Andrew Kirkman's
Onda
Earth roars...
Lightning shoots
between angry, blackened storm clouds and wide, rolling waves surge towards me from every direction...
Furious gusts of wind and rain, sharp as needles, batter me back and forth as the sea writhes under my feet.
A crash of thunder rumbles deep through my body; I reach my hands out, groping blindly in the darkness for something to cling onto, to steady myself. I battle my way across the ship and stumble erratically into the cabin, the flimsy wooden door thrashing behind me, slamming repeatedly in the gale. I quickly spin around and wrestle it closed, fastening it shut, but the whole cabin continues to shake violently. I can do nothing but curl up on the cold, hard floor-boards and there I will stay, until the storm subsides. The wind shrieks and wails around me as if searching for a way inside, and the cabin shudders in fear.
The wind shrieks and wails around me
I press my hands over my ears and clamp my eyes shut. I gaze across the horizon to where the bleak and utterly empty sky meets the impenetrably blue, softly undulating mass of the ocean. Long, unkempt hair whips around my face, a long and tattered coat billows behind me, and gusts of stinging sea-spray are hurled into my eyes in the constant force of the morning breeze. I remain unblinking, my stare fixated on the distance.
A spark of brilliant light breaks the blurred line of the horizon, bathing me, grizzled and unflinching, and the small, dilapidated boat upon which I stand, in glorious beams of intense sunlight.
A spark of brilliant light breaks the blurred line of the horizon
Slowly turning my head over my shoulder, I see my shadow stretching seemingly infinately across the unending, pulsating seawater. The shining orb in the sky gradually rises, turning its gaze downwards towards the ocean and sending sparkling reflections over my craft and I.
The shining orb in the sky gradually rises
Gazing around me, I notice the curvature of the Earth under the now azure, cloudless sky.
I am alone, in every sense of the word, save for the warming sunlight on my skin and the calming to-and-fro motion of the sea which rocks my boat back and forth.
Location has, like time, lost meaning in this uniformly blue world...
But though the Sun warms my skin, a paralysing coldness pervades my being.
It wasn’t always like this. My eyelids flicker before drifting to a close, and I withdraw from this cold reality which surrounds me into the past: my sanctuary.
I used to have a name. I remember the shape formed by the lips of those around me as this elusive expression escaped in their breath: Onda...
