Anchor
A man was stranded in the ocean. A violent storm had ripped his ship apart and killed his crew. The grey skies above had taken everything from him. Except his own life. He sat, soaking and cold on a piece of wood, clinging to it like a child to its mother's leg. He was worried though about the wood drifting further out to sea. He didn't want to drift to far from where the ship had taken its final bow. People might investigate the wreck and save him. He looked for anything that could help him. Then he saw it. The chain of the anchor had gotten stuck, wrapped around a piece of stray metal. The man took a deep breath and jumped into the icy cold water. The water stabbed at him like hundreds of tiny knives. He swam in deep strokes to the metal and climbed onto it. A small barrel floated next to him, and he quickly opened it to find pieces of bread and fish inside. He took out a piece of the stale and hardened bread. He took a bite out of it and felt safer than he had in the last few hours since the ship had sunk into the unknown depths of the hellish ocean, he had now become all too familiar with. He looked deeper into the barrel to see that he had enough food to last maybe two or three days. So, he waited for help. He waited for rescue. After two days, nothing came. The anchor had done its job at keeping him in place so far though. He didn't think anything had gone wrong yet, until he realized that the metal had started to tilt downwards into the ocean. The anchor that he had become so dependent on, was starting to slowly drown him. He quickly looked around to find something else to stay on, but the wind and waves had blown everything else away. He had nowhere to go. So, he sat and kept waiting for help to arrive. On the dawn of the third day, the metal was now halfway underwater, and he only had one piece of bread left. He knew that if help didn't arrive in the next few hours, he would surely be a dead man. And as he thought, on the dawn of the fourth day, help had still not arrived, and the metal was now fully submerged in the deep cold sea. He was now floating shakily with nothing to support him. The one thing he had bet his whole life on, was now the very thing that had doomed him. On the dawn of the fifth day, the ocean had claimed the last crew member's life. The man's lifeless body had sunk into the waves, passing by a sunken anchor.
