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The Absolute Possibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living

Short story

By Elaine Ruth WhitePublished 3 years ago 10 min read
1
The Absolute Possibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living
Photo by Max Gotts on Unsplash

The June sun fizzed, then dissolved, as the sea rushed over her face. Suspended for a moment in that sliver of space between exhilaration and anxiety, an unfamiliar thought washed through her mind: ‘This time, will I come back?’

She should not have been going alone. She knew that. So, did the fisherman she’d persuaded to take her. He’d no love of scuba divers that was for sure. More than once, and just for sport, they’d cut the orange-buoyed ropes securing his costly lobster pots, pots he’d never get to retrieve. Sometimes they’d take the buoys to use as surface markers. Or to decorate their gardens. Other times, believing themselves noble saviours, they would release his catch of lobster and crab, making it that much harder for him to put food on the table through the winter months. The one hundred and fifty in cash plus fuel costs she’d offered him ‘righted some wrongs’, he’d said. But she knew from the deepening sun-cuts in his face that despite the wrongs, and the money she offered, his agreement was not totally without conscience.

Breaking back through the surface, as she’d done a thousand times before, she touched the tip of her right index finger to the tip of her thumb and made the familiar ‘okay’ signal to the boatman.

‘Forty minutes’, he warned. ‘Absolute max’.

She signalled ‘okay’ again, gave a ‘thumbs down’ – the signal for descent – then slowly let the air out of her buoyancy jacket, slipping down, leaving only the bubbles of her breath on the surface.

They'd always loved this place.

The cove was sheltered from westerlies – the prevailing wind - and in any case today saw nothing more than a gentle Force Two, meaning no white horses dancing toward the shore. Nevertheless, it didn’t do to forget the cove was perilously close to Shark Reef, with its strong currents and gigantic submerged rocks that had bitten their way into many a ship’s hull. Diving the reef, a badge of honour for many divers, was restricted to slack water, that hour between the ebb and flow of the tide when the sea idled, before roaring back into life. Only a fool would push their luck too far. But it happened. Shark Reef had taken many a life. Sailors. Fishermen. Travellers. The unwise. The unlucky. Local churchyards testified to the tragedies, as well as the courage of the men and women who’d risked their own lives trying to save passengers and crew, like those who now lay cradled together in one grave in the local town, its monumental granite headstone bearing one word: Wrecked.

But none of this was on her mind as, looking down, she gasped through the regulator in her mouth that delivered her life-sustaining compressed air. At this point, the reef, at little more than ten metres depth, and on such a bright day, was bathed in the light. It was just as it had always been, like diving in an aquarium.

Scattered below, littering the craggy, granite rocks visible through tall swaying kelp, and sparkling like jewels in the penetrating sunlight, were round white sea urchins, their shells so much lovelier than when dried out in the baskets outside souvenir shops. And purple snake lock anemones, their sting the reason she always wore the lightweight neoprene gloves, even when the water temperature was a balmy 18C.

Long-legged spider crabs clambered over the sand and silt seabed. Camouflaged cuttlefish scuttled and merged into the kelp. Outlines of flat fish were just visible in the sand beneath which they hid. Tiny velvet swimming crabs danced on their rear legs and waved their claws, daring the world to take them on. Transparent shrimp flitted around the dark mouths of inlets where conger eels lurked. Dog fish darted in and out of the plankton-covered kelp. Silvered mackerel, wrasse, multi-coloured cuckoo fish - so much life …

Her throat tightened.

She checked her air gauge and watch. Six minutes already gone. Releasing more air from her jacket she completed her descent, hovering in neutral buoyancy two metres above the seabed. At this depth it was shallow enough for her air to last a full forty minutes, giving her a safety margin of ten before the sea began to suck back through the reef. Kicking gently with her right fin, she turned her upper body to the left and began to track the familiar route.

Except for the seasons, the terrain here did not change much, not even after a storm. That was something they’d both loved: revisiting familiar territory, knowing which nooks were home to a crab or lobster, which shelves or gullies housed a conger eel. The natural world seemed timeless. Only the wrecks would really change, as the saltwater bit into their twisted metal, sculpting them less over decades. She shook away the memories and began moving slowly, carefully, so her fin tips would not disturb the sand and silt, destroying the visibility. She knew why she was here but for a moment, she wanted to revisit everything they’d seen five years ago on their first dive together. She wanted to recapture the awe, the magic, the whole falling in love with the place. With Sarah.

She knew the route instinctively, knew exactly where she was heading, how long it would take and was focused on navigating her way through the thick kelp, when suddenly, a shadow passed overhead, blocking out the light and startling her. She looked up sharply, her breath quickening, for a moment using her air more rapidly. It was a sun fish! She knew sunfish visited these waters, but she’d never seen one before. Strangely disc-shaped, female sunfish were known to lay more eggs than any other vertebrate in the world - up to 300 million each season – a massive vessel of life. Forgetting everything else for a moment, she turned to follow its strange shape, grasping for the carabiner clip of the camera attached to the D-ring on her buoyancy jacket.

As the sun fish began to disappear, she finned harder, thankful the waters were giving less resistance than they might if she were swimming against an onshore current, but despite her efforts, the sun fish moved out of sight. She felt a sharp pang of disappointment, before instinctively checking her air gauge and watch, which showed she had thirty-two minutes of air left if she had remained at a depth of twelve meters, but her depth gauge indicated she was in deeper water – sixteen metres – and in her pursuit she had moved off track. She cursed lightly but wasn’t concerned. She knew the site well enough, and alongside her air and depth gauges was a reliable compass. The waters at her new depth had grown darker, more turbid, taking on a gloomy grey blue tinge. The outlines of the rocks that had given definition were now much less distinct. There was less colour. Less life. She checked her depth gauge again: eighteen metres now. Her breath came faster, filling her lungs and using air more quickly. With increased depth came increased atmospheric pressure and the neoprene of her suit began to compress, causing the fin on her right foot to loosen and try to break free. She grasped at the strap, pulling it tighter, at the same time hearing Sarah’s voice as clear as if she was there with her.

‘It’s a fin, not a flipper! Flipper’s a dolphin!’

Sarah had continued her mocking Adrienne Rich's choice of words.

‘Diving On The Wreck? I bet the woman never dived in her life!’

‘Diving Into The Wreck’, Megan had retorted, grateful her favourite poet hadn’t committed the ultimate sin and referred to the diving mask as goggles.

It was how they used to fight. With words. It would drive her mad, the way Sarah had fixated on one detail, one notion, one word, then rant, intransigently. Most times Megan switched off to it, but not about that; it was a poem she loved, that meant something to her way beyond the words.

‘I don’t give a shit’, Sarah had continued. ‘How good a metaphor it is, or its place in feminist literature; a fin is a fin, not a flipper!'

It was the same when Sarah got sick: that picking at words:

‘Necrotising fasciitis eats. Leprosy eats. This thing doesn’t EAT. It grows. It spreads. It colonises. It doesn’t fucking EAT’.

That was her way of dealing with things. Get angry. Yell. Fight. But despite the fight, Sarah sank into the cancer, as it grew, and it spread, and it colonised.

Megan blinked away the past as the sea around her became darker and her unplanned descent continued. As depth increased, each lungful of air took more from her tank than she'd allowed for. As she moved downward she felt the weight of the lead around her waist, the tank on her back. Her left hand reached slowly for the inflator valve on her buoyancy jacket that would lift her from the deepening waters, but something stopped her from pressing it. It would be easy to do it now, she thought, so easy. The weight would keep her down. The current would take her deeper, further out; thirty, forty metres. They’d never find her. It would spare them the funeral, the grotesque farce where nothing of a life is truly revealed. Nothing of the person is truly there. It would spare everyone.

Salt water stung her eyes. Instinctively she pressed the heel of her hand to the top rim of her mask and tilted her head, breathing out through her nose to clear her mask of what her training led her to believe was sea water. But it wasn’t the sea that had leaked in. Her vision continued to blur, and she could no longer make out any of her surroundings. There were no shapes and barely any colour.

And then she saw it. Silhouetted against the lighter waters above her. Sleek. Beautiful. And purposeful.

Was it a reef shark? Maybe a blue? Or a juvenile white?

She felt the panic rise.

Her training told her to sink to the ocean floor and stay perfectly still. But that would take her to an unsafe depth. Her breathing came fast and erratic, affecting her buoyancy. The water became lighter as the expanding air in her jacket caused her to ascend several metres. Now parallel to her, the shark looked as if it was moving away, but as she moved into the light, it changed direction, and turned toward her, curious. It began to circle, edging closer with each round. Megan grasped desperately for the deflator valve, fighting every urge to rush unsafely to the surface. But then, just as quickly, the shark lost interest in her, turning to pursue the sunfish. And Meghan started to laugh, laugh so hard she had to hold her air regulator to stop it falling out of her mouth.

'What's the matter with you?' she mocked herself. 'Scared of dying? Isn't that what you came here to do? Or have you suddenly become picky about how you want to go?'

She stabilised her buoyancy and watched as the shark faded into the distance. And a sob broke through her laughter.

'Oh, Sarah, I miss you so much.'

Back on the boat, the fisherman gave her a strange look as he pulled up his anchor.

'Find what you were looking for?' he said.

'Yes,' said Megan, slipping off her fins. 'I think so.'

Short Story
1

About the Creator

Elaine Ruth White

Hi. I'm a writer who believes that nothing is wasted! My words have become poems, plays, short stories and novels. My favourite themes are mental health, art and scuba diving. You can follow me on www.words-like-music, Goodreads and Amazon.

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