Michael Seidlinger - The Fun We've Had

Its army circled the coffin, enough present to change the direction of the waves.

He could see nothing above and nothing below, nothing near and nothing far, but he didn’t need to:

Nothing had changed. Nothing will change.

Her in his arms and him holding off the onslaught, he cannot bear to see anything change. He turned coffin into warship, imagining the words as weapons as the sharks took turns ramming the coffin. First from the right side and then from the left, the coffin creaked and began to take on seawater.

This water could be seen, a dark murky seawater that stank of decay. He held her with one arm as he fought off the water, small, useless handfuls of water, but he would never let go.

A hero’s fear is that he is really the enemy.

YOU SAVED HER. It was what he wanted to see, needed at this very moment, and what he would have heard, if the soft rains hadn’t entered his ear canal, hadn’t taken his hearing while he paid attention to a more visible enemy.

By the time he noticed the rain, it had burned most of his skin too. He glanced down at her and saw that she was whole, unaffected by the rains.

He believed it was due to his embrace.

A hero is blind to the truth.

The rains continued, steady and localized above their coffin. She watched as he started to waste away, the rain burning him apart, just like they had said. She squinted out into the water, avoiding the fact that the rain had no effect on her. Instead they floated, every memory floated in the water, the onslaught to which would be forever her unraveling.

Why?

It was stupid of her to ask but they gave reply.

Why not?

Admit that it hurts.

She couldn’t admit it. For this to work, admission came after fear and her fear had only begun to really surface.

How fickle then for her to refuse.

The sharks, did you not recognize, are not here to feast on you; the body that you use is not the body that you were. The physical is an offshoot of misunderstanding, of the impossibility that you bother to remain at all.

Ghostly and ghastly, they told her that there was nothing physical about this.

Affection transcends the turn.

Each turn is his or hers to employ.

Timeless, there is only this, this trek.

The rain wasn’t hers to feel the harm. Instead, the sharks ate at every single one of her memories until she saw the fins return to the perimeter of the coffin, circling once more.

This time they swam faster, causing the coffin to spin.

She looked at him, hoping, dearly hoping, that he noticed; when he did, she felt relieved. At least it was still theirs—

This coffin, this casualty. This chaos.

She watched as the ghosts turned their attention to another coffin. Sitting alone in the coffin she saw her mom, arms wrapped fearfully around her knees.

She wasn’t seeing this.

She couldn’t be seeing this.

They made sure that she did. The coffin floated up to theirs and when her mom seemingly noticed her there, she could do nothing but scream a bloodcurdling scream, a scream that burrowed deep into her stomach and forced up the fear.

Reaching out toward her mom’s coffin, he pulled her close, wouldn’t let her go. Her mom saw him, saw him with her, and as fleeting as it was, the coffin that carried her mom close pulled away, the shark fins trailing after.

She could not have both and really she could have neither. Her fear is being alone. The ghosts, her demons, made it clear that her fear wasn’t something implied.

It was something true.

Her fear is real. It is here, part of the pulling apart that would soon be their letting go. No amount of affection could abstain the inevitable acceptance, the fact that she would be alone with her demons. Alone with the ghosts and therefore more alone than loneliness could provide.

Something had come over her. She fought his embrace. She tried to break free, and the hero inside him, meaning the words formed around him on all sides told him HER WEAKNESS IS YOUR STRENGTH. He needed to be strong. Continue to be strong.

For her.

There he kept her close and when she continued to fight his grip, he held her closer until her face became buried in what he had come to realize:

He was still an overweight and naïve man. Middle age in death is the same as middle age in life when the one you hold onto, the one with whom you share an intimate bond beyond explanation.

How he had categorized this as subscript, considered briefly before the constraint to save, to be a hero, to protect, overpowered him. For that brief struggle, he experienced a thought in full, and he nearly let go. He almost did until the sea reacted, as if it had won. The waters froze; its freezing doing nothing for the sharks as their fins shattered through the ice sheet, bringing with it an entirely different kind of downpour.

The rain from above continued to melt away his physical being. He was nearly bone now, and still he was a man that wanted nothing more than to know that he could make a difference.

He tried and continued to try, the effort ultimately would be turned to waste, given how this could only end the way it had already been written to end.

Everyone is capable of a lifetime and nothing more. A poor resistance is still a resistance, one that is fought in frigid temperatures, as the water from above turned to sting.

Jellyfish rained down on the coffin.

For him, the sting of a jellyfish mimicked the rains that had burned him. The jellyfish stung and held on, quickly covering him all over but on his chest where she held onto him.

For her, the jellyfish felt for her flesh too.

They would sting anything they could.

The jellyfish became, for him, a second skin. The coffin crystalized in the water, the shark waited patiently, unaffected by the extreme temperatures, just like the other sharks.

He saw his breath in the air. This could not be good.

The words on the horizon, commands like IT WILL BE OKAY and YOU ARE HER HERO and SHE LOVES YOU froze, became heavier, and fell into shatters on the ice.

Waves had frozen high and low turning into steep inclines that tried to block out his view of the horizon.

One jellyfish landed right on his face and stung his right eye. He cried out in mock-pain, half feeling it and half letting it pass; he managed to dislodge from the jellyfish’s grip but it had already taken half of his sight.

He blinked and blinked some more.

No use. Vision in his right eye faded like the words he wanted to see, commands like HERO and THANK YOU and I LOVE YOU, and even if he could get it back, the soft rains saw to it that it wouldn’t happen.

The soft rains became a steady downpour, rain drops freezing moments before impact.

The darkened sky unnatural and looming closer, pulled in to force them into a crouch, and from a crouching position, it would soon force them to meet the water, meet the depths. The sky became yet another form of deceit.

Her in his arms, they lay in the coffin.

They saw nothing but the sky, the breath in the air.

They forced out breaths as often as possible, using it to communicate with each other.

Thankful because she couldn’t see them, instead she watched the blank sky.

She had reason to tell him what would happen next but instead she let herself enjoy this.

Already she treated it as the final stretch of a protest.

In his breath, he told her, “Don’t be afraid.”

She exhaled and wrote on her breath, “I’m not.”

The moment froze. All they had now were moments, reliving actions and sensations, speech and impulse, that had been unappreciated in life.