Monstrous Love Bites Back - Short Story Anthology

ROUGH WATERS

written by still_just_me

*****MATURE AUDIENCES ONLY*****

watch/listen to the audio book on YouTube

Despite mankind's dependence on them for sustainable life, eighty percent of the world's oceans are unexplored. Less than ten percent is mapped by sonar.

And, at the rate we're heading, all of it will become a fucking landfill.

For once, the altruistic cause I center my life around means nothing under the icy grip of the very ocean I attempt to clean up. Kicking and flailing my arms through the invisible resistance, I burst through the surface. Sputtering, I gasp a salty breath. My tongue stings with brine, burning to the point I want to scratch it off with my nails.

Blinking through the burn in my eyes, gray, blurry shapes come in and out of focus. Seven ragged letters appear.

Hustler.

"You've gotta be freaking kidding me." I groan at the folded over remnants of a dirty magazine. This one features a busty blonde shooting her legs in a V for victory.

A constraint shackles my right ankle, compressing it in a vice that prevents me from swimming higher than my chin at the water's edge. Assuming I'm snagged by a fishing net, my numb fingers fumble in my pockets for the Swiss Army knife I pray I haven't lost.

The relief when my fingers brush smooth metal is short-lived. Sucking in a breath, I resubmerge into my unwanted ice bucket challenge. My hair separates as if I touch a Van de Graff generator, the flyaway strands tickling my forehead and puffy cheeks. I curl in and slice through the gray murk, stabbing at the thick cords until cutting myself free.

Kicking with all my might, my lungs burn when I breathe air again. My chin trembles as I tread water and take inventory. My boat - my crew - are nowhere to be seen. The uncertainty of whether they've capsized or sank seizes my heart with the same chill that turns my limbs into lead.

Coarse, gray wood passes my line of vision. Grasping onto a floating pallet snagged in a fishing net, I ignore the pricks of splinters in my palms, hoisting myself up in a ragged heap of stringy hair and heavy, soaked clothes.

Blusters of wind, almost as cold as the water rocking the pallet in rhythmic bobs, lick at my skin. Throbs in my ankle bring me to sit and peeling back my socks and pant leg reveals perfectly round, circular red imprints. They're swollen and tingle with sensitivity when I brush over them, but they're absent of pain.

"What happened?" I whisper to my leg, as if it would answer me.

Shivers start at the base of my neck and trickle down my spine. My teeth speak their own language, clattering vibrations from my jaw into my ears. Rough, salty wind slaps my cheeks and forehead, drying the skin into leather and stinging my eyes. A hopeless scan shows nothing but an endless wasteland of what we intended to remove here.

Oh, this is bad. So, so bad.

As a child, I grew up on the New England coastline. The pull of the sea had nothing to do with childlike dreams of the unknown, the lure of the deep, dark, unexplored expanses. Trident, Poseidon, fuck even Godzilla's origin stories didn't bring me out here, in a small, three-crew vessel.