The Swimmers
Corpses. Something smells wrong, my eyes sting. I am in a pile of corpses. I knew before I hit the water that I was at my end. I did not expect new thoughts ever again so the halting nature of the single slow-arriving thoughts is less unnerving and more a happy realization that I wasn't dead yet.
But It starts to sink in that I am laying on body parts, and what little air I had in my lungs starts to fade. My heart starts to race even more than normal and I try to use what little of my rationale I have left to make sense of my situation.
I'm wet, my chutes and sails seem tangled around my legs and part of my face and cling to me in a soggy way they were never designed to exist. They cloy at me and seem to seal me in place like a death shroud. No one else in the corpse pile has a death shroud. To my left I see an elbow and part of a bare rib cage, on top of the midriff lays part of a leg that seems to go underneath me. I stifle the silent screaming that starts to build in my belly, parts of the scream come out as a gurgle or miniature moan as I roll to my right away from the bodies and face to my horror many more in this direction as well. I seem to have washed up into a pile of discarded men. I have never felt as inexperienced and infantile as I do trying to conjure a situation that would explain a pile of floating corpses.
Trying to free myself from the vision of the arms and legs I turned to the same and worse. I see joints and limbs in the near distance, but the unclothed pectoral and chest hair less than two inches in front of my face brings up bile from my stomach and I start to contort as if I'm going to wretch.
To make things worse I can tell I am laying on a pile of bodies that is in turn floating mid-ocean. The rise and fall of the water is something I have observed but never experienced and is not helping me regain any sense of composure. I just want the rocking to stop. Entwined and imprisoned in cloying silks, in the midst of unending swells and dips and swells again, salt water stinging my eye while I am prostate on a pile of pale damp bodies. For some reason the body hair on the body to the right is more than I can handle, it makes the body too real, this used to be a person and was never meant to be my raft and I start to shift and squirm trying to get free from the ropes and cords of the contraptions that were supposed to keep me airborne but now pin me to this pile of flesh and hair. I think I've started to cry.
I manage to slightly elevate my upper body onto my elbows but my legs are hopelessly trapped. I try to raise my buttocks in the air enough to slip a cord from one side of my waist to the other hoping to detangle myself eventually but the plan fails. My arms slip out on the shifting slick wet human pile of a raft and I fall. My face sickeningly making a wet slapping sound as my cheek hits somewhere between armpit and nipple. I feel the bile start to rise again as I feel his body hair on my temple and a head that was floating just past is disturbed then dislodged and bobs for a moment before shifting in the pile until it is facing me. Matted hair partially obscuring the unshaven face of part of my boat of horror and now I know I am crying. When the eye opens I start to scream.
I don't just scream. I go into full flailing primordial convulsing terror ridden fits of rage. I make new noises I didn't know I could produce. I twist push and throw myself in every direction at once. Bodies are shifting and rolling in the water. I hit more and more water mixed with less and less limbs as I choke on the salt water one last time before melting through the shifting pile of flesh and debris and sink under the water for the very first time in my entire life. I know I can't breath underwater but my brain forgets to not try and I suck in a fake breath of liquid death.
I fling about still but can't help to notice a calm as I realize that the end I was fearing just took a second to arrive, as now I was surely going to die. So I look to the light. As the bodies float out away from the hole I sank through the sun shines through and into the smooth water forming a blurry halo of blues and rippled whites. I stop twitching. I want to enjoy the last sunshine I will see. The sun had always been such a large part of my world, living above the clouds. I am glad to see her one more time and to say goodbye. It seems fitting that as I sink lower the sun slowly gets harder to see, it is a nice soft goodbye this way... if I just focus on the sun and ignore the floating dead people.
But they weren't just floating anymore. I was disappointed that the bodies were sinking with me. I wanted this time alone with the sun one last time. But nearby corpses were sinking head first around me. My chutes untangle from my legs and torso and are beautiful in the water, like they are moving slow-motion and free. That's when I notice the eyes of one of the bodies seem to be looking at the fabric as well. Which makes no sense. Even less understandable is that the bodies seem to be moving, not sinking, not floating, not corpses.
Eight to a dozen predominantly naked men float near me indifferently and calmly observing my last moments of life. They weren't technically naked, they seem to have ropes tied here and there that float around and with them. One of the men reaches out to touch my fore chute and I clutch it away but my strength is gone and my arm twitches oddly.
Another face is suddenly near my own. I can't explain it, but some eyes are different. Some eyes are kinder. He looked right at me and I had no fear. Perhaps he was a guardian of the gate between our life and whatever is next and we all sink into it. He reaches one arm around me and I stop noticing much besides shadow below and shimmering light above.
The light gets brighter. Surely this was the light the dying speak of coming to welcome them to death. The light was blinding and I no longer fight for breath. It was an odd end to a life in the clouds, this wet gateway to the after-world. I had been raised on wind and breezes, they were like friends and companions. It makes sense to me that those same breezes were what caught my attention and told me I was still not yet dead. A breeze blows across my cheek, like a whisper on my skin. Then I feel myself get slapped and my eyes shoot open. The swimming death guardian with kind eyes floats in front of me and slaps me twice more then hits my stomach hard causing me to vomit saltwater and bile into the water I was barely floating in. Before I could panic again his kind eyes look right back at me. I just focus on kind eyes barely perceiving the swimmers that tread water all around us. Their eyes were less kind and their mouths were tight or foreheads creased.
Kind eyes just watched as I started to breath. Slowly the swimmers move to lay on the water instead of floating in it. One swimmer's arm supports another's torso, one leg supporting another head. Realization dawns as I observe them recreating a free form raft of resting bodies. Bodies, but not corpses.
Free from my the sails that previously trapped me in cords I start moving my own legs and arms, ineffectively as it may have been. The motion itself was soothing. Kind eyes pushes my legs up to the top of the water and moves my arms out to the side. I understand that I am intended to cup the water with my body as I used to grip air with my sails, and slowly find myself rising and falling with the swells of the ocean. He rests his head on the raft of swimmers behind him and holds the base of my head on the tips of his fingers as I no longer am able to maintain consciousness.
I float, ebb, and flow, with the terrifying swimmers of the Northern Sea.
Next Episode: The Rules
Really like the symbolism and the word pictures! I'm getting hooked.
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