My eyes burned, felt singed. Blinded. The metallic taste of stale seawater, a swirling dervish, with a dull yet sharp twang on my tongue brought me back. Landing hard, crashing on the swabbed deck like a drenched leather sack of humid, rotting shark and fish chum, I woke up face down, soaked to the bone and drenched in salty sweat and iron blood. Breathing heavily, desperately, but no oxygen came. Was I suffocating, drowning? I felt something different coming hard and fast. An intense sense of another metaphysical awakening from within was coming. Now. Something familiar, additional archaic whispers rapidly writhing amongst a rushed maelstrom. A quick rush arrived with a lucky strike of the matchstick. Suddenly my body burst into white lightning, burnt orange, then crimson flames. This time no pain, just a calming, growing warmth spreading through me. As I was fully consumed by fire, now a glowing invisible force, I felt a sense of release as my ashes fell scattered, blowing away and mixing with the winding, gentle ocean’s undertow. Now deeper than the Mariana Trench. All localized light lost reluctantly to the deep, cold murmur of shipwrecked pasts.
Doc Vinson, master farmer, fisherman, and puzzle solver never made house calls. He was a kind, wise man with a tanned, weathered face. The rest of his religiously covered skin was as white as alabaster. Every time I think of him, I see his lighthearted grin, glasses, hair as black as sack cloth, and missing big toe. Grandad’s first name, Doc, got him confused with midnight calls from folks asking if the doctor was in.
One of mine and my two sisters’ favorite childhood memories was him teaching us his little physics trick revealing how the center of gravity works with only a single toothpick, juice glass, spoon, and fork. He joined the utensils in a handshake, nudging, balancing them like a playground teeter-totter on the very edge of the glass with nothing but patience and that tiny splinter of wood. Magical.
The tightly organized pressure that was always holding my organs and tissues together had given way. I was now free from all of the earthly delights that seduced everyone. Earthly, an odd adjective for tech that betrayed us leaving us lost and forgetful. Not all of us were led astray by the sirens’ songs. I kept my head down, ears covered, remained divinely protected. I was a rare bird, er fish. One of only a handful remaining with pulsing neurons capable of critical thinking. I passed the tests. So many tests. God’s boot camp was now over, but who or what was I now?
Then I heard it. A fragment of a never ending echo, a wavelength from far across streams of southern consciousness came as four items hovering just slightly above the weathered surface of a hexagonal game table. A fork, spoon, glass, and a single toothpick. What’s up Doc? God I loved my family’s clever bread crumbs. Never stale. This puzzle my sisters and I knew since our earliest years of an innocent childhood. I had no physical form so my soul’s reaching grasp passed through these objects resembling puzzle pieces of Grandad’s center of gravity trick.