Her imagination omitted the shark at the front of the coffin, waiting until she closed the coffin so that it could pull him finally away from her. She constructed an entire scene, one that plays out in these last few turns.
In the remaining lines of this turn, she fell back into his embrace. For one moment, her skeleton gripped his and it was perfect. As perfect as can be.
Finally in the coffin, the seawater cooled.
The coffin began to take on water.
It wouldn’t stop until the shark pulled it under, bringing whatever was left of him to the depths of death. Right where any that still floated on the seas belonged.
HIS TURN
For this turn, she assumed that the water was still boiling, that the coffin still floated, and that she was still in his tender embrace.
She focused on him.
What he would think before finally jumping into the water to collect the shards that had once been the moon.
She mulled over whether or not the moon needed to shatter, and yet it was strangely romantic of him to seek out the light.
It had to continue in the very same way. He would have preferred it.
During his turn, he told her it was okay.
Maybe it was even a little fun.
That became his excuse: “We’re having fun.” Only they could have fun in such a dire situation. However, that’s what brought him to her. She was an out of control child, barely even a teenager; she had, perhaps, grown up too quickly.
But the way she imagined it, she sought out fault because she still believed that she could be a good person.
A person like him could not have cared for someone that could be nothing but a burden.
In this imaginary scene, they both laugh.
“It is fun, actually.” That’s what she says.
It’s always about fun with you.
Actually no — she changes that.
He says something cliché. He tells her, “I have fun whenever I’m with you.”
She adds, “It doesn’t matter what we do, where we go, or where we’ve gone. It’s fun when you belong and I belong with you.”
Hold back a sentimental tear. She tends to the bittersweet scenario. By definition, the hero has to be a real charmer. He was a charmer, a real charmer, even though that couldn’t be further from the truth. Really he was just some guy who had chased foolish ideas, received a modicum of success from a small group of peers, and let himself fall over the deep end after they had told him that he might not be full of shit.
Death was no closer to being a disease than love being something that you overcome. If you felt anything pure about a person, you wouldn’t surely fight to get away.
Maybe only if you were her.
But this is her imaginary scenario.
Her fantasy.
And in this they swam for miles in each other’s arms, the sharks following them, maybe attacking, but his own return attacks, using a weapon she incorporated into the fantasy in order to apologize for pinning down one of his arms when he could have really used both.
She wanted it to be something she wouldn’t need to accept. She wanted it to be something that didn’t need any accepting.
Something before the inevitable nothing.
HER TURN
“Are we having fun?” she shouted out to the sea. She shouted because there wasn’t anything else she could do. She imagined that the sharks circled the coffin. She imagined that her flesh had fallen off her bones in large sheets and the jellyfish had continued to grip onto various parts of his and her bodies.
It was worth accepting that it would continue to be pain until the very last moment.
She shouted to the shark, the one that watched and directed the entire onslaught, “Are we having fun?”
She meant for it to be a question, meant for it to be loud, carried out in an echo that might be heard elsewhere, but she could not hear her own voice. Because she couldn’t hear her own shouts, she imagined them as gruff whispers, barely anything but a wheeze from her mouth.
What she must look like, she decided to leave off the page.
One love buries another.
His burial required her vigil. Though he fought so that she would never have to be in such a position, her role as burden in so many lives transformed into purpose, her very real purpose in continuing to hold on. Her loneliness became a deadly buoy in an already dead place. Indeed, she accepted her role.
Burden is always yours, never theirs. She accepted what she needed to accept. Her mom’s passing. The life that was a waste, the life she didn’t do much to protect or save.
Everything without a name, burned like a cigarette lit to be put out on her thigh.
She had finally accepted everything. Summarized as such:
Once upon a time a young preteen sought danger because that foolish person thought danger asked for nothing in return. Risk was simple. Risk was face value.
She never understood that danger would inevitably require a life. It took hers because she hadn’t been careful enough.
The stage, the final stage, lives passing on like the shark fins poking through the cooling waters.
If she could, she would feel his face. If she could, she would run her own hand across the sockets where her eyes had once been; if she could, she would separate herself from this body.
If she could, but she couldn’t because the small part of feeling that remained had a very physical connection. The ghosts in place, the ghosts she could hear calling her name, speaking beyond speech, beyond sound, faulting her for yet another fault, she ignored because they simply couldn’t understand.
She must tend to his burial.
She must feed the sharks.
“Are we having fun?”
HIS TURN
This is the turn where he continues to fight back and gathers all the shards. There are as many as she thinks there should be to put him in a positive light.
By that you can expect a lot. With each shard she places him in heroic situations:
He fights the shark that had watched them from the start. And wins.
He swims to the horizon and pulls back a rope bridge. And they walk it over the horizon, back to their still-beating hearts.
He swims circles around the sharks and gets them to cannibalize each other.
He builds a second coffin for her and they both sleep side-by-side.
He freely controls the temperature of the sea.
He makes sense of the nonsense in their lives. He tells her that this was all just a dream, and maybe, depending on how traumatic this had been, a nightmare, and she wakes up.
It’s all part of his study.
She wakes up and feels so much better.
Key word: feel.
He makes her feel again.
Say goodbye to numbness.
He makes death as distant as possible. But even she can’t completely imagine how that might be possible.
The one that works best is the one where he gathers the light and places the moon back on its perch. It is the one where he kicks the sky back up to its typically impossible-to-reach distance.
He places her on his back, tells her to grip on, and paddles back to the coffin. In that coffin, they sit and enjoy. They watch as the sky becomes a real sky, full of stars, the moon looking like it had never been broken. Their senses return and they share a perfect moment.
Demise sticks to its ocean depths.
They share the dream of a starry night.
By dawn, they let go. She figures if it must be over, it ends at once, together, with a single breath, a single blink of an eye. Most of all, she imagines him as a hero.