Weightless

* Apocalyptic themes of grief and death.

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Water. Everywhere. Nothing but water and debris. Some tree canopies here and there, but otherwise, only the mottled blue-gray aftermath of last week’s storm, mixed with the reddish brown mud stirred up from below after months of ceaseless rain, and set in contrast against the dark gray-blue of the cloudy sky above.

A splintered pine branch floated by, drawn by the current. Or maybe it was oak. Maple? What did it matter? Hooked onto it by a loose thread was a child’s toy. A plush, stuffed shark, by the looks of it, though it was so waterlogged it was impossible to tell. Whatever it was, it bobbed up and down in the waves as if it were drowning, regardless of whether or not it had gills. The cruel, unfeeling tempest didn’t care. It swallowed all alike, all lifeless, one way or another.

The limb caught in a snag of nettles and halted its course, turning perpendicular to its relentless carrier that continued to flow over and around it. No question now: it was definitely a shark clinging to the branch. The telltale dorsal fin protruding from the water’s surface was a dead giveaway.

A pale, trembling hand reached down and rescued the toy from the torrent. A second gingerly untangled the unraveling thread and tossed the stick aside, disappearing into the roiling waves. The man to whom the hands belonged gently wrung the water out of the inanimate creature, as if loathe to hurt it.

He scanned the water around him, craning his raw and sunburnt neck against the soreness that came from lying propped up in the same position for who knows how long. He hadn’t seen another soul in days. A mother desperately paddling upstream, ascending the mountain, looking for her lost child. A young man swimming foolishly but valiantly to find his wife. An elderly man clinging to the uppermost branch of a soon-to-be submerged tree, calling through his mental fog for his daughter, or maybe his granddaughter, or his sister, though he wasn’t sure. He had feebly offered to share his dismal raft, for all the good it would do, but all had refused. All were committed to their respective rescue missions. But all in vain. He had crossed paths with each again on their return journey. Alone. Facedown and motionless. The river, their hearse. Like all the rest.

The man had long since abandoned paddling, with or against the current. He shifted his body on the damp cloth cushioning the stiff door-made-raft underneath him, careful to minimize the pitch and roll of his craft to avoid dipping into the oppressively cold water that bore him ever onward. Beside him lay his meager belongings, nestled in the cloth: a whistle, a baseball glove, two apples plus one half eaten, and now a soggy shark.

Bruce, he decided. That was the shark’s name.

The parting gray clouds overhead did little to comfort him, but at least they had deigned to add no further to the torturous flood for the time being. Even still, the water level refused to recede. It hadn’t in months. Almost as long since he’d seen the stars.

For all recent memory, the whole world seemed to be painted from a palette limited to shades of blue, gray, and brown. No green of any substance to be seen, and if not for the occasional renegade leafy branch, the man wasn’t sure he would even remember what the color green looked like, not to mention the rest of the color spectrum. It had been so long since he had seen a sunset that he no longer dreamed of them for lack of reference material. In fact, some days it seemed that the Painter had used the same mixture for both sky and sea, and the horizon seemed nonexistent as the two blended into one infinite expanse.

If heaven was a paradise above and hell was an inferno below, this desolate, eternal waste in between must be purgatory, though the man saw little distinction between the latter two.

He took a bite of his half-eaten apple. It was soft and bitter, but at least the juice assuaged his dry and burning throat. He took another bite. He froze. Gulped.

Thunder.

No, not thunder. Mercifully, this was something different.

His breath caught. There was something primally familiar about the sound. Roaring. Something ominous. Torrential.

The sound had been growing steadily in his subconscious, but it hadn’t registered to him just how deafening it had become. No, that wasn’t quite right. He had chosen to ignore it. He knew what it meant. Knew that it was inevitable. That the only way forward was down. So he had drowned it out. But it was undeniable now. The time had come.

The man took a deep breath and surrendered to the will of the waves. He rose to his knees and bundled up his findings in the cloth that had once been his son’s favorite security blanket. He hugged it tightly to his emaciated chest. Then suddenly, the makeshift raft fell away from under him and he was weightless.

He wanted to relish these final sensations. He felt the warm, dry wind all around, the tattered remains of his loose clothes whipping around his body. He breathed deeply and smelled pine and petrichor. He listened to the water crashing on the rocks buried in the mist. He heard shouting and laughter, like children at play — or maybe that was his imagination. And tumbling through the air, he saw the whitewater pouring over the ledge he had left behind, mixed with scattered detritus, and endless floods beyond, with the mountain peak barely exposed in the distance. He saw the pale blue sky above. The vibrant green grass below. His son’s beaming face.

Then black.

Laughter. Light. A warm hand on his cheek.

“Dad! Bruce!”

He sat up and wrapped his arms around the boy in his lap, enshrouded in a blanket, saltwater blurring his vision, and a soft stuffed shark squeezed tightly between them.