The Anatomy of Drowning (ONC 2022 Longlist)

one by one they drown

The water was cold, but she was not. She'd long lost the feeling in her fingers.

Vera staggered, braced against the ship, passed corpses that watched like ghosts. The hard metal cut into her side as she fell against it, breath leaked from her lungs on impact. The force of it pulled at her chest, her lungs.

She caught herself on the railing with a wet hand. The echo of the impact reverberating around the stairwell, barley a record scratch in the roar of the water filling in around her.

The walls made a sound like branches breaking in the wind.

The hallway tilted, water rising,  and her legs went out from under her, driving her knees into the floor. The water cut through the hallway in a sheet of hard edged panic, as it hit her chin in the backsplash.

Vera bucked and thrashed, water rushed into her nose, her ears. She kept moving and reached a hand up to grip the railing lining the walls, driving herself forward. The impact of water against the ship had deafened the scream trying to pull it's self from her mouth but the walls were intact here. As if nothing had happening, as if it had all been one grand illusion of sound.

But it meant she had time, the breach hadn't reached this far.

She tried to push up, but her body wouldn't listen. Her mind was screaming in panic, it swelled in her ears but there was no way out. The only thing beyond her now was the slow curtain of darkness as it crept across her mind, her consciousness. She was sinking though her skin, into the black, into the depths of the water now rising around her. She was running out of breathable air, coughing out what little she could hold onto.

But she had to see for herself, she had to see if they were still there. She could save them. This time – this time, but the breath was leaking from her lungs.

The sky changed colour outside the pothole above her. Light to dark. Day to night and the air was pulled from her lungs.