Chapter 4

Adieu

I’m curled up into fetal position when I regain consciousness. I’m shaking uncontrollably and I don’t want to open my eyes. I don’t want to know that I’m being digested by some gargantuan caveman.

But I’m not there anymore. I know it almost automatically because when I breathe through my nose, I don’t smell the putrid smell of the black hole. I smell sea water and wet wood.

“Ava, quick, I think she’s waking up,” a man says from beside me.

When I lift my eyes, the ground starts to shake. Quickly, I slap my hands on my sides, trying to find my balance and stop the ground from moving, and that’s when I realize the ground isn’t moving, because I’m not lying on the ground. I’m lying in a boat. And my clothes aren’t wet because of my dripping blood drenching them, or because of the monster’s gastric fluids, but because the water keeps hitting the side of the boat and coming overboard.

I must be quite a sight to these strangers, my hair plastered against my temples, my pale jeans muddy and wet and bloody. My light pink shirt turned red because of my blood that splattered against it.

A train wreck is pretty much the perfect fit.

I try to sit up, to get a better look at my surroundings, but a hand presses down my shoulder. “Don’t move too fast, you seem to be bleeding and I think you bumped your head,” a gentle woman’s voice says.

I had it eaten actually…

Nevertheless, I listen to her and sit down slowly, careful of not making the boat move erratically again.

When I do I come face to face with a brunette woman, probably in her mid thirties, wearing a lilac dress, her facial features as gentle as her voice.

“You doing okay there, deary?” a man’s voice asked from behind me. He’s the one sitting at the back of the boat, steering it. He has a long brown beard and is wearing what looks like a corduroy suit. It would be a funny sight in another context but right now he just looks like he comes out of that Les Misérables’ movie.

“Yes, I’m fine thank you,” I assure him, though I’m really not sure about it.

Am I okay? Honestly, I’m the farthest thing from okay. I just saw a man get eaten—alas some painted man, but still a man. I just had my skulls crushed between a giant’s teeth. I’m an not okay.

How is any of this supposed to make me appreciate art? All of this just makes me hate it more. It makes me not regret to have burn that stupid museum.

“But all the blood…”

I’m about to say, ‘not my blood’ but it is my blood. It was my blood in another painting. I don’t get this. I don’t get why I don’t start new in each dream if I’m not really dead. Why do my clothes keep the stains they previously got?

Maybe that’s just a way to make me feel even worse.

“Those stains are just from…”I take a second to continue that thought, “old wounds. I haven’t had the chance to change in a while,” I try to explain.

“Did you steal the clothes off a dead man’s body?” the man chuckles.

I wrap my arms around myself, trying to get warmer. The wind is cold and the sky is clouded and there’s a storm on its way. “They’re my clothes…”

“Peculiar choice of attire,” the woman says softly, a little smile on the edge of her lips.

Oh, so now I’m going to be ridiculed by painting people because I’m wearing pants? Great, just great.

Thinking about this makes me realize something. I have no idea what this painting is, but it seems fine so far. But a storm is coming, that much is obvious and we’re in a tiny boat.

I can already see where this is going and I don’t like it.

Still, that man insulted my clothes. I frown at him. “Excuse me?”

“You are wearing pants,” he points out.

“Yes, and?” I press.

“You are a woman,” Ava adds.

“Where I’m from, woman wear pants.” I inform them.

“It must be a strange place.”

I shrug. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Is the fact that woman wear pants one of the reasons why you left your homeland?” the woman asks.

That’s a weird question. And shouldn’t these people know why I’m on their boat? How the hell did I even get on this boat? Did I just suddenly appear? I have so many questions, but I should answer the one they asked first. And how am I supposed to answer? What am I doing here? “I was sentenced…” It’s as close as I can get without using the word curse.

“Oh…”

“You?”

“We wanted to be together…” the man trails.

“And leaving was the only way we could…” the woman finishes, as she extends her hand towards his and he reaches for hers, wrapping his around hers. Then, he presses both their hands against her stomach and they look at each other with such love and intensity that I have to look away.

I don’t think Jarvis ever looked at me this way. No one’s ever looked at me with such love and devotion. Maybe this is what this painting is about—rubbing in my face just how truly unloved I’ve been in my life.

But I’m wrong about this and my first guess is right because soon, lightning strikes over the ocean, breaking the couple’s gaze.

They look worried now.

The couple works in unison around the tiny boat, giving each other’s instructions as the sky darkens and darkens. It starts to rain. I wrap my arms around my legs and press my forehead against my knees.

This is alright. I’m an okay swimmer. I can survive a ship sinking… I think.

“You might want to hold onto something deary,” the man says, and I look up just in time to see a big wave coming our way.

I freak and grabbed onto the side of the boat.

Water crashes against me but again, against all reason, we haven’t flipped.

“Everything will be alright, Ava, we’ll get through this,” the man tells the woman, obviously trying to reassure her.

“Whatever happens…” she starts, her voice trembling.

“We have each other.”

“Together till the end,” she finishes and slightly smiles.

Of course, everything is not alright, and the next wave is much bigger than the first. This time the boat flips over. My body slams into the freezing ocean and I try to keep my mouth close to not swallow water but I didn’t take a big enough breath and I choke on the salty water.

But I’m a good enough swimmer and manage to keep my head on top of the water, and make my way to a floating piece of wood that probably came off the boat.

The waves keep swinging me back and forth, as I try to hold on to my makeshift raft.

            The storm picks up, and the rain pours harder, the lightening strikes faster, but through all this I can hear a man a woman shouting in the distance, trying to get to each other.

When the storm finally calms down, hours later, and I wash up on a beach, I’m so exhausted. I can barely feel my limbs anymore. All I can hear is the man’s cries, his desperate walling louder than the crashing sound of the waves.

With my eyes half open, I see him, his body still inside the boat, holding onto the unconscious body of the woman, kissing her face and wailing.

I can’t keep myself up and fall in the not so deep water. I don’t even have the energy to lift my head out of the ocesn. So I just choke on water over and over again, until my lungs are filled with it and my ears deafened by a man’s mourning cries, a man who’s name, I realize, I’ll never known.

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Adieu by Alfred Guillou