The Eternal Sleep: A Collection of Short Stories

The MAYDAY Flower

Another day aboard the MAYDAY Flower, another ugly sea monster.

A severed shockingly pink tentacle flew over my head. But, I could be wrong. I only glimpsed it for a second, and I'm legally blind. Not totally blind. Just legally. I could see, for example, our captain, Captain Julie Rogers, in her heavy armour, yelling commands at my crewmates as they scrambled around the rugged and seven-times-repainted wooden planks swabbed earlier that afternoon by yours truly.

I could not, however, make out the flag that our ship hung on its foremast: the multicoloured decorative banner that I'm sure was a tablecloth below deck before we strung it up. It got named the Julie Roger (take one guess at who came up with that name, I dare you).

Lightning flashed, illuminating the light splotches of colour across the Captain's predominantly dark skinned neck and face. Despite what all those Swashbuckler Weekly magazine directors said the Captain could and couldn't do, she landed a sweet modelling gig just the other day. But the crew wasn't supposed to talk about that. The Captain was too humble.

"Hey, butter brain!" shouted Buddy, navigator and cancer survivor extraordinaire. "Stop gawking, and get your head in the fight!"

I was vaguely aware he was talking to me, but, like most times I dared gaze at his tattoos, I began piecing together his survivor story, all illustrated by the images covering his bald head. 

Across his crown - a tattoo of a faceless man holding two opposing towering walls from caving in on him that depicted his struggle and loss of identity. A tattoo of a lock of hair curling around his left ear represented what he lost most of: his dignity. And, my favourite: a rising sun on his forehead to show that you always have to have hope to be a survivor.

A loud boom jolted my attention to our very own trigger-happy cannoneer, Aminah Almasi, who had just fired a cannonball into the monster's gut.

Yes, Aminah was Muslim. But I'm going to spare you from making the uneducated assumption that I made when I met her. After a fight with a particularly nasty horde of killer squids (which are only almost as bad as killer crabs), I cautiously asked her whether she had ever used her cannon on people. She looked at me in horror and told me the truth: that she was a pacifist to all creatures but sea monsters.

And it wasn't long before she started dating our crewmember, Nicole, the cook from Indonesia. The only thing I really knew about Nicole was that she was the one who painted the "DAY" in "The MAYDAY Flower" on the hull after the Captain thought she named the ship after the famous pilgrim-carrying vessel. Besides that, she cooked. A lot.

As I watched Nicole throw sushi rolls at the sea monster, I thought: Wow, sure is great to have a unique crew, as well as: Oh, right, we're fighting a giant sea monster.