Witch & whale.

I am in some rusty vessel bobbing through the blue, isolated, enclosed, and in the shadows and hallways there is a resounding throaty growl, gripping, grabbing, and filling us all up with blackness, blackness that spreads, blackness, filling up our pupils and spreading to blot out our eyes. Bobbing, rocking, swaying, queasy seasick dread, eventually it’ll come for me. I can see out across the water, something looming, huge and gray beneath the surface, huge and gray, and waiting.

When she comes for me, I feel myself slipping towards the edge, all that vast blue looming heavy beneath me, ready to swallow me up, the yawning mouth, the abyss, the endless, endless depths, black as those iris-less eyes, darkness that reaches back into my soul and finds itself, waiting in the bitter bile of my secrets, all the failures stored up and waiting to pour out.

And as the whole rusty ship comes creaking down, tilting very slowly so that gravity is turned on its side and we are leaned over, backs parallel to the shimmering sea, parallel to the gray hulking mass, feet still touching the deck, and our hair spilling all around our faces, and all of us tumbling to certain death, I suddenly know that I am more than the sum of all that blackness and I push against it until I am staring into gray-blue eyes with tiny inky pinprick pupils, all emptied out. Everything evaporates.

In the next moment, I am walking away, huddled up and hurried. I encounter a person on the path that asks me where I’m headed, and I tell them I’m headed as far away from all that ominous water as I can go. Oh that, they say with a shrug, that’ll dry up any day now.

photo: Hani Amir via photopin cc