In 20 Words or Less

My friend Matt Higbee and I have a writing game we play at work sometimes where we use a random prompt (it's an improv theater, so there's a lot of those) to try and write a story in 20 words or less. It started because I wanted to put together a new piece to read at Two With Water's Rx Reading Series. I was going to be traveling most of the week leading up to the reading and I wanted to get something started before I left. The theme of the reading was "Orientation."

We didn't discuss what we were doing,
but came up with strikingly similar 20-word stories:

Mine: "It always sounds like, but is never actually, a ship. Only waves lapping endlessly against the side of the boat."

Matt's: "Fins circle. Waves lap our cheeks. Inexperience made fools of Sal and I today. So goes day one as Seamen."

Uncanny, right??

I ended up expanding my 20 words into a longer piece for the reading. Here it is:

"On cloudless nights sometimes the surface glitters almost as bright as daytime, but it's still a little easier to sleep even though it's so much colder. The problem isn't really the brightness or the temperature, though, it's that at night you can never tell how long you've been asleep for, and not knowing jolts you awake over and over, and every time it feels like falling, but up, out of the water, rocketing backwards until your back hits the floor of the boat and it starts spinning around and around like on an axis until you sit up, clamping your hands down on either side of the boat, squinting until you can make out the faint line in the distance separating the sky from the water.

Once you know which way is up again you can usually drop back off to sleep, but it never feels like more than a few seconds before you're falling up and out again, the ball of sky and its wavery reflection spinning around you again until your eyes can fix onto the line again and pull you out again.

When there are clouds at night the line disappears completely and so does everything else, and you have no way to tell if you're asleep or awake at all. You squint at what you know is your fingers brushing the salt-caked notches you used to cut into the side of the boat to keep count before not knowing how long it had been became so much easier than fighting . . . you feel yourself moving your fingers, your wrists, but you still can't see anything. You move your face closer, trying to see, jumping back with a start when your nose suddenly touches the back of your hand . . .

You bring your fingertips up to what you're sure will be your closed eyelids, wincing when you feel the sting of salt on your eyeballs instead.

Now that your eyes are watering you can feel them opening and closing, and you still can't see anything, and then you really start spinning. you clamp your hands down on the edge of the boat and try to sit without moving at all except for short shallow breaths but you're still sure you feel yourself tipping, tipping, about to roll over and slip into the water.

In the blackness all you hear is a roar that gets louder and louder, and you think it may be the blood pounding in the veins in your ears or it may be the water lapping at the side of the boat, with no rhythm, echoing through the silence that fills your ears like water and you think maybe you already tipped over so slowly and quietly you didn't notice you were slipping into the water and sinking. you wonder if you should try then to hold your breath but always eventually inhale and realize you're still above water, in the boat.

After a few cloudless nights in a row the deafening indeterminate roar stays with you even during the day. At first you think it sounds like a ship but of course it never actually is, and you try to pick out the sound of the water lapping endlessly at the side of the boat, to have a reference point, but it always gets lost again. At night in the blackness you lay in the bottom of the boat imagining dark ships slipping silently by, drowned out by the roar in your ears, maybe even so close you could stretch out your arm and touch them if you could see them in the blind dark, if they could see you.

But then, when you see that real ship one night, off in the distance lit up like the Fourth of July, you know you'd know if they ever got right next to you. It's too far away to be able to hear the engines but the lights are so bright you have to squint and their reflection on the surface glitters almost as bright as day time, rippling towards you so that it seems like you can almost touch it, and if you can almost touch the reflection then you must be getting closer to the ship as you paddle towards it frantic and gasping until you pass out dry heaving and when you wake up, you can't see it anymore. You fix your eyes on the pink glow just starting to come up over the horizon, and wait for the boat to stop spinning."

I might workshop it, submit it somewhere, add images and turn it into another issue of Bloop?