Shoreside

This is a story about life, finding oneself in unfamiliar territory, losing those we love, staying together with those we love, growing up, hardship, and above all else, finding a way through. Stay strong, dear reader, there may be rough water ahead.

Vincent Miller

Shoreside

The woman was strapped into a chair. Her constrained wrists loosed small streams of blood. Her dirty blonde hair hung lank over her face, her body was relaxed and slumped. As she came to consciousness, she noticed a strange device strapped to her head. She tried to reach up and whimpered when her hands were unable to explore this anomaly. From her left a shadowed figure entered the room. The figure stepped into the harsh light emanating from a bare bulb above her head. A man, dressed in a long white lab coat neared. He held a long syringe in a menacing way.

"How are you Diane," his voice played at sympathy as a sadistic smile filled his face.

"Where am I, what's happening?" Diane whimpered.

"Don't worry, this won't hurt a bit," the man said as he stepped closer and plunged the syringe into Diane's neck, a long scream erupted from the woman, and the opening credits rolled through the noise.

The Boy had seen this movie many times and already grew bored and restless. This film was one of his favorites, but there were only a handful to choose from. Also, sitting still was not one of his favorite ways to pass time.

"Scream queens," Beana scoffed, "so annoying." Beana was sitting next to The Boy on the couch. Today was movie day, and everyone had already done their chores. The solar panels were in ship shape, the battery was holding power as it always did. Rain water stores were a little low but there was not much they could do about that. They were not yet desperate for fresh water, and the small desalination still they had was always working, its small pump slurping happily at the ocean it swam in.

The Boy got up; the thoughts of water had led him to a thirst. He padded across the smooth wooden floors of their home, opened the front door. He was greeted by the familiar sight of the ocean. Waves stretched on and on until they touched skies, blue skies that were interrupted only by the sun's bright glare and small skittering clouds. Their home floated on these waters, as it had always. The Boy knew no other life than a life on the waves with Beana and Nana. These boards, the salty air, the bobbing of the sea.

The Boy took a deep breath as he made his way to the water still, his gait confident over the rocking deck. The wood out here was bleached by salt and sun. There was a section near the prow of the raft like structure that they had recently repaired. They had used materials scavenged from the waves, its fresh face already fast nearing a match with its older neighbors. With regular maintenance their home remained strong and fast against the often-harsh environment.

They had a small garden out here, fertilized by fish and seaweed. Caring for this tiny plot was both crucial and an enjoyable challenge for The Boy. Nana was the best at it, though to be fair, she was the only one among them that could remember having crop fields, or having enough land to plot fields at all. The only one among them to ever have stood on any other dirt than that little square. They were sometimes able to scavenge usable soil from small rocky islands, but they came across them so rarely. The ones they did find were usually nothing but stone and coral and sand. None of them had been worth staying on.

All in all, they did everything they could to waste nothing, and lived a good life for it.

The desalination still floated alongside the boat, he reeled in the rope it was tethered to and filled his glass from its reservoir. He let the still free and it floated gently out again, tugging slightly at its rope. He had seen pictures of dogs in books and imagined it was something like that, a playful little pet pulling at its leash. He liked to imagine things from the before.