The Heart of The Sea

ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ ᴏɴᴇ

EAST ASIA WAS Drowning.

If the world continued to Drown like this, there wouldn't be much left after 3000. Ferries were already being dispatched with the residents who could afford to get on the ships and save themselves.

But how much longer could the world function like that? Surely, at one point of time, there would be no land left, no safe haven to grow crop on and to mourn the dead and celebrate the living.

Maybe people would live on ferries.

There were special boats being made, special prototypes should the world ever face a position where there was no land left. These new boats would have artificial crops, artificial light, and artificial everything.

Aru threw a long look at the docks, looking at the newest ferry bringing in around five-hundred East Asians.

And then she looked away from the loss written, nay, scribbled on their faces in the well versed script of twisted agony.

People lost. People lived. It wasn't like life cared.

She spared a glance at the piazza della speranza, built when the South Asians and Australians lost their homes and had to travel to the colonising states.

She hastened her footsteps home. The sky was taking on the colour of a raven's plumage.

Then again, what really was home if not a jumble of words and sparse goodbyes? Perhaps she'd known a home before her mother took the coward's way out of life, as Aru called 'suicide'. Perhaps she'd known a home before she awoke one morning with her mother's throat and wrist slit by the knife in her hands and a thrown away half butterfly ring she'd always worn on her finger.

That ring, which had tasted the tang of blood, was steadily resting on her finger.

In front of her home, she always questioned herself. Inside, where it is safe, or outside, where it is sound.

Safety, or peace of mind?

And in the end, safety always won over.

The house reeked of alcohol, the shelves, once dotted with collections of expensive wines and liquors filled to the brim, now housed empty bottles that only had tags to prove their former contents of wealth.

Aru checked her father's room, and closed the door to his 'house', as she'd come to call it. He barely stepped out of the room.

He'd just fallen asleep, she assumed, based on the light snores of light sleep.

The screams would follow soon.

She shut the main door, closed all the curtains, checking the ones in her father's room again, making sure that they were indeed closed.

A spell of silence.

And then the shrieks.

He was never in the right state of mind after his wife died.

At times, she couldn't take it. She'd escape from the many windows and consider penning a note to the church and quietly disappearing into the forest, where she could live, or she would die.

All that, and then she'd think back to the man who'd once chased her around the house and tickle her until her stomach hurt and cook dinners for his wife and daughter and collect wines to open on the greatest occasions and fold paper songbirds for the one he'd loved with all his heart and the other he'd loved with an extra, hidden heart, as he used to claim.

She swallowed a sob.

The screams grew louder.

If she'd escaped on the ferry, would anyone have noticed?