Jonie's Story

Jonie always sensed that there was an immutable energy created by the coexistence of two people, distinct from all others. For Jonie and Eir, theirs was an energy that sagged, bearing the weight of all-too-conscious sadness, which often brought their eyes together in brief painful glances, broken by heaviness. Jonie didn’t know why it felt as if they were always near the point of being scalded by the truth of things. Often they avoided discussing anything too burdensome particularly to maneuver away from its overhanging presence, and instead made jokes about the passersby or their clumsy endearing teachers or Eir’s silly dog who always came bounding by with a slobbered ball in his jaw to pierce through the weariness of their day. Still, though their mutual presence was always overhung by a dreadfully clear and ominous cloud, Jonie and Eir had an inexplicable desire to be as one as often as possible, excepting and occasionally forgoing sleep and meals and studies. They were lucky to not yet be at the age of necessary responsibility. They were unlucky to feel as if the pressure of everything and everyone was on their growing heads. They often liked to sit on the edges of bridges and piers so that their feet might hang loosely and dangle over nothingness, as if the overhead weight could be transferred down their body and dissipated through their liberated toes. Occasionally, Eir would point at distant lights and murky outlines and beg Jonie to make a story explaining their existence. “Oh, all right,” Jonie would say with a half-smile and a sigh, though in fact Jonie loved nothing more than to make meaning out of meaningless things.

“There once lived an old sailor, who jumped into the waters of Timbuktu and surfaced far off in Armantu,” the story describing a particularly reddish blue squibble on the horizon began. Jonie had once heard the name of Timbuktu and shelved it away for later narratorial use.

“Oh! I hope there’s giant seaweed and enormous storms and seahorses in battle!” Eir clapped their hands ecstatically. Jonie lifted their eyebrows and lowered their lids as if they were an old wizened physician gazing down at the jumping child in their care.

“The sailor had swum deep down into the trenches of oceans and seas in search of his old well-worn ship, which had taken him across the most troubled of waters and carried him through the most mystical of days. With it had sunk his most beloved of things: his captain and his crewmates, among which was his daring lily of a lover, on whose neck was strung the most priceless of jewels, a token of affection and dedication meant to last them through their days. The sailor had been off-ship at the time, duly taking leave to recover from a terrible illness from which he continued to suffer pains in his legs and shoulders. He was certain that if he’d been on the boat he might have saved his precious friends, or at the very least drowned with them to fulfill their promises to brave their nights together to the end. He saw countless tentacled, finned, striped, and gilled creatures in his endless plunges across the sea, but never the topmast of The Penguin’s Beak, its likely torn flag like a beacon in bright red and subtle blue encroached by lichens, weeds, and schools of fish.”

“Oh, Jonie, please don’t make the story sad, I was hoping for weightlessness today.” Jonie nodded, mutely, and did not pause.

“Once, when he eventually paused for breath, the sailor recounted the stories of his adventures and of the love he once had shared to a jovial stranger in a quiet inn. But when the jolly stranger asked where his ship and its inhabitants were today, the sailor only managed a grimace and a huddling towards his chest, unable to meet the stranger’s questioning gaze. He was tucked into a corner of the stone wall, knees partially hiding his dripping face. It had been so long since he spoke of all he lost. The stranger knelt gently by his side, with a tissue to clear his eyes, and said, ‘Look, lad, I don’t know where you’ve a need to go, or what you’ve a need to do, but here, here,” he left the tissue folded in the sailor’s lap and a gentle kiss atop his head. When the sailor woke, after a peaceful sleep of unburdened tears, he found the tissue fallen beside him, and inside it twenty thousand dollars and not even a note with the stranger’s name.

“He didn’t know what to do. After a morning in stupefied mechanical life, he managed to make it outside and into the dazzling light of an autumn’s day. The wind nudged his scraggly face as if to say, ‘Good morning, welcome to the world, my long lost son’, and the sailor allowed it to sweep him off his feet and over to the unmarked door of a studious merchant squid. The squid glanced over his spectacles at the bedraggled man, sparkling with bubbly confused childish hope, and asked him what matters brought him there today, and the sailor told him, confidently, he was here to hire the gracious squid for his help in the search of a ship. ‘Yet another shipwrecked sailor I suppose’, the squid sighed internally and used one tentacle to place a strip of bark between the pages of his open book, another to pick up a quill, and a third to lay flat a piece of paper on which he wrote: Ship Search - 1,000 dollars per day, plus sustenance and lodgings as needed. The sailor nodded once and the deal was made.

“On the 18th day, with all but a thousand and seven dollars remaining to his name, the sailor went to sleep in restless anxious fitful bursts. The next day, the squid set off, with the sailor dragged behind wrapped in a tentacle hug, and they swam to the last sea he had yet to search. As the sunlight’s warmth disappeared, the squid searched stolidly on, and the sailor, cold and limp, watched the fast-moving scenery below his sequestered body with an unfocused stare. Until, a penguin’s leap away, he saw a glimmering rainbow of light emanating from a sandy depth, and he cried out to the squid, ‘Ho! Stop!’, and the squid lowered them to the mountainous pressure of the ocean floor. The sailor crawled—tired, muddy, covered in kelp— through the torturous pain of weight above him, around him, inside him. He extended a hand to graze the smooth glass ring of stones, and found above it the skeletoned head of his lover’s once-bearded lovely face. The ocean’s salty waters, pressing as it was, didn’t allow the sailor’s tears to take visible shape, but his hand clutched onto the jewels, and all the memories it held in its now-cold veneer, and he allowed himself to sink, and sink, and sink below the sand. The squid shook himself once, gingerly wrapped a tentacle around a grazing eel for lunch, and shot back towards his home to open again his unfinished book.

“And the sailor awoke. There was tarnished wood beneath his feet, the motherly wind was stripping across his face, saltwater and foam spraying across his chest, and his hands were wrapped around the neck of his beloved, his captain at his side, his crewmates busily hoisting ropes behind. And he turned his face upward, letting his phantom gaze fall on the red penguin emblazoned across a blue field, far up where the topmast met the sky, and he closed his eyes, and breathed.”

Jonie sat, silent, feet dangling over eternity, and Eir looked up from his little black notebook, where they always wrote down Jonie’s stories, and together they watched the red and the blue ghostly light fading far away, and together they accepted the whole of the ocean above their heads, and together they drifted purposely, never-lost beneath its weight.