The End and the Beginning [A Short Story]

My Predicament and the Glint of Hope

She stood alone on the bow of the ship, looking off into the deep, just as she had done every night before, and sighed heavily and long--almost a whimper at the end, or a cry. I echoed the sentiment from a distance, not wanting to disturb her lonely lamentations. In all of the countless days and nights that stretched on as endless as the ocean was wide, I thought about what to say to her, imagining, practicing, and discarding ideas. Not that she would hear me, but if, by some strange magic, my words broke through her spell, I wanted them to be perfect.

She turned around to face me, yet she didn't see me at all. Just like everyone else on the ship, she had succumbed to the same spell of not seeing. It wasn't the same as blindness. It was more of an acute un-observance.

But I saw her. The spell on me was broken. I no longer wanted to roam around the ship, wailing and moaning and doing something that I couldn't clearly remember. I was sick of sorrow. I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to be with her. But I couldn't find the words to say.

So I only watched, taking in her translucent beauty with all the same dedication of everyone else that ignored her. Her deathly pale eyes showed a delicate hint of rocky brown, like the color of her wavy hair; like the ocean bed we rested on. Her dress, once a lovely shade of red, was only a faded stain in the seawater that held us.

I had a hazy memory of her on the deck of the ship before the storm that sank us. She had been such a bright beauty. Now dulled and faded.

A fish interrupted my view for a moment, swimming through her face as if she wasn't there. Even the solid creatures were trapped in the spell of un-observance when it concerned us. The fish passed through her and she through it, weeping as she walked across the shattered deck. Her shoulder merged with mine for a brief moment, sending a warm sensation through my apparition, like a current from the south. And then it passed. She continued on her way behind me, floating into the cloud of crying passengers drifting across the main deck of the ship. Soon she disappeared in their midst; colors blending into colors blending into the blue and navy of the deep.

In some ways, gaining awareness of my predicament made me even more melancholic than before. I was alone.

Below deck, my old friend milled around near his own bones. "How are you, tonight?" I asked him as he followed his daily path around the room. I couldn't remember his name, or even if we had ever spoken before the storm. But something about him felt familiar. So I hung around.

He never answered me, of course. He couldn't hear me, couldn't see me, didn't even notice when he passed through me, sending a warm sensation through my being. He only moaned as he walked the room.

I had no idea what woke me from my un-observance, and consequently, no idea how to wake anyone else. All I knew was that the woman in red was the first thing I saw. And seeing her reminded me that I had always seen her. Familiarity was my best guess for how to wake someone. And this ship-hand was the only other form I was familiar with.

But how to get him to notice me? To remember me? Especially since I didn't clearly remember him.

I had nothing better to do than to try. So I tried. Hovering in front of him, waving my hand in front of his eyes, sitting on his bones with no ability to move them, and touching his phantom to make him feel the warmth that I felt. Nothing worked. He continued along his path, circling the area with no concern for anything except his own, infinite sadness. So, with no other idea of what to do, I followed his path around the room, staying in front of his face, hoping that he'd finally see me, until the light outside the porthole, which faced the surface of the water, shifted and caught my attention.

Rising through the hull of the ship, I went out to see what had flashed in the darkness of the ocean. The small flicker of light drew my attention away from the blurry misery of the ship and made me see the outside world more clearly. My vision of it was sharp--much sharper than anything I saw in my own world. It was stimulating. I nearly breathed. But it was just a flicker, and it disappeared into the gloom before I could find out what it was.

Another day passed on the ship just like every day I could recall. I followed familiar paths that twisted around the wreckage, turning my form sideways and occasionally upside down to feel as if I was walking properly on what was left of the floor. I waved at weeping forms that passed and tried to get the attention of the only two people I "knew." The darkness of night fell over the water as I sat down on the bones of my friend.

My own bones were lost deep within the ship, unidentifiable among the others that it lay with. On my first day of awareness, I had gone searching for them--trying desperately to find an article of clothing or an object that I could remember was mine. I wanted something to remind me who I was, or even just a name. But nothing looked familiar. Only these bones I sat on which clearly belonged to the form that walked the room and cried out over the loss of himself.

The clothes that I was wearing made me believe that I, too, was a crew member of the ship, which made sense of my feelings of familiarity to him. He must have been my only friend, for I had searched the faces of every other apparition that wore this uniform and none of them looked familiar to me.

"How are you, tonight?" I asked my friend as he passed me.

Out of the porthole, I saw the flash of light again and hurried out through the wall to see what it was. Far above me, near the surface of the water, a whale passed. And on its tail something glittered.

I had never left the ship before. But the clarity and "realness" of that glittering object on the whale made me feel things that I hadn't felt before. It tore me from the murky sorrow of the wreckage. It woke me into a new level of awareness. And if it could do that for me, I knew it had to be able to wake the others. Perhaps this thing was what woke me in the first place.