His Ocean

When he woke up, he found himself looking through the tight translucent glass at the bottom of a soda bottle. Then he looked further and saw the cork stopped in the top and realized that this bottle wasn’t for soda at all, but rather a display case for a model pirate ship with him as the item of attraction instead; and, just like a pirate ship, he was floating. Endless stretches of deep blue ocean surrounded him and blinded him with sharp pinprick reflections of light. He couldn’t see a trace of land anywhere.

The thought of land made him think of home, and then the thought of home made him think of how he got here, which made him realize that he couldn’t remember a thing. He knew he was a man. He knew what a bottle was, what an ocean and the sun looked like. He knew that pirates had existed once; he knew they weren’t remembered for their hospitality. He knew he’d been somewhere else before, somewhere on dry land, with other people all around him—a family, a house, a job, a life. He knew all of that. He just couldn’t remember anyone’s faces, couldn’t recall their names nor his memories with them. Couldn’t recall what job he worked, what home looked like, where in the world his home even was, what happened to take him away from all of that and put him in a bottle in the middle of the ocean.

Then, as if to answer his questions, the bottle tipped.

Its neck suddenly swung downwards and splashed into the water as an invisible chain latched onto it and dragged it below the surface in one quick pull. That same unseen force also wrenched the cork free and before he knew it the bottle was submerging, flooding, sinking.

The water was just reaching his chin when he tucked his legs and arms in and shut his eyes and held a long-drawn breath. He would swim, he thought, he would swim out and give the glass sides a good shove and tilt the bottle upright again, and then he would squeeze through the opening and swim up and breach for air before it sunk too far for him to—

But he couldn’t. Because he was sinking too. He tried to paddle towards the opening but it only seemed to move farther away from him. Then his arms filled with a stinging ache as they swung downwards, and then his legs did the same, all without any will from him. He struggled to gain control of them again, but then he realized with a jolt that it wasn’t that they’d started acting on their own accord as if they were entire beings separate from himself, but it was that something—something that felt eerily similar to the inexplicable force that dragged him and his glass prison into these depths—had latched onto them and yanked them down to take him further and further away from his escape. But then immediately after thinking it he realized just how wrong that thought was as well; as he approached the bottom of the bottle he thought about how the sensation in his arms and legs didn’t really feel so much like an invisible foe wrapping their own hands around his and pulling him down as, when he assessed it once more, it felt like his hands and feet suddenly seemed to turn to bricks. There were no chains, no grips, no outside forces carrying out a vendetta. He was totally alone in the sensation. He was the single factor that led to it. Nobody was dragging him; he was dragging himself. He was sinking, the logical and scientifically-backed action that followed placing an object of considerable weight and density into a body of water.

He sank like the heaviest boulder, and so the bottle sank quicker and began taking on water more rapidly as he became the dead weight that dragged everything with him to the dark deep floor.

He couldn’t hold his breath for very long—he understood that much—but when his lungs finally gave up, his anticipatory panic drifted away, leaving him with only stunned confusion. He felt the ocean entering his mouth, his body, flooding him from the inside out, but it wasn’t killing him—at least, it didn’t feel as though it was. He didn’t feel any pain or discomfort. It wasn’t a terror, but it didn’t calm him either. It invaded him the same way that alcohol invades a lightweight: it dulled his nerves, blurred his vision into a pulsing haze, dragged him down into that place between reality and unreality that at first sent a brief bolt of shock through him but then, just as quickly, numbed him and expelled the bolt back out like it had never been there at all. Soon he could barely place the names to these fleeting things, these things that shrinks called emotions and that the average dumbass called feelings. He didn’t know what to call them, and he could not have cared less. They were just ghosts of something that may or may not have been there at all, he didn’t know, like a series of fading memories warped by déjà vu.

First he couldn’t name feelings. Then he could hardly name shrinks or average dumbasses, bolts and ghosts and bottles and ocean and man. He still had enough of his mind to know that they did have names, but what were they? He couldn’t grasp them. They kept flitting in and out of his fuzzy memory; did this mean they weren’t real? Were they just false truths his mind had fabricated to reassure him that there was some sense in this nonsensical, unreal place? Was he nowhere? Was everything nothing? Of course, he didn’t care. What was caring? What was anything? He didn’t know anything. He couldn’t remember knowing anything. He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t know. He couldn’t.

Everything around him lulled.

And then everything came rushing back.

He opened his eyes with a gasp. Water flooded his lungs and he choked and held his breath as feelings and things and everything flooded his mind again. He could remember and know again. He could name everything around and inside of him: cold, dark, water, wet, bottle, trapped, sunk, bitter, real, fear, terror.

He tried to breathe but the water burned his lungs.

His arms jerked and he began paddling up, down, everywhere that he thought could lead to fresh air. He held his breath and didn’t care about what had happened before, he didn’t care that he was in a bottle that only led him nowhere, he only cared about finding that air and that surface that he knew existed somewhere, he wouldn’t stop even if he paddled until this universe collapsed.

But as he paddled his arms and legs created bubbles; these bubbles floated up beside him as if paddling with him, and he paid them no mind until his hand collided with one of them and a sharp ache traveled up his arm. He stopped his swimming to stare at them as they floated and positioned themselves above his head, growing larger as if someone were pumping them with air like a bicycle tire.

As he wondered how he knew what a bicycle was, the bubbles, now four times their original sizes, lined up above him. The first of them, the one closest to his face, approached him until just a hair’s width away from his nose.

He stared into its surface, as translucent and opaque as the bottle he’d first found himself in. He didn’t try swimming again; as soon as the first bubble had entered his vision, it had seemed to paralyze him to that spot in the water. He couldn’t float, he couldn’t sink. They held him there.

He stared into his own visage, reflected in the bubble’s surface, until it suddenly disappeared in the place of a new image, one that featured three characters: a young boy, an older woman, and something tall and covered in shadow. It appeared to have bulging arms, fingers that ended in pins, eye pits that pulsed and a razor set for teeth.

The name for the thing came as quickly to him as the names for bottle and water: monster.

Then the bubble popped, and the next in the line moved forwards and took its place. Then that bubble popped, and then the next took that one’s place. One by one they pressed up to his face and popped until the entire line had disappeared. They all showed him those same three characters, but with minor differences in the image each time. The sounds of them brought another fuddled memory-nonmemory to the forefront of his mind; an old projector, like one that he must’ve had in his younger years, the kind that displayed full-color slides that always looked like they had a semi-sepia filter pasted onto them, the kind that always clicked whenever they called in the next slide in line into place; *click*, new slide, *click* new slide; *pop*, slide, *pop* slide.

As each image passed by his lungs burned even more.

*pop*

The three standing together.

*pop*

The three standing together, but with their arms wrapped around each other.

*pop*

The three standing with their arms wrapped around each other but also with the monster’s pin fingers digging into the boy and the woman.

*pop*

The boy clinging to the monster’s back, the woman clinging to its hand despite the red that flowed between her own fingers.

*pop*

The monster roaring over the huddled woman and boy; neither seemed to want to touch it anymore.

*pop*

The monster pushing the boy, who sat on a metal contraption attached to two huge wheels; the boy smiling despite himself.

*pop*

The boy’s soft hands pushing and slapping at the monster’s pins as it dug them into his small neck, pushing him into a transparent but tight compartment; bubbles of air expelling from his body.

*pop*

The monster cradling what was left of the boy as the woman looked on, her face contorting with horror.

*pop*

The monster and the woman, cradling both the still boy and each other, even with the monster’s pins dripping red.

*pop*

His fingers twitched with the urge to claw at his throat and swim out of this Hell.

The next group of bubbles came and left rapidly like single frames in an animated feature, starring the main cast sans the young boy:

*pop*

The monster and the woman standing together.

*pop*

The woman staring down the monster.

*pop*

The monster roaring while the woman does the same back at it.

*pop*

The woman wielding a blunt household item as a weapon.

*pop*

The woman striking the monster even with the pins buried in her neck.

*pop*

The monster shoving her in with the boy. Their struggling.

*pop*

A bang.

*pop*

Another bang.

*pop*

Shattered glass. They make a twisted star.

*pop*

*pop*

*pop*

A thick haze of red filling the entire image, blurring the distinct silhouettes of boy, woman, monster.

When he finally realized that the monster was him he was already drowning.