere.

The world seemed so full of people on land. So many people you couldn’t move for bumping into someone. There were three thousand kids at his high school. Every day at school he had seen another student he’d never seen before and probably would never see again. And forget when he and his family went down to the city for the Fourth of July parade and you couldn’t even move and you’d give anything for a breath of fresh air away from all those people. 

And where were they all now? Now when he'd  give anything just to see anyone, any stranger, any ship or sail on the horizon. 

He looked around in a full circle, three hundred and sixty empty degrees in every direction. 

Nothing. 

The sun was climbing higher so he slumped back down into the bottom of the boat and huddled under the bench in the little shade it provided, just enough to cover his face. But it was hot in the bottom of the boat where the breeze didn’t reach and it smelled faintly of fish and strongly of salt. 

He tried to remember stories of people adrift at sea, what happened, how they survived. Maybe he’d wash up on some deserted island like Robinson Crusoe. 

What did Odysseus do when his ship sank and he was alone on the water? He had to be tough but he had the gods on his side. He had the special protection of Athena. Maybe some wandering goddess will take pity on me and save me. But they were pitiless gods. They only favored the strong. 

The heat soon became unbearable on his arms and legs so he crawled up the side of the boat and reached down into the water. He splashed seawater on his arms and legs and chest, enjoying the cool sensation. 

The breeze picked up and suddenly he felt chilled and he held his arms close to his chest to warm himself and his head swam and he vomited over the side. 

Then he collapsed back into the bottom of the boat and stared, motionless, straight up at the endless sky. 

A flock of birds appeared in the sky, flying into his limited view as he stared straight up from the bottom of the boat. 

The birds flew from the top of his field of vision until each one disappeared. Their bodies were flaxen gold and their heads black but their wings shimmered an iridescent rainbow of colors in the sunlight and he strained his eyes to look, to really look and hold each one of those huge majestic birds in his sight. 

And now they were growing larger—or perhaps coming closer; he couldn’t tell—until they were flying right over the top of the boat mere feet from him rushing past as silent as the night, a wingspan of six feet or more. 

The shadows and rainbow lights played around the inside of the boat. He closed his eyes and could see the light and shadow flicking across his eyelids as each bird crossed over the boat. 

They were so bright that they looked like they were on fire and he wondered if it was a flock of phoenixes in the flesh.

The last one passed overhead and then all was bright with sunlight again. 

He pulled his head up over the side at the back of the boat to see them fly off but they had completely disappeared. 

He smiled to himself as he lay back down. Of course magical birds like that could appear and disappear at will, otherwise people would see them all the time. He felt lucky that he had gotten to see them. 

If only Danny were here to see it. I wonder what he would think. 

Brian lay back in the bottom of the boat and fell asleep for a while and when he woke up it was getting dark. His skin crinkled and burned when he shifted, new sunburns compounded onto old. 

When he pulled himself up the side again to look around he almost cried out.

He was in the middle of a pond surrounded on all sides by trees—pine, maple, beech, oak, willow. The moon rose overhead.

The water was so pure and clear he could count the rocks on the bottom. 

Reaching a shaky hand over the side he broke the mirror-like surface which shattered into thousands of ripples. He brought his cupped hand to his mouth and drank greedily. The water was cold and delicious.

He sat on the bench, eyes closed, satisfied by the water, grateful that his thirst was gone. He opened his eyes.

This time he did cry out.

The moon still shone down but the pond and the trees were gone. All around were miles and miles of ocean.

His mouth tasted bitter. He licked his cracked burning lips. They tasted salty.

He cursed his stupidity. 

Of course I’m not in a pond. I’m on the ocean. It’s seawater. I think I’m delirious.

He vomited, this time into the bottom of the boat. His mouth and nose burned, tears streamed from his eyes.

He blinked hard, looking up at the moon, then all around him. 

In the fading light a flight of sails was gliding across the wine-dark sea. 

At first he wasn’t sure if it was approaching or sailing away from him, down down over the ridge of the horizon. 

But then it grew larger and larger and he knew it was coming closer, coming for him. Real tears streamed down his face then. He knew he was saved, that they would see him, they must see him at this close distance.

Soon he could pick out men moving about on deck below the great white furls of sail stretched out aloft.

Brian had always loved reading histories of sailing ships and fictional stories, Hornblower and Aubrey, and he knew immediately that she was ship-rigged, three-masted, that is, as opposed to a brig which only has two masts, and with her sails angled she was sailing with the wind on the larboard quarter, that is, the wind wasn’t quite right behind her but slightly off to the left side. 

Her jibs, triangular sails attached to the bowsprit sticking straight out from the bow of the ship, billowed brilliantly in the gentle wind. Her huge square courses and topsails were unfurled to catch every bit of wind along with the triangular staysails stretched out between the masts. 

On deck and in the rigging the men moved in harmony, each man’s round straw hat, blue shirt, and white trousers marking him among the wood and rigging. 

The ship, casting a beautiful bow wave, turned slightly and revealed her full broadside, gun ports closed and the entire side painted in black and white chequers. He counted the gun ports. Twenty. A forty-gun frigate.

And there on the quarterdeck, the captain in his finery, a blue uniform with gold detailing and bicorn hat worn athwart in the old style, not fore-and-aft. 

Sitting there agog he almost forgot to try to get their attention, he was so focused on the spectacle of it all. He hadn’t even thought that they would miss him. He could have tossed a stone and struck the side of her. 

He sat up and waved as best as he could, his arm jerking frantically back and forth in a final effort. He tried to cry out but all that emerged from his throat was a dry croak, his throat parched and swollen. 

He screamed and cried but the ship sailed on. He could dimly make out the name painted on the stern: Tartarus.

The sunlight faded. The stern lanterns were lit. 

In the ship’s churning wake a green phosphorescence glowed, swirling and writhing. 

They must have seen me. They had to have seen me. He’s got a good sense of humor, that captain. He’ll come back for me. I saw him look at me. Our eyes met. There’s no way he missed me. Surely one of the men saw me, one of the boys with sharp eyes. I’m right here.

“I’m right here!”

Brian put one foot on the bench and leaped into the green glowing water.

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Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, strictly a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance, perceived resemblance, or similarity to any other fictional works, to actual events or persons, living or dead, and any perceived slights of people, places, or organizations are products of the reader’s imagination. This fiction is the result of a partnership between a human writer and the character(s) he accessed with his creative subconscious as he raced through the story with them. No AI of any kind, generative or otherwise, was used in any way to write this story.