Steve

Suspended, Floating.

A soon-to-be corpse unraveling in salt.

Weighless in black water.

Neither alive nor lost; a purposeless memory refusing to sink.

Stones in his pockets. A discounted jacket, dragging him to the bottom.

Water poured into his lungs.

The moment he discovered he was alive, he thrashed for survival, bubbles snaking to the surface. Every sound—muffled, warped, blood surging in his ears. His thoughts fractured, and logic drowned. The suit was determined to pull him into the unknown. He prayed to someone else’s god to let his body float.

No answer to his prayer, his desperate whisper was swallowed by the deep.

Stubborn, the jacket tangled around his body, refusing to let him surface. Clinging to skin, twisting around his throat.

He untethered himself from the coat by instinct or dumb luck. One arm free, then the second.

His face burst through the surface, begging for breath. Coughing and treading angry water, he was washed ashore by the tide.

Not even the ocean could stomach him.

Crawling where the water met the earth, he spat and hacked, filling his lungs with air. Not chosen, not blessed, expelled from his own dark baptism.

Steve stumbled into a new kind of fog, tangled in seaweed, blank like the page no one bothered to write.

His lips peeled, still spitting salt into sand. Hacking, wheezing. His car was ten feet in front of him, the only witness to his awakening. He stood on uneven legs and stared at it like a newborn. Bewildered and ill-equipped.

The high beams had eyesight that cut through the clouded air, illuminating nothing. The door was wide open from a hasty exit. The engine sputtered at his unlikely return, like an uninvited guest that burst back through the door. The keys were in the ignition, and the car idled exactly how he had left it. He wobbled and climbed into it still dripping, the ocean’s sting eroding his tongue.

No applause, no radiant sunrise—just the cold GPS voice telling him the distance he must crawl to his decaying house buried in a maze of suburban sprawl.
The sea behind him glittered with a million indifferent eyes.
The beach is emptier than birth, emptier than death.
He peeled away, engine coughing, sand grinding between his teeth.

He doesn’t remember how he arrived.
He will not remember leaving.
All he knows is that the sea has expelled him, and the world expects nothing.

His finger stung from a deep cut. No knife had sliced his skin. He inherited the wound from the waitress in the parking lot. It never closed, and the infection festered.

I am that infection, I run through his blood, poisoning him day after day.