Swim (A Short Story)

“Swim, swim. There are boats bound for home and if we swim we can catch them, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Though we are largely forgotten here, though our geography confounds outsiders and betrays interlopers, we are still swimmers. We are still capable of clutching onto boats, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Swim, swim, swim, is what we must do. Until the boats bound for our strange and wonderful habitat make themselves known, their gurgles heard and their swish-sways swished. Until the resiliency of our kind keeps us afloat just long enough to take charge of this dishonorable situation we have found ourselves in, many meters from home, hungry, with thin blood and broken spirits, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Swim, like our birth mothers taught us, gurgle, gurgle, swish, flap, flip, yes?”

“Yes.”

“And dawn will arrive and the sun, regal and all-knowing, will show us the way and lead us to the promises yet to be broken, the dream lands yet to be navigated, navigations yet to be recorded in spiral seaman notebooks with black covers and bent wire, penmanship barely legible, all faded grids and dirty sketches made by bored hands with filthy fingers, yes?”

“Yes.”

“And heroes we will be, heroes bound by a moral code and a sense of duty unseen in the shackled world of the compromised, unrecognizable to those without books of the past, when souls like us trod the earth and sailed the seas without fail because it was our job damn it and not a crass display of self-sacrifice!”

“...”

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

“And...and...swim, swim, all we can do is swim, until we... swim, swim, swim some more, with grace, not flailing, living, not dying. It’s hard to do, it’s difficult to imagine going on, it is, I know. But we do what we have to do, goes the song, we do what we have to do, even if what we have to do is nearly downright impossible, but not completely downright impossible just nearly so and I’m getting achy and tired and I think I’m going deaf from the noise of this ocean, its swells and sways and swishes and swarms and fishes and plant life and seaweed smacking my head. Though I know that once we’re hungry we can eat the seaweed and it can sustain us for a good day, one complete set of its floppy leaves and husky tusks, it’s still getting to me, the goddamn seaweed, yes?”

“Yes.”

“And I hope to see my mother again, the one who taught me to swim, my birth mother that is, with her sullen gait and broken spirit, her wandering eyes when we went to the grocery store for cheese and bread and paper goods, staring a hole into the eyes of the others there, a gracious hole, not a burrowing one, a curious hole, not a harsh one. She was lonely, I know. She rarely laughed, my birth mother rarely laughed. But she taught me how to do this. She taught me all the strokes – the butterfly, the freestyle, the backstroke, the flailing dog, the drowning child, the runaway mother, the breast stroke, and did I say the butterfly? Yes I did. The butterfly. My mother, I mean my birth mother, trained me to be as graceful as a swan, though I was a boy and not a girl. She taught me how to float like a yellow butterfly. Or a red and orange one, I don’t know. But still, here on the drowning sea, I choose to freestyle. Because I find it more efficient. And when the sun rises and we are more tired and we are more hungry and the seaweed is not within reach, perhaps then I will do the inefficient butterfly, drowning for my mother’s wishes, I mean my birth mother’s wishes, dying gracefully, perhaps then I will do the butterfly, no?”

“No.”

“You’re right. We’ll see the boats before then. We sure haven’t seen them yet. Swim, swim, cough, swim. It sure is quiet. Except for the sounds of the ocean. It sounds like nothing out here, I’m tired, I’m achy. But I shall keep going. I shall bound forthrightly into the darkest night. I shall slay every doubting inch of me and massage every confident foot of me. I apologize for speaking awkwardly. It’s all I can do. And when the boats come and the ambulances meet us on shore and we are driven to the hospital in the special entitled way that ambulances drive those in need, I will wave to those we pass. I will give the polite little thank-you wave that drivers give when another driver does something nice like let one switch lanes in front of him or her. Though the ambulance will most likely not have windows, what can I do but wave? Someone might have x-ray vision. God, if there is one, may be watching. The Emergency Medical Technicians will surely be there and they can tell their grandchildren that a dying man waved through steel on his way to heaven. Yes!?”

“Yes.”

“Swim and allow the ocean’s crests and crushes and cracks to complete us, in a lustful way. Yes, lustful. If I think this way, I can go on forever, yes?”

“Yes!”

“And perhaps when the sun comes we’ll see a distant shore, with not a boat or ship in sight for miles to the left, miles to the right, miles leeward and port and starboard and fore and aft or whatever men of the sea say when they’re drunk on their own lack of culture, I don’t know anything, I really don’t. But what if we see land first, land only, land cruel, land crass, but land blessed land, saving us from our own tragic introduction to the afterlife, if there is one anyway? What if we see a craggy rocky peak, blessing us for our troubles and our heroic gift for swimming? Swim and we will be complete. I am a rascal, a rogue, a shaking fist to the fate that awaits us, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Swim and when our arms fall off we’ll be ecstatic for we will never want to move our arms again anyway, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Swim and when our legs stop working we won’t miss them for the voice-activated wheelchairs will do the work for us. Go left, steel chariot. Now go right. Go fore, go aft, go leeward, go home.
But never go down into the reedy depths of the weedy sea. That would be the grand tragedy. That would be the smiting of natural law. For at this moment we have arms. For at this moment we have legs. And they will carry us through another meter, another mile. Swim and there may be a shore. Though there will be no boat, no schooner, no yacht, no paddleboat, no goddamn kayak, no godforsaken canoe, no dinghy, no buoy, just a rocky craggy peak and the land it lords over, confident and weathered. Oh how I love the sea.”