97 Unfathomable
For Saturday, April 6, Story-a-Day Challenge: Day 97/366
It was a dark and stormy night in the Mariana Trench.
36,000 feet below the surface of the haunted Pacific, the waterwinds were blowing fiercely as bioluminescence flashed like lightning. Deafening thunder erupted from the friction of two shimmying layers of deep waters struggling against their common thermocline.
Turbulent and inclement, the weather below sea level was a tumult of disorder — deep chemistry charging and discharging their electrical fields into eddy currents the size of continents.
It was a perfect storm for the dead.
I, like the others, share this abyssal home with the drowned, the washed away, and sailors of all nations and the machines that ferried them here. We are the skeletons, the plastic, the flotsam, the twisted metal, and the ghosts of the derelict vessels.
From a world that once mattered.
How industrial they all were! How clever! Too smart, it seems. Now, after the sky caught fire that fateful, unsurprising day, sparkly radiation is all that's left of the scintillating Curies raining down upon us.
Months, even years after, those from sea level and the hills and even the mountains drifted down to join us, pushed here by the weather that rides the air instead of the water. Occasionally, one came down who had to have had great beauty, before the sinewy burns and the blast cavitation unraveled it. Certainly everyone up there will pass through down here. It is the nature of sediment, is it not?
I'm counting them. And all of the ones who must have been beautiful at one time will find a final discordant resting place of ugliness here with us in the Trench.
The winds of fire are over, replaced by the torrents of caustic air and water and earth that sweep across any remaining topographical irregularities, wearing them even and smooth and unpretentious.
Like nothing had ever happened up there.
The fermented fetid air will one day settle, distilled, into fragrant aether and hopefully some invertebrate will crawl out of the foam to start the new chapter of Earth's Book of Life. It will be only a second draft, but hopefully the writing will be more sophisticated, unlike the tawdry comedy that just ended.
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AUTHOR'S NOTES:
This is a standalone piece that also serves as Part 2 from my previous story-of-the-day, published Friday, April 7, 2024, entitled "We Live On In Syndication," story #96.
There are currenly three Vocal creators still participating in the Story-a-Day Challenge:
PLEASE SUPPORT THEM BY READING THEIR DAILY SUBMISSIONS
THIS SUBMISSION:
Word count (excluding notes): 365
Submitted for Saturday, April 6, 2024
2024: A Story-a-Day for the whole year. This one is #97.
All pictures are AI-generated, but the depths of depravity are not!
About the Creator
Gerard DiLeo
Retired, not tired. In Life Phase II: Living and writing from a decommissioned church in Hull, MA. (Phase I was New Orleans and everything that entails. Hippocampus, behave!
https://www.amazon.com/Gerard-DiLeo/e/B00JE6LL2W/
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Comments (3)
Tawdry comedy! Hahahahahahhahahaha that's EXACTLYYYYYYY what this life is! Loved your story!
Well-wrought! "Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" *ahem*
Super powerful imagery! 👏✨ The thought that this is a storm for the dead is intriguing… is it because the dead roam around drowned in the trench? What a horrible fate they had! 💭