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11 minute read
My First Apartment by Kyra Christensen
entire crew was up on deck, some thirty men, and they stood looking nervously at the scene around them. There was smoking and talking; inevitably speculation about how such a motley assembly came to converge out here some fifty miles from the Arctic Circle.
“Maybe they all abandoned ship. Run out of fuel or something.”
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“All of them? No, that’s preposterous. There’s too many.”
“Currents carried them here. Some sorta tidal vortex.”
“We’re hundreds of miles from anywhere.”
“Could be pirates. Lure us out here with all these boats.”
“This doesn’t make any sense.”
“I say we call the Coast Guard and leave well enough alone.”
The captain declared they would be boarding these crafts to search for survivors and any clue to what happened here. However, he also wanted to send some men to investigate the iceberg as well, a task for which there were no volunteers; they drew straws to see who would go. It was the first mate and the deck-hand who had slipped. Armed with flashlights and grappling hooks, they were lowered down in one of the life-boats and paddled to the iceberg, securing anchor upon it, and used the ropes to help ascend the ledge to the cave-like opening.
There they took a moment to salute their crewmen back on the ship before venturing inside. The cave led into a tunnel that went on for several meters before they emerged into an immense sepulchral chamber hewn from the iceberg’s interior. A large hole at the center of the dome of its ceiling allowed enough light that they could see they were on a ledge that encircled the perimeter of this chamber, which vaguely resembled an arena. There were two column-like platform blocks of ice about eight feet high sitting in the center of the arena directly beneath the window-hole. There were ladders leaning against them, at the foot of which there was a heap of broken electronics: radar, sonar, and radio equipment, doubtless hauled in from the ships outside, and all of it smashed to pieces. They looked around and beheld all this in awe, cringing at the noise of their voices, for the air seemed leaden with a resonant stillness, and to commit sound of any sort was a breach of that ineffable silence.
“Hello? HELLO! Is anybody here?”
“Good God, what is this place?”
Walking around the rim they saw additional tunnels on the lower level, all of which appeared to lead further downward. With a mass of this size, its entirety could only be inferred, and the possibility this iceberg might host a cavernous warren below the surface was entirely within reason. The notion there was a network of labyrinthine passages descending into the very bowels of the iceberg bloomed potently in their minds. They shivered in the frigid chill that seemed to emanate from those depths. It was an arctic breath, accompanied by a faint crackling sound like static or distant waves.
The purpose of this floating grotto eluded them. Considerable work had evidently gone into carving out this space, but to what end? Had there not been so many boats outside attracting attention, this iceberg would have been an otherwise perfect hideaway. Those platforms were situated such that they must have aided in excavating the cavities they assumed lay beyond, a mid-point from which to eject all that displaced material out through the window-hole and into the water.
They had nearly gone all the way around when they came across what they initially thought was a bundle of rags but turned out to be an emaciated old sailor wrapped in blankets, half-frozen and starved to the brink of death. Upon sighting them he became briefly hysterical and attempted to struggle but was soon subdued by his intrinsic exhaustion and collapsed. He wheezed at them: “What are you… doing here? Get out… while you can…”
The first mate did immediately head back outside to report finding a survivor while the deckhand stayed behind with him. He asked the old sailor, “Where is everybody? You can’t be the only one left. There’s too many boats. What the hell happened? Call you tell me?”
But the old sailor seemed driven partly insane by whatever happened to him here and cowered fetus-like in his nest of clothes and blankets; he covered his face and leered at the young man from between his fingers, rolling his eyes. Then he turned away and began quietly gibbering and rocking back and forth.
When the first mate returned his eyes were wide with alarm. “You’re gonna wanna come see this for yourself,” he said and beckoned his comrade to join him outside.
Outside the cold air was a succor to the enclosure of the chamber. The exterior ledge offered a heightened view upon the crowded cortege gathered here. Their mother ship was among the others, presumably checking each vessel for survivors. The water swirled blackly, tantalizing between them, as though suddenly rife with motion. And then he realized there was nobody on the deck; the captain should have been at the bridge, instead it was deserted. They watched, waiting for some sign of life, but there was none. The whole crew was gone.
They looked at the surrounding vista, wondering what happened. The sea was opaque and bereft of feature, hiding all clues; the water was a jagged stretch to the horizontal schism where the worm of sky pillowed overhead like a shroud, slowly darkening. It had the inverted pallor of an imminent downpour; otherwise the air was still. They didn’t know what else to do; they stood there and listened to the malefic lull of the waves lapping at the boats
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and the side of the iceberg. The sky dimmed with the realization that they were doomed.
Sometime during their dismal reverie they heard shouting from within the iceberg and promptly went back inside. There they found the old sailor inexplicably bleeding from a massive abdominal wound. He appeared to be desperately folding in on himself, as if by compressing the injury he could reduce its damage. He was sweating profusely and had started making a steady bug-like keening sound. He somehow crammed both hands into his mouth, his face swelling purple, eyes bulging. He lay on his side. The wound pulsed with glistening crimsons, green and gray; it was a vaguely circular laceration between the pelvis and ribcage about the size of a fist.
In dire need of medical aid, he let out a gurgling groan as they gingerly lifted him by his shoulders and knees and carried him out through the tunnel. For some reason they were hopeful: they could get him into the lifeboat, get back to their ship and the engine start; once they were on board they could get away; they had a first-aid kit; everything would be okay; soon enough they would be coasting past the yellow traffic buoy and into the safety of regulated waters. However, a single droplet hit each of their faces as they emerged back onto the exterior ledge.
Whereupon they then noticed their lifeboat was no longer beneath that ledge; it somehow came loose and drifted a distance of over fifty feet. There was a possibility, however faint, that if the boat drifted away then it might also drift back, but that would depend on the currents, and it was more likely to move to an even greater distance. They certainly couldn’t try swimming back to the ship; it was too cold, they’d freeze instantly. They thought perhaps they could use the ropes to snag the lifeboat and pull it back, but then they noticed the grappling hooks were gone as well.
At their feet the old sailor twisted over, puked up a long stream of black bile, then shuddered violently and died. Overhead the sky rumbled, and then at last it finally began to rain. They knew then that they were never going to be found. The boats would eventually drift away, like the planets will after the sun goes nova, and whatever the iceberg doesn’t suck down with it when it sinks will drift like rubbish across the endless seas.
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In Memoriam: Deepwater Horizon
Fire and Water
by Kira Ashbeck
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Mother
by Adrienne Pine
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My mother died in the early minutes of March 21, 2012, just as spring was coming to its fullest expression in Birmingham, Alabama—the city where she was born, married, had her children, and lived her entire life. The foliage was a promising shade of bright green. The suburban lawns were visions lined with banks of azaleas in full bloom. The year was still young; as yet, the sun’s heat had no weight to it.
On March 9, she was diagnosed with bone cancer. How long she had had the bone cancer, her doctor would not suppose. What was known was that the bone cancer was a metastasis from breast cancer which she had survived fourteen years ago. For the past twelve years, she had been cancer-free, but, as it was explained, breast cancer is sneaky, insidious, and doesn’t give up easily.
The doctor giving her the diagnosis stressed the positive aspects: the cancer had not spread beyond the bones; with chemotherapy, she might live a few more years, although she would likely be confined to a wheelchair. If this was meant to be the silver lining, my mother didn’t see it that way. She confided her true state of mind to her rabbi. “Rabbi, I know I’m dying,” she said to him when he visited her in the hospital.
“We’re all dying,” he replied.
“No, I know I am dying soon,” she said, “and it’s all right.”
He told us this after the funeral, at the shiva minyan. * * *
As I drove along the roads of my childhood, it occurred to me that my mother’s youth had been the best season of her life. Everything afterwards was a disappointment, and she had never really gotten over it.
Inside the woman she became, there was always the popular girl, the belle of the ball, whose life had never fulfilled its promise. Once her wit and repartee had charmed girls and boys alike, and young and old; she was accustomed to being the center of attention, adored and adorned.
Long after she married and had children, flirtation lived on in her encounters with tradesmen and repairmen—Stanley at the grocery store, Gus at the gas station—men she saw casually in the course of her errands. She seemed happiest when she was flirting, but I never saw her flirt with my father. Nothing so lighthearted existed between them. Instead there was a furious passion that erupted in explosions and battles. It is one morning at breakfast, and I am three or four years old.
I don’t know what started their argument, but Daddy wants to leave for work, and Mama is angry and threatening to pour coffee on him. He is angry, too, and taunts her that she won’t dare do it. “Don’t you believe it,” she cries, grabbing the coffee pot from the stove. She flings a fountain of hot coffee that reaches him as he tries to escape out the front door, splashing all over his good suit. He screams, and she flees back inside. Furious, he stomps up the stairs and inside the house to change, cursing her but avoiding her.
His suit is stained the color of dirt, the color of excrement.
That stain endures—dirty, shameful, coloring our family life for years to come. So much unhappiness and disappointment and so little tolerance and affection. Long before my parents met, something had happened to each of them that left them damaged. Neither was emotionally whole enough to love in an unstinting and generous way. Their connections to each other and their children were based on transactions. “I’ll do this for you, if you do that for me.” Nothing was free, and everything had its price. This was how they related to each other, and it was how they treated their children as well.
Mom tyrannized over us because she could dominate us. The home was the only sphere in which she was powerful. Every morning Dad escaped into the practice of law. It was a place where he had reason and justice on his side, and she didn’t exist. Only within her family was she all-powerful.
My parents fought constantly about money. There was never enough. Because my mother had no way of earning money and no intention of trying, she intensified the pressure on my father. He’d left a law firm where he was unhappy to go out on his own and struggled for years as a single practitioner before he was successful. But even after success came, the obsession with money continued.
It was more than a need for money that they expressed. They thought about money constantly—how to get it, how to hoard it, how to save it from anyone else spending it. My parents let their lust for money control their lives. The conclusion was that money was worth more than we were. We were constantly being reminded that they couldn’t afford us, but they were stuck with us. They calculated each expenditure, and it was up to us to prove we were worth every cent they grudgingly spent on us.
In her battles with our father, my mother pressured us to take sides, and woe befell us if we didn’t select hers. We grew up afraid of her temper and her outbursts. “What if Mom gets mad?” we would worry, and by “mad,” we meant her screaming until the veins stood out on her neck, and her vocal cords
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