Submerge
SPRING
Raindrops pattered his face but he barely felt it. The cardboard box in his hands was soaked, the yielding mush of its content's weight pushed into his palm like wet sand. The dog-shaped paperweight looked like it was crying.
His eyes were far away, sad, longing. It was not his boss' fault, he knew, not his fault that the company was hitting a rough patch, not his fault that they had decided to let some of their own go. Yet a bitter part of himself, deep down, kept asking "Why me? Why not someone else?". Still he suppressed that anger, pushed it down, buried it under determination. This was far from hopeless, only another bump in the road. He would recover.
The drizzle felt more like mist than rain, a veil of condensation that drenched every inch of everything he was. His shoes splashed through dirty puddles of the half-flooded street toward his car, the water lapping against his ankles like ocean's waves on low tide, encircling, tugging. Rising.
SUMMER
A light touch on his hair jerked his head up from the hospital bed. Raising his gaze, a tired but relieved smile coloured his lips.
"Hey, dad."
His father's skin was deadly pale, his eyes sunken and his cheeks hollow. The starkly white hospital light overhead threw mournful shadows over his features.
He tried to smile, but one side of his face didn't seem to respond and he paused momentarily in puzzlement.
"You've been here all night?" His father's voice came out in a croaked breathless whisper, and the mere act of speaking seemed to drain him, slumping his shoulders and drooping his barely opened eyelids.
"No, dad, I just got here." He lied. His eyes glistened and he wiped at them as if trying to rub the sleep off. Gently he squeezed his father's hand and the old man squeezed back, his grip barely detectable, weak as a child. The smell of disinfectant was overwhelming, hanging in the air like a palpable sheen. He had always hated hospitals. They felt like death and sickness masked under frigid indifference.
"Glad you're here kiddo..." His father's words trailed off into silence and his eyes fluttered close. He was asleep in a moment, an uneasy, labouring slumber.
"Get some rest dad." Pulling the blanket tight around his father and brushing a tender kiss to his head, he exited the room and closed the door softly behind him.
His knees felt weak and heavy, the world dragging his every step. As if he was treading through waist high water, the current violent and merciless. As if his life was flooding.
FALL
The door slammed shut with a resounding crash, cutting off his last glimpse of her. Faintly, the clicking of heels and the swishing of suitcase retreated further away until they were swallowed by the white noise of the outside world, the sporadic rumbling of cars, the constant humming of everyday lives, and the sharp keening of distracted grief. This city had just devoured another part of him.
She knew, she had to know that he had no choice but to sell his home, their home. She knew, and she left anyway. Perhaps knowing wasn't understanding for her.
It was for him. He understood why she had to go, why it was for the best. His father was dying, and she would live, perhaps even better without him.
His heart broke all the same, into a hundred thousand fragments that were quickly washed away by the waves that battered against his chest, its powerful force chipping away his hope piece by piece.
WINTER
His face grew pale, bloodless, as colourless as the white-knuckled grip of his hands trying to stop their shaking. The chair underneath him felt weightless, light as a feather. Or perhaps that was just his head spinning.
"And there's nothing you can do?" An overpowering mass choked his throat, his words barely forced through the sea of dread. He found himself unable to breathe, or move, or avert his eyes from the doctor's resigned, sad expression.
"Well, there is a program we can put him through, it's only on the first few experimental stages, and it's very costly..."
"I'll take that."
"Sir, I think you should at least take time to consider your options. Right now surgery is still your best chance financially..."
"Not medically?" His voice was not accusing, only resignedly bitter. He knew the answer in his heart without even needing to read it on the doctor's face.
The air felt stuffy, smotheringly still, like a crushing weight blanketing every inch of his being. The sensasion of snakes slithering across his body, revolting, constricting, sickeningly wretched. He thought he would scream, he thought he did. The deafening silence of desperation devoured the very possibility of such vocal relief.
"I'll manage something."
"Mr. S..."
"I'll manage!" He said with a forceful confidence he didn't feel.
The chains around his ankles dragged him down, down, down into the darkness. He could barely move, barely able to fight his way to the surface to get a breath. The water was suffocating him, choking his hope, drowning his light. Around him predators circled.
SPRING
A shimmering veil hung in the air, the sun's wrathful gaze seemed to warp reality itself into a distorted mirror through which the heavy streets of this desolated city glowed incandescently a light of malformed pleasure and a child's innocent destructive glee.
He hated it, this city that gave him meaning only to strip them away one by one like tearing flesh off bones. For all its cloudless brilliance of day, its underbelly nurtured blood sucking worms that revelled in eternal gloom where their feeding was masked under garrulous glamour.
The neon sign seemed to mock him, sneering its vicious mirth and perforating sadism of a beast that devoured souls for breakfast. He would be the breakfast today, he knew. And willingly offered.
There were other choices, but the water whispered to him its mellifluous siren song of the soothing dark, and the necessity of the gamble. He only had time to inhale one last lungfull before the door opened and he stepped inside, plunging into the depth.
SUMMER
Blood dribbled down his numb lips and splattered on the dirty warehouse floor, a crimson rose in a sea of lifeless bones.
"I promise I will have your money by next Thursd..." The heavy thud of hardened wood hitting flesh cut off his whimpering voice. An ashen-coloured mass blinded his right eye, his left caked by a pus-like mixture of tears and leaking wounds.
"You promised you will have our money by today." Another swing connected with his jaw with a resounding crack, shattering teeth and breaking bones. A choked whine burst through his split lips, full of agony and terror.
"You say next Thursday. We believe you. In fact, we believe you so much that we'll leave you a token of our trust." They enjoyed watching his lit up hope crumbled into fear and defeat, then proceeded to beat it out of him twice over.
He felt each impact, every single cut, bruise, snap. He felt his body tore apart by predators of the depth, savouring their feast. His lifeblood painted horror itself onto the canvass of the sea as they dragged him down, down, down.
FALL
His mournful cry cut through the graveyard, a keening wail of hopelessness and absolute desperation. Icy tears fell all around him, playing a cacophony of scorn and contempt on the thin veil above his head in time with the explosions of blinding vision and deafening buzz reverberating through his head.
His father looked peaceful when they lowered him down. The downpour drenched the earth blackened, pieces of it crumbling in his hand like wet sand. He missed that dog-shaped paperweight. Where had he put it? Soft hands brushing his shoulder felt like affirmations of his failure, unspoken verdicts that damned his existence to darkened pits of despondency and helplessness.
He could see no hope, no light. The surface was so, so far away, merely an impression rather than sight. Raindrops shattered against the pavement, tap, tap, tap, like the sound of popping air bubbles escaping his lips.
WINTER
Sinking the knife into the loan shark's torso was effortlessly easy. Simple motions, in, out, in, out, smooth as making love.
His face felt alien, his features twisted into a vicious and inhuman expression he could not recognize. The others must not have recognized it too, because the tugging and yanking hands that were trying to pull him away from their boss suddenly slackened and recoiled.
With each thrust a strange sensation blossomed in his heart, intensifying with each stab. In, out, in, out. The blood soaked through his clothes and hair, a blanket of forfeited life. The climax of pleasure jolted across his body, intoxicatingly in its familiarity. The heavy scarlet invigorated him, as if the dead body was the suffocating ocean that drowned everything he loved.
Stab. The choking mass lessened.
Stab. A popping boom resounded in his head of relieved tension.
Stab. With a gasp air flooded his body, muddied, weighty and labouring, but air nonetheless, infusing him with vitality.
The countless cuts on his body were liberating in their agony, as if he was breathing through the cracks, as if they were carved gills. His blood and the body's pooled around his kneeling feet and coated every inch of his soul, and he revelled in the rancid foulness of its smell, letting it saturate his desire. A shark's maddened hunger perforated his own.
SPRING
The bullet hole in his chest felt strangely numb, inconsequential. He had thought his father would be on his mind, but he wasn't. Nothing was.
Hunters cornered him with their harpoons of compacted lead and their glaring red blue light invading his bloodfilled water, and impaled him. Slowly they pulled on the wire and dragged his tainted life out of the depth.
A tunnel of bright white light blinded his sight, overwhelming, terrifying, and in a hard tug he was through, breaking the surface. Air, pure, clean, real. The air of hope he had longed for, yearned, craved. But it was another time, the other side of the point of no return.
For a shark, the open sky was only death.