Burning Sea

"She says, "You don't have to save me
You don't have to say a word
In love and silence, I'll return"
 - Invisible Oceans, by Amos Lee

I've been completing weekly writing assignments as part of an online course. Each exercise has a specific structure to follow, and has the writers introduce their pieces with a preamble about tense and tone. Here is my preamble and piece from the week before:

Third person persona narrator, past tense, sharing about a true-life event witnessed worldwide yet which imagines the scene from a non-human point of view. The mood plays with fear, curiosity, and speculation. 

 

The sea turtles were the first to fully take in the scene. All the smaller fish went darting away as quickly as possible - they were used to fleeing, after all, that being the natural order of things. It was when the sharks also sped away, not towards, as they are wont to do in their predatory way, but from, that the rest of the ocean understood there was truly a problem. 

 

The turtles and octopus and crabs hunkered low against the sand. When there was a problem, it always came from above. It came in the form of nets strewn from lumbering boats, clumsy and noisy and sudden. It came in the form of things dropped into their habitat, some new flotsam and jetsam which was dangerous in its unfamiliarity. It came in the form of ferocious storms, yet this one was new. A brightness which raged, churning and reaching with orange tendrils which heated the water in its furious wake. If the marine life had social media, they would look up “eye of fire in the Gulf of Mexico”, would follow the news of the ruptured gas pipe, and be confounded as to how a massive blaze could take place in the middle of water. 

 

What was it? they wondered. Would it end? Would it grow? This strange beast was the color of clownfish and coral, swirling in a vortex like a mammoth school of snappers or groupers. The brightness of it gleamed through the glass-like membrane of passing jellyfish. Overhead, boats encircled the calamity, hovering near for a purpose unknown to the inhabitants below. It began in the dark edge of night, bursting forth its strange glow and continuing as the natural light of the sun lit and warmed the water in its comforting way. Five hours it blazed, then gradually ceased. 

 

Would it come again? A new threat and invasion, though at least it stayed in one place, decently contained, if one were to look at the positives. The boats migrated away, the water cooled, and all could go back to normal. Maybe the animals knew and avoided that place: the octopus, if anyone, would be most likely to remember. The sea turtles had just begun their migratory path through the gulf, swimming diligently onwards in the way which was instinctively known to them. Perhaps this innate knowing would tell them to swim around that spot, some intrinsic sense of wrong lingering like an invisible wound. Or maybe all would be mended and well, the ocean healing herself through the movement of tides so that all which remained was the 12-inch pipeline, the source of the terror yet one which lived on in a way not unsimilar in its quiet strangeness to that of sunken ships: a mystery within the vastness of their ocean home. 

 

Was there damage? Was there death? It’s likely, yet speculative; how many sea creatures were affected by the methane gas, ingesting or inhaling it, and therefore poisoned. Were any caught by the flames? Only the sea life could tell us for sure. 

 

This monster had gone, though there would be others. The smallest of the fish knew danger well. The turtles, with their many decades of life, had seen and survived more than would ever be known, yet even so they had never seen anything quite like this. The day an angry fist punched fingers of heat towards them, maniacally crackling. Why it appeared and where it went was unknown. All they could do was swim onwards, led by the seasons as the tide was led by the waxing and waning of the moon. Forces within and forces beyond, guiding them past calamities and through storms in the way of the wild.