The Last Ten Minutes of Her Life

Drowning can happen in as little as twenty to sixty seconds.

Unconsciousness happens when there is no oxygen for under two minutes.

Within four to six minutes, the brain, heart, and lungs reach a state beyond what can be revived.

Ten minutes without oxygen causes severe, lasting brain damage, with a coma almost certain.

Drowning feels like an intense pain and burning in the chest, with this panic that burns and bubbles over before being slapped with an intense calm and becoming nothing at all. Welcomed by blackness rather than eigengrau.

Marissa was certain that she was going to die out here.

Her hair fanned out under her in the roaring waves of the water, looking like blood exploding into plumes beneath its surface. She could taste the alcohol on her breath, the bitter champagne bubbling and churning in her belly. Her stomach was twisting in on itself. Her heart was in her head, slamming against her skull and sounding like a drum. Ocean waves surrounded her and the cloth of her blinding white reception dress; her wedding ring had slipped off and fallen somewhere into the depths. The storm was swirling overhead, watercolor clouds becoming pregnant with the heavy rain and threatening to shoot her. She kept taking in short, panicked breaths, her hyperventilating falling on the deaf ears of the ocean.

A wave arched up, lifting its hands above her head, and then slammed down, attempting to crush her like a bug underneath its palm. She went under the ocean, her hair and dress swirling around her as if she were in zero gravity. Marissa reached up with her hands, grasping wildly at the ocean waves, trying to pull herself up with something solid. This time, maybe wood or rock or something might manifest; an oasis in the middle of the desert, rewarding her with nothing but bloodied feet. The seafoam made the image of beer flash into her head, her husband’s drink sitting next to her as he disappeared off to the bathroom, right before she got up to follow him on the cruise ship. 

She tried to kick upwards and swim to the light of heaven. Her knees drew toward her chest instead, something primal swirling, and she could feel her entire body turn into stiff, inflexible wood, her heart dropping to the tips of her toes. She inhaled water with a gasp. It filled her, dipped into the crevices of her lungs, and through the tunnels that made up her nose. She couldn’t even consider the taste of the salt and how it tasted like over-salted chicken before she started flailing in a blind panic, bubbles and foam curling around her head like a halo. Her dress was cement attached to her feet, and she felt herself sinking deeper into the black.

Her feet were getting tangled in the heaven-white silk cloth, like how it was supposed to be tangled in sheets, and she felt her head touch the crisp air of reality before being shoved back down by the ocean’s hands again. The ocean was trying to grab at her hair, her feet, and she was sinking. The water swirled around her ankles, and it started to caress her nerves; an unwanted touch that was caressing her body, and everything in her body screamed away. She kicked out on instinct, a toddler throwing a temper tantrum due to the slightest bit of touch.

She managed to get herself up, mostly. Her mouth kept dipping below the water, the ocean telling her to be a good girl and drink. She was coughing, flailing.

How many minutes had it been? Marissa’s mind was a broken stopwatch.

Her lungs were escalating into this white-hot, branding burn; they were starting to feel too small behind the confines of her ribs. She could swear she heard the sloshing of water in her lungs. Champagne came burning up her throat, and chunks of salted chicken and alcohol came out of her mouth. A toddler spitting up old food, liquid and spit-up running down her chin and lingering there in chunks, and running down into the V-shaped neckline of her dress.

Another wave tried to push her, a bully in a middle school hallway, putting its hands on her back and pushing her.

The ocean laughs, mockingly, making fun of her for how much of a mess she was. How pathetic. Black spots started to flicker around the corners of her vision, her lungs starting to explode into a supernova. Pale hands started to flail again, fingers brushing against the rock-hard water and blending together with the sea foam. The water was the color of dying hyacinth, mixed with oil-spill void.

Panic was swallowing everything else.

Marrisa’s thoughts stopped becoming thoughts and started to become fragments; shards of a shattered mirror where she could only catch glimpses of herself in the silver. Up, down, left, up, up. Swim up. For just a brief moment, a thought pierced into her mind, crashed like the waves above her head.

I’m a pathetic rabid dog.

Her chest seized. Her hands went numb and then violently trembled. She held her head above the water. Barely. Her breath came in tiny, useless pieces, each one chased by the certainty that the next breath wouldn’t come. She knew that panic was making everything worse, but knowing didn’t help.

The water wasn’t water anymore; It was the spiders that were crawling over her vision, it was the blood that coated her legs, it was the rotting flesh that she was scared was starting to leak away from the corner of her nails. It was above her, beneath her, around her. Her body was sinking again, dress-made chains wrapped around her hand that her husband grabbed and yanked and tossed. Tossed haphazardly as though she were a dog being left to survive past the eye of a hurricane.

The ocean became a lid, and she was trapped in the large soup container, unable to touch the sides or the bottom. She wished she were Houdini. She felt like one of those fake mermaids tapping the glass, except instead of blowing bubbles in the shapes of hearts, she was pierced by a harpoon.

Mermaids did not have immortal souls, and once they became wedding dress seafoam, they never lived again.

The ocean wouldn’t let her stand: “This is so silly, Marissa, a little girl who doesn’t know how to swim?” She sank further. It laughed at her again.

The salt was stinging her eyes, burning into her retinas like a police flashlight. If she looked down, would she see the cuts on her hand glow due to the singing of salt?

Up. She chants, almost in a prayer. Up.

For another blissful second, she broke up into the air. She was grateful that she broke the surface pressure, that the ocean didn’t try to trap her underneath in a fish lens bubble. Air filled her lungs and lingered with the water, and she could taste salt and fish on her tongue, for just a moment. The water folded her back in, a boot against her back, slamming her back into the ground. The world became a green-black and a roaring thunder.

Her hands moved, like she was at a concert, a celebration. But her legs stopped moving, a numbness settling in around the knees. The dress twisted around her legs again, and she kicked harder, but there was no rhythm to it anymore. The ocean was punishing her by putting her in time out. The light was everywhere and nowhere, splintering apart when it hit the surface of the waves, echoing around her like a prism.

Her chest was giving a demand for air.

The light above her blurred into an overexposed photograph.

She went to take in another breath, to try and erase the marathon runner feeling, and more water seeped into her lungs. She imagined pockets of air there, filling all the way again, and she tried to wheeze everything out, but it was no use. The world became tilting vertigo, images moving on top of each other, on top of each other, on top of each other, cascading down into a pile at her feet. The light started to turn into bleeding acrylic paint, the fumes stinging her eyes.

Her chest squeezed. Something was binding her chest together, wrapping around her tightly. Maybe it was made of saran wrap. She started clawing at her chest, meeting only the bare skin between her breasts, and she started to claw at it, maybe trying to peel everything out. The water wouldn’t let her get enough friction, so her nails just felt like the gentle bap of a playful cat’s paw.

The ocean sat down across from her, a seaweed-haired thing with blacker-than-black skin. “It’s okay,” the ocean said. “You can rest now.” And the vision shifted, turning into a blanket made of the softest Chinese silk. Marissa closed her eyes.

The ocean put her to bed.

The water settled over her, a comfortable weight rather than something trying to sink her. It prickled, moved over her with a soft rolling feeling.

Cold silk pressed into her back.

The sheets were wet. They clung to her skin, cold from sweat, and she could feel her husband’s breathing making the bed rise and fall. Marcus was lying next to her, doomscrolling on his phone. The walls were painted a light yellow, and she sat up slowly. The world was a storm outside, black-green clouds and the light peeking through the visions of rain. The light at her feet coming from the window seemed to swirl. The images of a dream overlapped with the images of reality. But what was dream, and what was reality, anyway? She slipped on her slippers; everything settled smoothly on her feet, and it felt soft, like a nice blanket. Marissa walked over to the bathroom. There was the fissure in the mirror that she had always known, broken there by a mover. With a ringless hand, she reached for her hairbrush, tucked behind the faucet.

She noticed the silence. The faucet was dripping, but not making noise.

Her hearing sounded muffled, and aloud she said: “Hello?” One of her ears was deafened, as though she was using an air nozzle and drowning out the noise of everything. She frowned; this happened a lot when she had colds. Her sinuses would get infected, and suddenly she couldn’t hear out of one ear. It was acting like it needed to pop.

She started to tug the brush through her hair. There was a slight ripping noise as she yanked at every single knot, and eventually it came back straight.

She shuffled to the kitchen, her slippers scratching across the wooden floors.

There it was! Her coffee cup, with the chip on the corner of the handle and everything. The granite countertops were sparkling and spotless. The sink was empty. Even with the gloom outside, everything felt like it was gleaming. Marcus must have already made coffee.

She couldn’t smell it, but she poured herself a cup anyway, right into the chipped white cup with stains at the sides. She took a sip. It felt hot, piercing at her lungs and warming the inside of her stomach with a brand hot heat. She couldn’t taste it, though.

Marissa really must have been coming down with something. She tried to breathe through her nose, and it didn’t feel stuffy, but she didn’t think she was getting oxygen into her lungs either. She opened her mouth and took another sip of coffee. She could feel the liquid go down her throat, could feel the heat of it. The liquid was black, just as black as the ocean in her dream. She laughed a little, dryly.

She couldn’t let this haunt her the rest of the day; she had work to do.

She nudged open the fridge and grabbed the peppermint creamer that she saved for special occasions (since it only came around at Christmas), and she poured it into the coffee. It exploded, looking like the frills of a cupcake dress. Glimpses of white cloth existing in the darkness.

Her husband, Marcus, stumbled out of their bedroom.

“I had the weirdest dream last night,” Marissa started, taking another sip of coffee and feeling the burn go down her throat. The creamer helped a little, a soothing balm. “I dreamt that it was our wedding night, on that cruise ship, and you had pushed me into the water to let me drown.”

Marcus laughs, dryly. Short and curt and brief. And she almost didn’t catch it because of the muffled sound in her ears. “Interesting.”

“You know, if Freud were looking at it, he would say something about my subconscious thinking that you want to kill me, or that you secretly hate me, or maybe that dream means I want to fuck you really, really bad. Maybe I have a kink for being drowned. Wouldn’t that be ironic? Anyways, I’m not really hungry.”

Marcus laughs again, brighter this time, sounding like the ringing of church bells: “That sounds like a treat, and yeah, ironic, you refuse to even touch water. What do you want for breakfast? You’re going to eat; sounds like you had a rough night.” His voice is smooth and deep, like the bottom of the ocean, calm and rolling. Marissa remembered that this was one of the reasons she fell for him. He had just such a sexy voice.

“I mean, water is supposed to represent the unconscious, right?” she said. “So maybe being thrown into the ocean means I’m being forced into some horrible part of myself that I don’t want to look at.”

Marcus only repeated himself: “What do you want for breakfast?”

“And the wedding dress is probably symbolic too. Death of the old self. Fear of marriage. Fear of adulthood. Fear of you.” She smiled at him. “Take your pick.”

He kept staring, his eyes unblinking.

Marissa’s smile faltered. “What?”

“I really hate it when you ignore me.”

“I wasn’t ignoring you; I gave you the answer to my question. I’m not hungry.”

“I don’t really care.”

She huffs, downing half of her coffee, wanting it to burn like whiskey on the way down.

He softens, just a little. The wrinkles ironed out of his voice, and it was back to being smooth. “Baby, you’re going to have to eat eventually.”

“And I said,” she tries to force some play into her voice, “That I’m not really hungry-- I think I’m coming down with something, and it’s not just my burning need for you.”

He steps in front of her to block her exit to the kitchen. “If I say eat, you’re going to eat.”

“Marcus.” She laughs. “Move.”

He doesn’t.

Marissa looks in the negative space between him and the counter, and he tries to slip out between

He grabs her by the arm and pulls her back. It didn’t hurt, but he was squeezing hard enough that it made his point clear.

“Let go of me.”

“When you stop being utterly ridiculous, I will.”

She tries again, tries again to be placating: “Can you fix the faucet?”

“What?”

“The faucet, it’s dripping; I couldn’t hear the water, though.”

“You said your ear was bothering you?”

“Yeah.”

“Then that’s why.”

She frowned slightly. She knew that was why, but she wanted him to fix the faucet. They both looked at the kitchen sink, the inside of it spotless. It was dripping, hitting the metal and starting to pool, and then leaked over and down into the drain. A droplet gathered around the metal spout-- it was rusted at the end; she probably needed to stick a bag of vinegar on it. It swelled, trembled, and then fell again, hitting the inner metal of the sink.

They were going to wash their babies in this sink someday, which meant he needed to get it fixed.

“You really can’t hear that?”

“Not particularly, no.”

There was something strange about the silence, as though the entire world had been wrapped in several layers of thick fabric. Marcus came and pressed himself into her. She could feel his breathing against her back, a steady rise and fall, like the steady rise and fall of rolling waves hitting a beach. She was his oasis.

“It’s okay, you can rest now,” Marcus says.

“But I just got up.”

He sighs, exasperated, and she can feel the death rattle breathing rattle against her back. “You always do this; you always make everything more difficult. You know I’m just trying to take care of you, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you really need to stop fighting me.”

The kitchen light above her head became a pale smear, spreading like light through water. She felt her eyes close again.

She floated there, suspended in the water, mouth agape. She looked like a preserved jellyfish floating in filthy liquid, her skin veiny and blue, her hair swirling up above her head like rotting black tentacles. Her eyes had crept open, a dead-fish-eyed look. The ocean continued to exist around her, stepping around her corpse as though it had always been there to begin with.

Soon, she was going to get bloated and float back up to the surface like she was sprawled across her bed.

Maybe she’ll sink back down, eventually, freezing waters leaving her suspended indefinitely.

But for right now, she floated there, preserved in her final moments.

The ocean seemed almost quiet; was it contemplating its sins? Or was it doing what it was born to do?

Marissa never thought to take off the dress.