Young Writers Society

DAY 1

The boy curled his knees to his chest, before unfurling them and standing to his feet. His chocolate hair whipped around and was cavorted by the wind. His stomach pressed to the gunwale, before his feet drew him to the front of the boat. The smell of moist oak lingered in the air. The sun lowered itself to the earth gently, falling behind the horizon and shutting out the lights.

His body laid itself down somewhat awkwardly. Grace is an anomaly, he pledged to remember for his free-write tomorrow. His shoulders ached uncomfortably from knots in the wood. He thought of her. He pretended hers were the eyes he was closing. He imagined her tail flipping from the ocean, asking him why he had become a pirate after all of those years of bearing endless nurse-talk. He dreamt of mermaids that had faces like hers. He couldn’t quite remember her face, so the faces in his dreams were only variations of defined cheekbones and soft, curved noses, and gold-flecked auburn eyes.

DAY 2

In the morning, he awoke to the sun coming through his eyelids. He had begun to develop a routine. He knelt before the bow of the ship. He shut his eyes. “How are you feeling?” he asked aloud. He took a deep breath.

“Fine,” he answered himself.

“What’s your pain, on a scale of one to ten?”

The boy looked himself over. There were only a few scratches he felt behind his ears and on his neck. He adjusted the mask on his face, breathed the oxygen deeply. It wasn’t difficult to feel like a sick patient.

“Three,” he said. And then softer, in a mumble, “I’m just about a three.” A three seemed like a number or two too high, considering he was in minimal physical pain if any at all, but he figured nobody would know if he exaggerated a bit. That was the great thing about pretending; nothing you say had to be the truth. Just like the great thing about feelings was that only you had them.

His voice was still high, at the age of eleven. His brown hair hung a little shaggy around his ears. The oxygen mask was loose on his face, and he hated it more than anything. The plastic rubbed against his face, and the tank that sat at the back of the boat was heavy. Whenever he wanted to stray further to the front of the boat than the mast, his thin shoulders had to strain to drag the tank the five feet it took.

He wished he was bigger. He wanted to do big things, like sculpt the hills or climb mountains or find something that no one’d ever found before. But he knew he could never leave. The boat was his life raft. He didn’t know how to swim, and he suspected he never would. He knew how to walk, but he suspected that he’d never need to know how to do such a thing in a world where solid ground was an abnormality. The world was so many things; hard wasn’t one of them. The world was fragile, penetrable, easily corrupted. Donald Davie had been right when he said, “This is the setting for one of our murderous scenes.” The boy had only read Davie’s one poem. He liked to read, but lately he could only really remember two of the books he’d ever read.

The boy picked up the journal whose pages were soaked from the storms. There were storms everyday now. They all felt like the strongest hurricane, just like the calm spell afterwards made it feel like the rain would just dry up, and there would be no more humidity to stick fast to his skin.

But the storms came. And they came, and they came.

Whenever the charcoal altostratus that composed the sky would blacken and roll overhead, the boy would rush to the mast and lower the sail, yanking on the ropes violently. Afterwards he would run to the rear of the boat and drag his oxygen tank into the cabin, ducking his head, clutching his leather-covered book and pretending the thunder was the voices of the gods, telling him he was meant to find her.

Somehow, his boat would never fail to survive the storm. The boy never thought long about dying. It had crossed his mind before, but he had always quickly dismissed it. Instead, his mind strayed to seeing to it that the sun would end up peeking through the clouds like an open door, and asking him to come out of his room like a concerned mother would.

The boy opened to the middle of the journal and added the segment he remembered from the night before. Grace is an anomaly. He looked at the words and then snapped the journal shut.

DAY 3 

When the boy woke, he found he couldn’t breathe. His chest heaved in deeply, and it felt like someone had lodged a ball of cloth in his throat. His head began to spin, spots of black blotting his vision. The heat of the sun intensified, and the fire spread down into his lungs in a web across his chest. He tried to breathe in deeper, his breath hitching. His body lay strewn across the wood. His fingers found his face as his chest contracted violently. His hands ripped the mask away from his face.

This didn’t help at all, but it also didn’t make it any worse. The boy could feel the saliva thickening in his mouth, coming past his lips as he choked. The muscles in his forearms tensed as he dragged himself to the edge of the boat. His chin rested on the rail of the ship, directly over the convulsing cerulean waves. Oxygen seeped into his lungs in small amounts, keeping him on the verge of consciousness. He coughed, inhaling deeply, but never getting a satisfying breath of air.

His shoulders quivered. He didn’t move, just trying to breathe. His face was moistened by both his involuntary tears and the intensifying humidity.

He didn’t know what was happening to him. He felt fear sprout just beneath his skin, where it was on the precipice of escaping and just consuming him entirely. He laid there for what seemed like hours, longing for more oxygen. His hand clutched the fabric of his shirt over his heart, wondering if it stopped beating if he could just pump it back to life.

He was able to breathe without choking after a time. His chest still heaved, and the air wheezed past his lips like helium passing through the nape of a balloon. He was still too weak to move, and he laid there without a clue of when or if he’d be able to stand.

When his ribs ached from being pressed to the wooden planks of the rail, the boy tried to move. He breathed in deeply. He pushed off of the rail as thunder sounded suddenly above him. He coughed, looking up to the sky as it began to rain. The clouds were black. Droplets wove into his hair and stabbed at his face.

The smell of acid rain filled his nose as he stumbled over to the oxygen tank. He lifted it, and found that it was surprisingly easy to tote it into the cabin. Empty, he realized suddenly, and with that thought, the pace of his hyperventilation quickened. The thunder became louder. Lightning flashed between the cumulonimbus clouds and scarred the sky.

The boy’s hands shook as he dragged the oxygen tank out of the cabin and hurled it over the side of the boat. He saw stars whenever his heel touched to the ground. He peered over the edge of the vessel and into the sea. The waves were now murky depths that wavered in his vision and turned ebony. His labored breathing worsened. The boat shook and rose slightly. The boy fell onto the wood, tearing the skin just below his kneecap. He cried out in pain before getting to his feet and rushing to the mast, attempting to lower the sail.

A sudden gust of wind blew past him and ripped through the fabric of the sail. The boy tried to lower it still, but it wasn’t long before the sail was torn entirely from the mast, flapping violently one second and the next, lost in the storm.

The boy sheltered himself beneath the roof of the cabin, rocking back and forth on his heels. He clutched his hands together, breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth. It was a tactic he had seen nurses tell their patients. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Good.

“How are you feeling?” he asked himself, the words barely able to escape his mouth.

“Scared,” he responded, voice wavering.

“How’s your pain?”

He didn’t answer himself, and laid down to sleep.

DAY 10

Although the boy had read Weir’s "The Martian", at eight he hadn’t understood how Mark Watney had made oxygen where there wasn’t any. He had chalked it up to the magic and sheer luck only found in science fiction. He had never believed at that age that the oxygen Watney made was supported by a legitimate scientific calculation, just as he had never believed that on Earth the percentage of oxygen would fall from 20.95% to just above 19.5 %. He was only a boy. He had never had reason to dwell on such things.

Now, as breath came slowly, he wished he had paid attention to such things. That way, in moments like this, he could be the hero of his own story. Not the hero he had always aspired to be, not the nurse who leaned over the bed and whispered that it was going to be alright. The heroes in Marvel comics who sometimes seemed like they could jump from the pages of fictional works and into real life. He had never thought before now that he would be the only one there to save his own life when the time came.

The other story he remembered reading was a short work by Tim O’Brien. The title came to him today; “The Lives of The Dead”. What he liked about it was the love that Timmy had felt for Linda. His favorite part was when Tim was talking about Linda, particularly the line where he said, “I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones.”

He liked it because he felt about her how Timmy felt about Linda. He wanted to melt in her bones. It wasn’t a red cap with a white tassel that intrigued him as Timmy was intrigued by Linda. All the boy could picture were Willow’s bendy frame and wavy white-blond hair, the way her body seemed to sway without the slightest of breezes. Her eyes that tinted a reddish-brown when the sunset touched them. The round ‘o’ of her lips, the southern accent that made her voice go up and down when she asked if he wanted to sit in her bus seat.

He remembered that they had only ever been together sixteen times. Sixteen wasn’t a big number, he knew, but to him, it was a lifetime. The boy loved Willow more than he had ever loved anybody or anything. The love intensified now as the images in the memories faded. He thought of being close to her. He thought of sitting next to her and seeing the soft upturn of her mouth as she smiled.

He thought about the time when Willow insisted they hide from a few boys that she’d told him had been “bothering me lately”. She never wanted to talk about the boys; she always just wanted to get away. It was the fourth day of the month when the incident happened. The boy remembered the scene clearly, how the group of eighth-grade boys loomed over her at the top of the staircase, with crossed arms and long-faced stares. The boy remembered coming around the corner. He was met by the image of Willow, hair-sprayed blond curls bouncing on her back against the polka-dotted blouse she often wore. One of the older boys grabbed her arm, pulled her close. A small scream escaped Willow’s mouth as another one of the boys slapped the lunchbox out of her hand.

The boy thought about it now, the way the pink metal lunchbox clanked to the floor and echoed throughout the corridor, milk spilling from her thermos. It spread over the dirtied linoleum and dripped like white rain down the steps. Strawberries rolled and fell afterwards, splattering onto the staircase like blood.

It was the kind of thing that could be slowed down and replayed without the feeling ever being captured. The boy had watched as Will struggled, trying to free herself from their arms, her shirt coming up and exposing her pale stomach, her fair hair falling into her face. The boy had never seen her in a state of such disarray, such discomfort. He wanted to help her, but he stayed in his place. He was in shock; his stomach roiled and nausea plagued his chest. He was afraid of what would happen to him if he came forward.

Willow, finally, from some feat of strength, freed herself from the older boys’ hands. She stumbled over her own feet, stepping backwards, and one of the eighth-graders gave her a firm shove in her chest. She took a bad step and tumbled down the stairs, hitting her head on the third-to-last step. Her body lay crumpled like paper at the foot of the stairs. The older boys were surprised, exchanging wary looks. They quickly fled the scene, footsteps pounding in the younger boy’s ears long after they were gone.

The crack of Will’s temple on the third stair replayed in his mind as he rushed to the top of the staircase. “Will?” he asked over and over, his voice high in pitch. “Will?”

What he didn’t like about “The Lives of the Dead” was when Nick Veerhoff pulled off Linda’s hat. He didn’t like it because Timmy loved her and didn’t stand up for her. Timmy was supposed to be the hero; he was supposed to rescue Linda from pain and humiliation. It reminded himself of his own cowardice as he watched Will tumble through her spilt milk and bleed it pink. As he hid in the corner by her body until the second grade teacher who’d taught him phonics found them and punched in the number for the ER.

The boy had made many memories in the eleven years of his life, but there were only three that he was able to remember in vivid detail. One was that of the boys and Willow. The other was his time spent in the hospital; a particular moment as he sat by Will’s bed. He remembered looking at her. Seeing the clear tubes that they had shoved up into her nostrils, the hair that the fan on the far wall had blown into her closed eyes, the blue veins visible under her white, translucent skin. He remembered thinking, they made her this way. They made her ugly. He remembered wishing he could crawl inside her skin and melt in her bones. He remembered how real her hand felt in his, and how he wanted to have his fingers in hers forever. He wished his eyes could lay down between the lines written on her pages. He wondered, not for the first time, what it would be like to live inside someone else’s body.

That kind of love.

He remembered the slow and methodical beep of her heart monitor. Men and women in white jackets came and then promptly left, passing dialogue about “cerebral damage” between furtive glances at the boy, who was slumped in the bedside chair, his feet barely touching the ground.

When they left, he always leaned in close, and whispered, “I know you’ll make it, Will.” He wanted her to know he was there for her, as if that would somehow make up for what he did. “How are you feeling?” he whispered to her, like a nurse would. And then, “What’s your pain?”

He imagined her sitting up in bed and telling him that she felt as “right as rain”. “Why didn’t you save me?” he imagined her asking, with the lilt to her voice. “Why are you crying, Vin?” He heard her voice as he wept into the sheets on the side of the bed, snot and tears running from his nose like a faucet. “Why are you crying, Vinny? It’s okay, you know.”

Whenever he looked up, her eyes were closed, her head caught in the crook of the stark-white pillow. When he squeezed her hand, she never squeezed back. Vin cursed his imagination. He didn’t let go of Will’s hand until they made him.

Vin woke to another half-baked morning, propping himself up against the mast of the vessel. The wood was chipped and tarnished by the wind and rain. The sail had disappeared. At first, Vin couldn’t breathe, but he found it in him to inhale enough oxygen to remain conscious. His muscles were weak, and his thin legs shook when he stood upon them.

He had dreamed of Will, but her figure was hardly recognizable in the phantasmagoria of images that tripped through his mind. He wiped the sleep from his eyes. The boat floated without direction on the placid waters. The sun blinked in and out like a broken flashlight through the gray wall of clouds. Will is an anomaly, he scrawled in the journal.

DAY 732

The storm raged. It was worse than normal; Vin was knocked between the walls of the cabin like a racquetball. He couldn’t hold on for more than a mere second. In a single moment, he was thrown from the cabin and onto the bottom planks of the boat. Warm rain rushed into his face. He stumbled to his feet, only for his body to be cast into the side of the ship. The sky growled furiously. It was then that the sight of a massive wave reached Vin’s eyes. It towered above his head. It curled inwards and then crashed upon him.

For a moment, the only sound in Vin’s ears was the quiet rush of the sea. He was underwater, and for a moment, it was dark, silent and tranquil.

And then the world turned upside down.

He tried to move his arms and legs in order to reach the surface, but he couldn’t propel himself towards the top. He was carried away underwater in the momentum of another wave. He thrashed around, perpetual fear rooted inside of him. He could no longer hold his breath, and opened his mouth. Upon inhaling, cold water rushed into his lungs. His head smacked on something unseen. He choked and sputtered, trying to clear his lungs, only for more water to fill them. Suddenly, his head bobbed about the surface. Arms flailing, Vin finally got a breath of air, which sent him into a fit of coughing. He was plunged beneath and above the surface. He struggled to remain afloat.

Suddenly, Vin found that if he moved his arms forward and backward in a successive motion and kicked his legs furiously, he could keep himself above the surface. He let out a small laugh, water cascading from his mouth. He launched into a cough, trying to empty his lungs and fill them with air again. He heaved in a breath, and ducked his head underwater to avoid a wave. His head came back to the surface, the storm still roaring.

He took note of his surroundings. His limbs were tiring. Suddenly, he saw the silhouette of the mast and then the hull of the vessel. He began to swim towards it hastily, his breaths quickening. He swam through several large body-sized pieces of wood and metal; wreckage of other ships, maybe buildings. Vin gulped for air. His hand finally grasped the side-rail, fingers groping for the wet and slippery oakwood. It took three tries to thrust himself over the edge.

He rolled onto his back. The angry sky finally faded behind his eyes like a memory, the heat and exhaustion settling in. He struggled to breathe, fighting unconsciousness, until hours of respiratory struggle blended into a dreamless sleep.

DAY 1400

The third memory Vin had clear recollection of was the day he’d ended up on the boat.

The world had been crumbling since Vin could open his eyes. As temperatures skyrocketed, the polar icecaps had continued to melt, and thus sea levels had continued to rise. The subject of global warming had been toyed with by scientists for more than a hundred years before, but humanity didn’t take initiative until it was far too late. By the time the urgency of the problem settled in, the most people could do was avoid the problem for as long as possible; preventive measures were no longer an option.

Vin had grown up on this principle. Families mostly resided on the upper floors of apartment buildings or on the roofs of housing developments. However, it was never long before the water weakened the infrastructure, and buildings fell. The frequent and violent storms wiped out billions of homes.

On what Vin had dubbed “Day 0” was the Great Big Storm.

He had woken at two in the morning to his mother shaking his shoulder violently, urging him to wake up. For the past century, oxygen levels had been declining rapidly. So much so that anybody without an oxygen mask could faint, or, in extreme cases, suffocate to death. Water filled the world from the bottom of the Floridian city Vin lived in to the tops of the windows, like a cup that was half-full. Or as many put it, half-empty.

Vin’s mother had looped the backpack straps over Vin’s shoulders, kissing the back of his head. In the backpack was his extra oxygen tank and mask. Mother was the reason that Vin wanted to be a nurse. She would drag him along to work, and he watched as his mother calmed sick patients, whispering softly to little boys with broken arms. Vin thought that she could cure Willow, once. But it didn’t matter how many long hours the two of them spent reading by her bedside. Willow remained in her coma, breathing so slowly that Vin was afraid her body would just stop.

Vin remembered a time when he had been pedaling a bicycle, wheel spokes turning until they didn’t. His pedals hitched, and his breath followed, his stomach tumbling from his body. He collided with the pavement, the skin on his shin breaking open. Blood gushed from the wound, and his mother rushed from the front door, whispering in his ear. “Are you okay?” she was asking.

“No,” Vin had whined, having been barely six at the time.

“What’s your pain, on a scale from one to ten?” she had asked soothingly, brushing his hair across his forehead.

"Ten,” Vin cried.

“A ten?” Vin’s mother asked, feigning incredulousness, and began to tickle his sides. Vin laughed through his tears, grabbing her arms with his tiny hands. “Are you sure it’s a ten?”

Vin remembered jumping into the boat on that day, five years later—one of the sailboats docked by the shore. The waves were raging; rain came down in buckets upon their heads and lapped around their ankles. Vin’s mother untied the rope, her hair clinging to her face in the slanted downpour. The boat began to drift from the shore. Mother ran down the length of the wooden dock, and Vin was beckoning to her with his hand. “C’mon, Mommy! C’mon!”

She leapt to the boat, her figure seeming to freeze in the air. Her jump was short, but Vin was sure that she’d make it. She didn’t. Her chin came down on the rear of the boat, and her neck snapped backwards, her body slipping between the waves. Vin yelled after her, screaming, willing her to bob above the surface, but she was gone. Cloaked by the water as black as outer space, stars scattered in the ripples where Vin couldn’t see a thing.

He remembered crying his throat raw.

Vin woke from his midday slumber on the boat. His figure was lean and tall, and hair grew across his upper lip. He crawled to the bow of the ship. He closed his eyes, pretending to be in the hospital room where Willow’s body was wrapped in blankets. “How are you feeling?” he asked, pretending to have his mother’s voice.

"Okay,” he replied, imagining Willow awakening from her sleep.

“What’s your pain, on a scale from one to ten?”

He wrote the answers down.

DAY 5002

Vin used a knife to gut the fish he held in his hand. After he ate, he dreamt of Willow, of blond curls and the southern accent she used when she asked him if he wanted to sit her bus seat. The wind pulled at the locks of his hair and the stubble that shadowed his chin. He wished on the stars that hid behind the clouds, and the heat overtook him, prying cracks into his skin like it wanted his secrets.

DAY 9992

There was one sip of water left in the gallon-sized bucket that Vin left in the back corner of boat. He held it between his ankles to collect water during storms. It hadn’t rained in over twenty days. It was ironic, in a way. He wouldn’t drown when he was cast overboard, nor would he cease to breathe when his oxygen tank emptied. Instead, he’d die of dehydration in a place where nearly all there was for miles was water.

The pale brown hair that was a wisp about his temple had begun to gray. His skin was beginning to fall loose about his bones. He wondered if this is how Willow felt after she fell; detached from her body. Vin’s memory hadn’t been fading as it used to in his first years on the boat, but sharpening. He could see Will at the bottom of the stairs. She may have fallen a story, but she was at the top of his memory. He could see her face as clearly as day. When the thunder steamrolled across the mattress of clouds, it was still a voice of the gods, telling him he was meant to find her. He longed for it, this reminder that he had a purpose.

DAY 9999

I see something.

It looked like a swordfish’s nose, sticking up like a flagpole from the middle of the ocean. Vin squinted at it, hand shielding his eyes from the sun that threatened to blind him. His mouth was dry. Suddenly, the front of the boat stopped drifting. Vin’s feet crept to the bow of the ship. The boat hadn’t stopped by courtesy of the swordfish’s nose; its movement had been impeded by something underneath the water.

It excited Vin, this small discovery. He hadn’t seen anything in nearly thirty years. But this—this was something. He decided he had to find out what it was, this something that had caused his ship to stop.

He pushed off from his calloused toes, and dove beneath the surface.

What met his eyes when he opened them left him nearly breathless.

Seaweed crawled over the edges of buildings, chipped and broken. There were gaping holes in many of the structures. Plankton were suspended in the sea and covered the sides of tall complexes. The underwater city seemed small from where Vin floated at the surface; it was as if he was levitating. He was inside of a fish tank, searching for the glass walls and finding that he’d rather be confined than lost in thousands of miles of the ocean.

Vin swam to the surface and took a quick breath before plunging back into the depths of the city under the sea. The sea was fairly shallow. He could see the bottom; it was nothing like the infinite fade-to-black of the ocean that Vin had experienced when taking daily swims in his late teen years. He could see everything, from the marine animals that crept along the sandy floor to the tops of the city buildings that, from the looks of it, had long since been buried beneath the sea.

He swam to the bottom. He touched the sidewalks as he flew. His fingers brushed along the slimy streets. Something caught his eye; something fleshy that lay on the seafloor. He swam down to it curiously, his eyes squinting for a better view in the murky water. It was a girl of roughly ten years old, slightly bloated. The skin beneath her eye was eaten away, and the white of her cheekbone was exposed.

She was flat-chested, blond curls suspended in the moldy water, eyes closed. Emotions ripped into Vin’s heart, splashing color onto his memories, painting them blue, yellow, pink. It made her this way, it made her ugly. He cradled the girl’s fragile body in his arms. She said in his mind, “Why are you crying, Vinny?” He kissed her forehead as his lungs strained for a breath of air. Clutching her body to his old chest, he tried to swim to the surface. It only seemed to get further away the harder he pumped his legs.

He felt a rumbling in his chest. It was the voice of the gods. Save yourself. His arms and legs fatigued, and the clouds passed between him and sunlight that shone through the rippling surface. Suddenly, the surface began to recede in the distance. The water was warm as it entered his lungs. She began slipping through his fingers. He reached out for God’s grace.

"It's okay, you know,” Death told him as he fell.