Blaze David
The only thing he could think of was like it was being baptized. He had been, on the urging of his mother, when he was six or so.
The church was all wrong.
The stained glass was broken--sandy, white, green, aqua--and shattered all around him. Light came in unfiltered and it made him think of the angels of the Bible, on fire and burning.
His skin was burning.
His eyes were burning.
Water washed over his mouth and nose and he was sure he was drowning, but he felt no hand at the back of his neck, rather something like wet concrete. Sinkhole, like on the cartoons.
He had to be sinking. Sinking and drowning.
Maybe he could find a branch.
He pulled away from the sinkhole and the water poured away, as if grasped and pulled like a carpet underfoot.
He smelled salt and his lips were bloody and cracked, maybe because of the glass.
He looked down and closed his eyes, though his eyelids were doused in fire his eyes didn’t burn. He felt something squirm around by his calf, something scaled, and his wool coat was heavy as anvils on his shoulders and sides.
Why was he--?
He opened his eyes again and looked back.
Palm trees.
He was either dead, mad, dreaming, or on an island.
Maybe all of them.
He vomited onto the sand, brine and bile, and got the fish out of his pant’s leg. He put it in his coat pocket, in case he needed it later, and started to try to slog up between the pews--between the driftwood, he meant--and towards the tree line.
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