Blue
by Edward Newton
It’s blue.
As far as the eye could see.
Sebastian has been taking these charter fishing expeditions out since he was a teenager and working with his dad. Orlando tourists eager to get away from the maddening sue lines at the Attractions come out to the coast to get some sand and sun and fun on the water. He takes folks out every morning and brings them back in before nightfall. And dark in Orlando falls early on December nights. He’s preparing to head into shore already at three-thirty to make shore by dusk.
Six passengers today. The winter months are always lean, but this year had been particularly slow. Luckily, the more offseason expeditions usually feature more colorful passengers than the bland and banal tourists during peak summertimes. One more landlubber from Lincoln gets seasick all over his deck and he’s going to hand them over the mop and bucket or toss them overboard.
He doesn’t get so many kids this time of year, but his passengers today include a father and his young son named Elton. The kid can’t be more than ten but is as curious as a cat. Homeschooled and preternaturally intelligent, he’s asking Sebastian questions about the patterns of the waves and the nature of the cloud-cover that a simple twenty-six year old tour boat captain can’t answer. The father finally intervenes and tells Elton they’ll check online when they get back to their hotel room.
Good answer.
Two adult siblings looking as little green but keeping their guts inside are huddled close on the deck. The wind is chilly and the waves have started to swell. The December weather can either be nice as can be or rough as hell—or it can turn unexpectedly and start to real churn. Sebastian fears the latter today. The weather reports hadn’t even hinted at trouble, but this was Florida and the tides always turn. The brother and sister were about the age of Sebastian’s folks and their father was as old as Sebastian’s gramps. Grizzled and stubborn, Don Devon stood aft and stared down the sea.
The sixth passenger most interests Sebastian. During the summer, the type is commonplace on his boat. College coeds wanting the open ocean experience. Pretty and usually wearing something skimpy, sometimes Sebastian wondered if the bathing-suit beauties were the best perk of this job. During the winter dearth, he’d go months without seeing anyone within ten years of his age. Maybe the occasional divorcee who finds it amusing to flit with the sailor boy. But someone Sebastian’s age in December…?
She told him her name is Evergreen and finds it fascinating that Evergreen is out on the endless blue. Like a leaf carried upon the ocean. Alone and out of her element. Fascinating and yet perfectly matched—two elements of nature in a dance in the wild.
Mostly, young women like Evergreen travel in packs. Groups of galpals all giggly and glossy and gregarious, but Evergreen is quiet and introspective. She watches the rolling waves like the message isn’t inside the bottle but in the pattern of the peaks and troughs. Maybe little Elton knows what he’s talking about…
She’s not flouting anything at all. Sebastian tried to remember the last time he’s encountered a young woman who didn’t board his boat woefully underdressed. Summertime, it was a distraction. Fall and spring when the winds could turn chilly, it was amusing and then annoying, bikini babes begging Sebastian for a blanket. He kept a stack of smelly sheets in a trunk, so the girls stunk like dead fish when they debarked. But Evergreen was in a sensible jacket, cute little stocking cap, stylish scarf, with perfect boots. No shivers. Unfortunate. Sebastian would volunteer to keep her warm.
“This typical, kid?” asks Old Don.
Elton and Evergreen seem to see patterns and messages in the waves of the sea, but Old Don seems tuned to the elements itself—the wind whips through his snow-white hair and he bares his teeth to the spray. He waits expectantly for an answer, his piercing blue eyes as deep and mysterious as the sea. Sebastian’s Gramps once read him a Hemingway story about the sea and Sebastian almost wonders if this old man might’ve inspired the story. He opens his mouth to ask but stops, worried maybe Hemingway had been dead for a hundred years. Sebastian didn’t pay much attention in school.
But he did like that story.
“Florida weather’s a pickle to predict,” Sebastian admits. “But this isn’t exactly normal. Bit of a rough sea.”
“We gonna be okay?” little Elton asks. His father appears a little nervous.
“It has to get a lot worse than this to make me nervous,” Sebastian assures. “The seas are steady enough in December. And anything inclement enough to give us real trouble moves in like a tottering turtle. We’d have known about any bad long before we ever even left shore.”
“Hurricane don’t come out of nowhere,” Elton’s father adds.
Elton had seemed assuaged by Sebastian’s assertion, but offended by his father’s comment. “Hurricanes don’t occur in December, Dad.”
Mostly right. Grampa once told Sebastian about Hurricane Alice in a December that happened before even he was born. So it hasn’t happened in more decades than anyone except Old Don could recall. Certainly there isn’t a tropical storm forming within a few miles off the Florida coast. This was merely some choppy seas.
“So nothing to be afraid of th—”
Elton’s dad’s voice gets drowned out by a roll of thunder accompanying a blinding flash of lightning. So close it make the sea glow and Sebastian could see the shadows of marine life under the surface. Fish, clouds of seaweed, maybe a dolphin or marlin, and—
And what the hell is that?
Sebastian rubs his eyes. The light had blinded him a little. Maybe what he was seeing was the little dark effects of a bright light shined in his eyes. The strobe effect of the brightness. Spots in his eyes. Because he thought he saw a dark mass under there. Like a long sea snake the size of some kind of loch ness monster. Or the shape of a giant squid.
Perhaps the strange weather had attracted some rarely seen gargantuan from the deep?
Sebastian loves the sea. He has grown up on the waves. He knows how to sail in almost any weather and he knows enough to stay ashore if the elements are antagonistic. But when he was doing, his Grampa let him watch 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and he sometimes pictures the Kraken from the end of the movie beneath his boat, reaching, a massive shape beneath his bow.
Sebastian shudders.
There’s no Kraken in the deep.
Yet he reaches over an opens the throttle. Full speed ahead.
Thunderheads have rolled in from…from seemingly nowhere. Formed directly overhead. Lightning danced cloud to cloud in a nearly contract current. As he glances skyward, a full droplet of rain hits him directly in the eye. It rolls down his cheek like a teardrop. Then, without warning, the sky opens and it begins to pour.
Elton and his father join the middle-aged siblings in the cabin. Old Don stays at the bow, staring ahead. “Get in”, Sebastian cries over the drum of rain and roll of thunder. The old man waves him off.
Evergreen is suddenly at his side. Her face is fresh and mysterious. She distracts Sebastian from the strange circumstances of their adventure at sea. He stares too long as their eyes meet. But this seems more important than—
“You saw it, didn’t you?”
“What?” Sebastian stutters. He doesn’t want to talk about the kraken. “Saw what?”
“Something…,” Evergreen said. Her eyes are iridescent against her blue ensemble—sticking cap and scarf both the color of a clear sky. Matching coat. Now mittens. In Florida. She must not be from around here.
“The lightning plays tricks with shadows,” Sebastian says.
“You know it wasn’t a trick.”
“I know it wasn’t real,” Sebastian snaps. He’s enamored of the girl, but he isn’t going to let her talk him into believing in…what?…monsters?
The wind comes up, blowing sea spray over the passengers in a deluge. He’d scoffed at the idea of a hurricane, but the squall is exhibiting all the signs of a surging tropical storm. Tis isn’t the season. The waves have grown into small hills, his boat moving up one slope and sliding down the other. The wind wicks away the tips of the waves, a white spray making the air between raindrops hazy with mist.
Distance is obscured in every direction. Peaks and troughs over and over, the sea becomes the same regular pattern over and over. A man caught on repeat. Sebastian knows the solution, his hands moving by rote. This isn’t his first storm, unexpected or not. He appreciates the danger presented by nature, always respectful, but never scared. He’s weathered the elements since he was a boy. This is another day like many others.
“I don’t like this,” the old man calls out from the prow. He’s dripping with saltwater, the sea soaking his white beard. His grizzled eyes exhibit worry. He’s seen much in his many years, but this is uncharted experience.
“It’s a south Atlantic storm, old man. It isn’t my first.”
“It’s more than a storm,” Old Don opines.
He’s see something, too. Like Sebastian, he is reluctant to give word to form. Finally, he heeds Sebastian’s warning and gets belowdeck with Elton and his father and Old Don’s two adult children. Evergreen remains beside Sebastian behind the wheel of the boat.
The lightning is fearsome, crawling across the sky like spiders spinning electric webs. The clouds are familiar to even a kid from Florida—a certain gray singular to superstorms. Sebastian had watched a hurricane tracks along the coast a few years ago, miles offshore and trundling by, a plodding event that seemed to dare all landlubbers of making landfall as it slowly slogged northward. Wind and rain had plastered the coast for long hours but the storm never pushed onshore.
Now, Sebastian felt as if someone had dropped that weather event right on his head. The last time a storm had come through, it had been forecasted for days. The cell had been tracked and several routes mapped as possible trajectories. This had come out of nowhere. The forecast this morning had been for seventy-eight degrees and sunny skies.
Instead, a hurricane was on Sebastian’s ass.
This was bad. He fought to push the boast harder and faster, but the storm raged. He started to be concerned about getting to shore. The circumstances were as bad he’d ever sailed in. This was crazy! What would it do to the family business if he lost a bunch of tourists at sea? He might be able to survive in a life vest long enough to get to shore, but these landlubbers would sink like—
“The anchor!” Evergreen cries.
Sebastian’s cubby cabin 30’ boat utilizes a mortised anchor with a hundred foot chain. The anchor hangs off the side of the deck unless he hauls anchor or drops the line. Now, the anchor formerly dangling to his left is dropped, trailing behind like a trawling fishline.
“What the he—”
The line starts to add friction as it plays out closer to the end, slowing the whole ship like easing the brakes on a car. The boat slows so that when the line gets to the end, it doesn’t snap off or rip free of the deck. As the line runs out, the ship has arrested all forward momentum and is churning in place.
“Weigh anchor!” Evergreen shouts. “It’s dragging us back!”
How many fish has Sebastian seen reeled in and pulled onto this deck. Thousands. But as the floorboards shift underfoot and he feels a strange lurch beneath the balls of his feet, he senses something is different. He isn’t the fisherman. He’s the fucking fish.
The monster beneath the sea has them on the hook. Reeling them in. Sebastian eases the throttle, the engine crying out. He’s either going to pull free and leave the anchor in his wake or he’s going to blow the engine. He can’t blow the engine. Sebastian throttle down and turns, riding up and wave and changing direction using the motion of the ocean. He rides down into a trough, going backward, toward the open sea.
“We need to cut the anchor,” he calls out to Evergreen. “Use whatever you can find.”
Evergreen disappears below deck as Sebastian attempts to keep slack in the line. He follows the direction of where the end of his anchor has been hooked, making a circle as the winds and rain and waves batter the little ship. Evergreen returns, swaying back and forth and using any grip she can find. At her heels, Old Don re-emerges from belowdecks. He has the grim expression of determination in the face of the chaos. He carries a the big ax Sebastian had inside the cabin—a tool he hadn’t even remembered until he saw it again.
Old Don walked on stout, steady legs across a wet deck moving up and down, back and forth. He raised the ax over his head and brought it down on the taunt line of the anchor. The chain gave off a pained clangor but the links held. Old Don raised it again.
With the eerie accuracy of Indiana Jones’s whip, an appendage thin and rubbery erupted from the surface of the sea and curled over Old Don’s hand, wrapping around the whole handle of the ax. The man shouts something vulgar that is lost by the storm, and them like a frog retracts it tongue with a fly on the end, the tentacles pulls Old Don over the side of the boat and he disappears.
Gone.
Sebastián had never lost a passenger. All these years and his perfect record is ruined in an instant. Old Don is gone—and so is the ax.
“Jesus, hell,” Evergreen swears, stepping backward beside Sebastian at the wheel instead of running to loo over the side of the boat. She doesn’t need to see where Old Don descended. Old Don is dead.
The Kraken gives the boat a mighty tug and suddenly the boat is impossibly traveling backward. The wrong wave could overturn them and then it would be the end. Sebastian turns the wheel as hard as he can, trying to ease the pressure of being reeled in.
“Take the wheel,” Sebastian demands, shoving Evergreen into his place. “Turn into the direction of the pull. Don’t let the fucker sink us.”
Sebastian rushed to the anchor’s line. Links of steel aren’t going to give way to the Kraken’s might. The anchor would pull them under. Big fucking thing could swallow them whole.
Sebastian grabbed a length of steel bar he used to poke and prod for weak spots along the decks. He wedged it between the links of the taut chain. “Full reverse,” he hollers. His legs know the rhythm of the sea and the jolts of his ship, and Sebastian remains steady as Evergreen changes course. The chain gives him slack long enough to wedge the bar between the steel plates mounting the anchor winch to the deck. The strongest part of the whole fucking boat.
“Go!” Sebastian cries.
The way he looped the chain, when the length snaps tight again it causes perfect strain on the chain and a link snaps, the line severed, one link shooting out like a bullet from the chain. The piece buries in the side hull of the boat, driven into the surface like a nail. If Sebastian would’ve been standing a few feet to the right, he’d have taken shrapnel in the thigh.
Sebastian rushes back to the wheel as they break free, the motor pushing them forward at the same time a major wave builds beneath the boat. The water rises and rises and rises. This is no wave. The Kraken is following, creating a gigantic berth as high as a monster swell. Sebastian pushes the boat beyond any previous limits, the engine chugging for dear life. Like a surfing chipmunk on the biggest bastard of all fucking waves, the Azul Perla hangs on the tip of this goddamn crest. Sebastian can’t tell how high he is, but he feels like the misty wind is broiling among the clouds.
“Hang on,” Sebastian warns.
Like a surfer riding the curl, the Azul Perla skates along the monster wave. Sebastian feels like the nose of his ship is pointed at the seafloor, a missile dropped from above and falling straight to it target. But the wave follows some kind of physics even though biology and meteorology have both thrown the rules out. The boat rides the water as the slope of the wave turns flatter and flatter.
They escaped the Kraken.
Sebastian opens the throttle and points westward. He knows the best place to aim for. The wind and rain and waves make the world before him earned, but he doesn’t need to see. He’s close enough to shore to know where he is by instinct alone. Sebastian doesn’t throttle back as the beach grows nearer and nearer. Evergreen is right at his side.
Above noise of the thunder and crashing waves, Sebastian throws his head back and roars as loud as any sound he’s ever made in his whole life. “Hold on to something!” Because he isn’t stopping. He isn’t giving the sea any room to reach out and recapture the Azul Perla. Sebastian is gunning for land and he’s never going to set foot on the water ever again. The sea tried to kill him. And he’s not the forgiving type.
He knows the shape of the land beneath the waters off the coast. He could return to the cove and dock in the boathouse where they’d started this morning, but the dock is too far and Sebastian isn’t going to spend another single second longer on this deck that he has to. He wants sand, solid, safety, land.
The waves are big enough where he can time it right. He rides a swell inland and the boat gets all the way halfway up the beach. The bow slams into the sand and he’s thrown against the steering column. Evergreen has anchored herself in some ropes and straps like a pro, and she’s tied Sebastian to herself without him even noticing. The ship crunches and cracks open, never to sail again, but Sebastian ins’t going to give her another chance anyway. This was his last trip. Sebastian is going to find the highest mountain and climb it.
Little Elton and his dad emerge from belowdecks as Evergreen works to unstrap them from the keel. The middle-aged siblings follow the kid and his dad. They study their unsteady surroundings, turning back toward the turbulent sea. The ocean that had claimed their father. But not the sea. Don Devon had been taken by a Kraken.
The survivors managed to deboard the boat. Sebastian patted the Azul Perla once on her prow and then set off inland. He didn’t even bother to take one last look at the Atlantic. She had cheated on Sebastian with another. Taken a Kraken as a lover. It had become a tempestuous romance. The world itself felt the shudders of their union.
“Where are we going?” Evergreen hollered over wind and rain and thunder and crashing waves.
“Higher ground,” Sebastian answered.
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