June 13,
2017
Time originally allotted : 25 minutes
I immediately saw a guy sitting in a row boat on a vast body of mirror surfaced water and ran with it. When you've only 20 minutes or so to write, often it's best to just run with your idea and edit later. As a group, we read what we come up with aloud. It's always interesting to where everyone else travels.
The wind
had left him hours ago to drift on black water still as a mirror. Murray stared down into its secretive
depths. What lie beneath and how deep
was the open door to infinite quandaries? Who knew what stirred down there, what creatures lurked in the aqueous
void between air and rock? Real or
imagined, six gilled sharks or sea monsters, carp and krackens. Both were equally real since the presence of
either could not be verified. Denizens
of the deep wilderness or absolutely nothing beneath his small row boat at any
given moment.
It left him
starring into the darkness of an endless opaque mirror wide-eyed. Occasionally, blips in the mercury, stirrings
a stone throw away rose in concentric circles of wave energy, as the hidden
life dared to reach from a watery world to touch the sky. Rings of moonlight, shadow and light rocked
the boat gently. Great beast or the
dainty strokes of a water strider, Murray couldn’t distinguish heads or tails
by a ripple.
Water spanned
all the way to the horizon. A vanishing
point nearly impossible to determine as pinpoints of light galaxies away met
the reflexed skyline in perpetual undisturbed perfection. Real blending with the image. Murray found himself imagining possibilities vast
as the expanse of space and as numerous as scattering of light above. As much as he knew of the worlds above, he
knew less of what stirred beneath. With the
snap of a jaw, tooth, a tail, he’d be tipped over the edge into the abyss. The chill gnawed at his bones. Don’t let the
fear in, nor the dark. Take an oar, make
a way.
Murray
followed the rise and fall of each breath with one thought. He could glide across a sea of calm as long
as he drank in the night air. Ribs could
rise and fall without a thought, a constant.
A heart beats in steady rhythm. Letting
panic in would only make this hour, the terrible night less bearable. To be here and accept he was a cork bobbing
over a world invisible. A lone soul left
a drift in a sea of sinking souls and an absent sun. That ship had left. Was he a man on a hidden mountain top?
All the
wonders determined by the strength of the mind’s eye. What was truth? The promise of a sky full of
beacons. Stars blazed in the night sky
overhead. An absolute he could use to navigate
his way. A rowboat lost no more in a
fixed sea of galaxies and stars. Lead on
Orion and Sirius, triangulate and trickle into safe harbour.
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