Anthology

The silence is broken by rubber tires droning loudly into the asphalt, as darkness lifts to reveal a sky full of a hundred shades of blue, aqua, and navy. The sun is brilliantly white and blinding to the naked eye. The road is long, smooth, and unbroken. Until now. The hill climbs higher, and upon cresting it I discover that it gives way into nothingness. Well, not quite. But unending, forever reaching, swirling, angry water might as well be nothingness. The tires no longer hum; they no longer find traction on the road. Instead they turn into anchors and with fearful force pull me from the bright, endless horizon. Doors lock, windows burst, water fills the cab surrounding me simultaneously in warmth and freezing cold. Before I can fathom an escape from the water filled coffin, I’m plunged into the liquid depths only to discover that it’s nice here. At first. But with shocking fierceness, the water hits my lungs, burning and stinging from the inside out. I lunge, push, and finally free myself from what is surely a grave . . . only to tread the surface in mad circles, desperately trying to find the way out through which I entered the void. But there is nothing—no shore, no land, no road. Water is all I see; all I feel; all I breathe. It flows past me, around me, through me, soaking every inch before absorbing into my skin. It’s pulsating with life and energy so strongly that it overpowers my own. I feel in it a power, a deep, churning strength that diminishes my ability to swim. I hear within it moans and weeps that haunt my mind and numb me to the thoughts of escape. My burning lungs give way to fear, and my fear gives way to panic. My body no longer treads the water, but instead it slowly begins to sink below. I cry out— only to take in more water. The more I try to swim, the faster

I sink. No matter how urgently I claw at the wet walls around me, I find myself falling deeper and deeper into the abyss. The sunlight that was once blinding is now nothing but a  shimmering light in the distance that grows dimmer with each passing second. The sky settles over the top of the water and encloses me inside with its abundance of blue. The moans are silenced, and I hear nothing but the gurgled sounds of my own choking; I feel nothing but the water pressing in on me from all sides, even from within me. I wonder if I will ever reach the bottom of this vast, mystifying ocean, or if I will just continue sinking into this darkness forever. A flash erupts in my watery tomb as a tidal wave engulfs me, and I jerk to life and suck deeply into my lungs—air. Sweet, sustaining air. I gasp it in quickly, too quickly, and sputter violently. My greed for oxygen overwhelms me; I fixate on its journey of entering and leaving my body. In the stillness, the dream can faintly be heard fading into the darkness around me, as it silently lies in wait for the next time I sleep.