By Harper Kingsley

CHAPTER ONE

There’s so much water.

It’s everywhere.

Salty and terrible.

Almost worst than the blazing heat of the sun. The light so bright and encompassing. Burning away his skin one reddened layer at a time until he wondered when he would be left as nothing more than bones.

Floating forever on the ocean. Or withered down and swallowed by the waves.

His mouth was so dry. Surrounded on all sides by water, but so thirsty his lips stuck to his teeth and his tongue felt too big for his mouth.

He was dying. He knew it and couldn’t stop it.

His death was an inevitability at this point. So far from the shore that land was nothing more than a half-remembered dream to his sun burned mind.

This was the end of him.

These were the last moments of his life.

And thinking back… he felt regret for all the time he’d wasted. Enjoying his moments but not treasuring his hours. This was all he had left.

Floating far from shore. So thirsty he couldn’t feel hungry. So hot that all he knew was burning misery.

These were his last moments.

Floating lost. Hopeless. Knowing he wasn’t going to be found.

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It was hot. That’s the first thing Ames realized. The horrible, all-encompassing heat.

Then he recognized the slapping sloshing sound around him: water.

He tried to groan, but his throat hurt too much. When he weakly shifted he lost his balance and slipped off the board he hadn’t realized he was resting on.

He splashed into the water. Gasped. Panicked. Swallowed a mouthful of salty ocean water. Began to drown.

Lights flashed behind his eyes. Or maybe it was the darkness cutting away the light.

He weakly tried to kick his legs, but his body was too exhausted by sunstroke.

He passed out.

And found himself in memory. Back in the hospital where he had so recently died after saying his final farewells to his tearful family and friends.

Everything had had a haziness to it from the painkillers. It had reached the point where there were no longer limits to the amount he was given. He’d held the button in his hand and could control things for himself, a little bit or a lot. It didn’t matter because he was going to die anyway.

He’d pushed the button enough to take the edge off the grinding agony. But he’d held off enough that he could coherently say his goodbyes.

It had hurt to see his mother sobbing against his father’s shoulder. Neither one of them had thought he would die first. Barely 29 years old, but so ravaged by cancer that there was barely anything left of him.

Ames had managed to smile at them. Had spent his last precious moments offering them comfort rather than focusing on the fact that he was really dying.

Some bit of him had felt resentment, but he hadn’t allowed it to show. He wanted his loved ones to remember him the way he was, not like this, wasted away in a hospital bed, full of wires and tubes, piss and shit pumped out of his body through holes cut into his belly near the feeding port that had kept him alive for the last year of his life.

His body had failed him in the worst way.

And when everything ended… It was to the sound of his loved ones weeping and the blare of the heart monitor. Then blackness swallowed him whole.

He wasn’t expecting to ever wake up. Much less on a beach. Naked.

He could tell he was naked by the pain of sunburn covering his entire body. His legs screamed when he tried to move them

His entire body felt as if it were covered by a tight leather suit that was shrinking with every minute that passed. It felt as if too deep of a breath would cause his skin to split.

He couldn’t even groan. His throat was so dry it felt torn in places. He could taste the metallic flavor of blood.

Ames didn’t want to move, with how much it hurt, but he knew he had to. If he didn’t save himself, he would die here.

He didn’t have much strength and he could feel it becoming less as he lay on the sand. The energy was being sucked out of him as the sun baked him alive.

It was agony. Every move he made was like a scalpel peeling off his skin. And below the flesh was screaming nerves.

If he didn’t have the memories of the hospital, of the sickness, of the dying… he might have given up. Might have laid back down in the hopes of passing out and dying in his sleep.

But he’d died once.

And however he’d gotten to this place, he would see what happened next. He was no stranger to pain. He could take this much and more.

He just wished he didn’t have to.

It was the dream–the delusion–of a body that didn’t hurt that kept him moving. Crawling up the beach, away from the water to the tree-line and the desperate hope for shade to bring him some relief.

He crawled. And crawled. And crawled.

And he would have cried if he had tears. But he was so dry, the moisture sweated and baked out of him until it was pure will that kept him moving. Only the fire of his soul kept him alive.

Lights and colors and strange fluttery sensations… He felt like he crawled into madness. The heat and the sunlight blazed upon him. The thirst made every bit of him ache from the surface of his skin to the depths of his teeth.

He thought his gums were bleeding. His throat was raw and torn by the dryness. His bones felt cooked inside him.

He was dying.

The sand, rough and white, was like diamonds cutting away at his skin. Scraping, peeling, digging into him.

And still he kept crawling. The delusion of coolness and relief luring him on.

The agony was proof positive that he was alive. It was a good thing. That’s what he tried to get himself to believe in his lucid moments. In the brief seconds and minutes when he formed actual thoughts and didn’t simply do.

There were stretches of time when he didn’t know why he even bothered. Heartbeat upon heartbeat of time when he had no idea where or when he was, the very concepts of beach and sand and sun made meaningless and unknown by a brain that was frying inside a skull covered by hair and sunburnt scalp.

This was death and dying. A complete transcendence of being.

He was on an impossible endless journey of unmaking, and if he reached the other side he would be reforged into something new.

Or he would unravel completely. And all the bits that made him him would catch fire and melt away, leaving only carbon residue. Unrecognizable and unrecognized, lamented by no one.

He would be like a smear on a water glass: wiped away.

.

Time had no meaning. There was only the distance between him and the shade.

He didn’t even know what he would do when he got there. How he would deal with his raw, burnt flesh. How he would alleviate the terrible and deadly thirst.

All he knew to do was crawl. It was endless forward momentum.

His eyes had gone dim and his ears were filled with a rushing sound that drowned out the sighs of the ocean. His heartbeat was a pendulum. A drumbeat. A vibration through his blood.

He was dying, but he was still alive. For now.

/END CHAPTER