[September Contest] de profundis

Gorgeous.

I love the way you clued us in on the fact that he is a doctor. The imagery is wonderful. Your use of second person is genius. Most people would botch it and you managed to make it work the way it was intended to work. I feel like I'm there, like I'm experiencing living underwater.

The idea that the fish are mean-spirited entertains me xD

Write On!
Lette

Fixed flow in the longer sentences and tenses, and made the 'being a doctor' less in-your-face obvious.
Thank you both for the reviews!

What is it with the story generator and doctors (or some otherwise highfalutin technical occupation)?

Anyway. Spectacular.

First paragraph: beautiful. It sets the mood instantly. The tone is so forlorn and so spiritless.

Not everyone had been that lucky. You were a doctor then—you saw skin charred black and peeling back and eyes melting out of bloody sockets, voices broken and hoarse yet still rising over the shore as the stars blinked away and the sun seared the ground and made pyres of the last ships, the ones that left at dawn and that were caught mid-dive and crumpled like sparrows shot in flight.

the few that still responded to visual stimuli were quiet little things that never speak.

Sometimes when the fish dances by they laughed,

you discovered then that you had lost her name to the silence, and that with it had gone the names you had set aside, like so many precious little things, for the boys you could have had

Wow, what a deep story. You did a tremendous job managing to write about a doctor living under the sea and forgetting names. Many people would have taken the easy way out; a mermaid or intelligent sea creature, but you went all the way. From what I gathered (though I'm sure other people will perceive it differently), the sun turned on earth in such a way that required humans to live under the surface of the water. And slowly the children born to in this new lifestyle became blind. And after the death of his wife, he slowly started to forget the names of the things above the water, and that of his wife.

It was an absolutely chilling and fantastic story. I noticed little to no mistakes.

When the skies fell down, the waters opened their arms to you, and so you went: into the deep and into the dark, where fish shone pallid and ethereal and men shuffled silent and skittish, and when you forgot how the wind felt brushing over your face you told yourself it wasn’t so bad, because you were still alive.

So you counted your blessings and went home to your wife, watched her sleep in the soft glow of bioluminescent algae and hatchetfish and loved her in that quiet, desperate way of yours; you touched her hair, her skin, enumerated scapula, clavicle, sternum, until you knew only her and could forget about the rest of the world.

You remembered the flashes and the fires but not the laughter or the lazy summer afternoons—knew only the cold neon lights and the fish, still the fish languid and careless through the thick windows. You missed her.

Through your hands passed children with eyes too blue to see and skin so light they burnt like rice paper every time the sun flared up and snaked its tentacles of light into your hidden homes under the sea, and the few that still responded to visual stimuli were quiet little things that never speak.

Sometimes when the fish dances danced by they laughed, a sound that rattled and grated but was still better than the grave silence that settled the rest of the time, and disappeared the moment the last luminescent dot faded away.

When the walls finally snapped and yielded to the ocean’s whispering tides, you were not so afraid as resigned. Still, you reached out for the things that were still precious

With the last lights out and the waters rising black and loud around you you still could not find your love’s name, and those might have been tears once upon a time, but you could not be sure now: the fish stole them too.