Cold Water Burning by John Straley

Author:John Straley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Crime Fiction
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2018-05-14T20:14:16+00:00

9

When I came to, I was floating near the skiff, and there were athletic shoes floating in a calm sea. The sun was shining weakly through a high overcast. I was in a sur­vival suit. I had no memory of putting it on, and my vision seemed intensely sharp, as if my whole life up to that point had been a dream and I was just then waking up.

I dimly remembered the fall and the sharp teeth of the cold water chewing into my body. I remembered thinking that there was something I should be doing as I tumbled over and over through the crush of the foaming wave, and I knew I would get to this important thing just as soon as I stopped falling. I remembered the salt water in my mouth. I remembered the burn of cold water pushing through my nose. I remembered reaching out my hands to grab on to something solid in the world gone to burning water.

But I didn’t remember anything about the athletic shoes that were now bobbing around me on the easy swells. There were hun­dreds of them, maybe thousands, with knobby rubber treads and fat tongues flopped out like open mouths. The horizon was an etched line of blue, and I was inexplicably hot. I pulled the hood off my head. I looked around and saw gulls circling the tangled mess my life had become.

The Amelia floated upside down just three feet from me. A loop of the safety line had tangled around my legs, tethering me to the skiff. I found all of this interesting but I kept staring at the athletic shoes. These were brand-new shoes; some were floating on their soles like little boats. Most were tipped on their sides floating half-full as if they were greedily sucking down sea water. They were black-and-white shoes with a red wedge up the tongue continuing back through the heel. Expensive shoes, I thought, for so many of them to be floating out in the middle of the ocean.

A gull flew close and dove at one of the shoes. I saw a small scoter beating the air with her stubby wings just above the water. As she passed me I could hear a slight squeak with each of her quick wingbeats. Then she was gone over the lip of the next swell.

“Strange,” I said out loud, for no discernible reason other than the strangeness I felt at being alive and being able to see every­thing so clearly for the first time.

I heard the faint buzz of an engine. I splashed the surface around me, turning and leaning back in the water, but I could see only the angry gulls.

The overturned yellow hull floated stern-down, so I could slide up until most of my torso was out of the water. My suit bulged with water at the feet and the heaviness of my body pressed in on my bones. I felt bruising pain everywhere I had feeling. I unzipped the neck of my suit.

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