I took that wind from your sail and pushed it down into a hole in the earth, where it crept farther and farther into stifling darkness.

Where light couldn’t go, the breath of air went, and the darkness was complete as that sigh moved deeper still through the heart of rock and the veins of the world.

The waves were dark and quiet, lapping at the shore. You watched the ocean come in and out in a night and thought all the thoughts you thought you could think.

I was in my world without much care, without much notice of anything outside of myself. I was looking inward, and as I took my next breath, it was like something went through me, a slight shock of recognition.

I couldn’t put my finger on it.

Meanwhile, out on the big ocean was a little boat. The sails and ropes were slack and hanging, and the hull tipped back and forth on a placid sheet of blue. The water, licking the bow, made a quiet slapping sound and over the edge of the little slip a man dangled his arm and hand, tracing patterns into the depths.

He hadn’t been sleeping much. His little transistor radio had run out of batteries the previous week and anyway, there wasn’t much to listen to outside of static and a low rumble of incoherence in some indistinguishable language.

Below the boat, in the cool depths, the man’s patterns danced as light, and the fish rumbled about the glint in their eyes. Even deeper down, in a dark crevice of rock and abyss, a slow bubble ascended, pushing up from the depths. It heaved and groaned its way up through the darkness, up up up past the groaning fish with light in their eyes, and up to the man’s fingers, tracing patterns on the surface of the sea, blub blubbing with a steady force.

With a sudden and unexpected pop, the man snapped to attention at the answer to his thoughts, and sniffed the air.  salt. Tears. Life.

He breathed in the thoughts that had been lingering in the silence, and very slowly felt a wind gathering out behind a bank of dark clouds to the west.

Ed: Bryonie Wise