The Resistance of Memory

The Resistance of Memory

The cold, deep and pernicious with steely probing fingers, enveloped his descent. It poured through his suit, cracks and seams that were exposed pulsed with the streamline flow. A gentle caress rubbed his skin to a dead numbness that alarmed his mind; the cold water was turning his nerves into corpses, with only the clammy reminder of connection and strained—the tendons in his neck worked tremendously against the pressure—sight.

Fragmented thoughts withered on vines of memory and tears slowly fell from his eyes.

Charlie, he had been called, Charlie Adams, a well loved man with a fiery temperament and a vast cavern of care. He had a wife and two children. They were grown and gone, but still alive. As infants their hands had grasped the air when they wanted to be lifted. A smile lifted and hurt his cheeks.

Feebly, with eyes swollen shut by the poison salt water, his fingers twitched. They opened outward, pulling away from his palm, away from the ocean’s will. Rapidly they shut again, a stabbing pain moving up from his hand and into his shoulders.

Still alive and enjoying a vacation with his family, his children had grown. The oldest had carried the name fondly, and married a beautiful girl. Three children had come from his oldest child, and when he visited their place by the ocean their hands would work out and then in.

The smile snapped to a grimace like the cracking of earth, and blood spouted from the corner of his mouth. It colored the sea water a dark maroon, deep and vivid, but quickly drifted into the vastness of nothingness of the water. A heave bent him slightly and a cough of more ragged blood tore out. Yet his pain was not enough to keep the smile away. He forced it back, exposing a good many browned and caked teeth; beaming he wanted to laugh. His fingers pried from the flesh of his palm, both right and left, and shakily, crooked and jagged, opened; then closed shut to mark fingernails on his skin.

At the beach, their toes dragging in the warm sand and building trenches for the salted water, the day had settled into a calm pleasantness. His oldest son spoke dearly, but slowly to him about the family affairs. It would seem that the youngest had had encounters with the difficulty of law; only minor, and besides love was too strong to allow anything bad to happen. With smiles as radiant as the sun, his child’s children were at each side with one of his hands. They released their grasp and jumped over the wave and back into the sand; their tiny feet making small prints in the ground.

His descent began to slow; the cold wrapped around his body and dulled his senses. When his feet touched the ground, leaving the large and distorted prints of his boots, he did not know he had stopped. Another cough, a heave of pieces of his stomach, turned his glass mask into a spattered painting. Knees turned inward, he fell down; into the warm embrace of the darkness of the ocean, his breath a heavy wheeze that seemed to match the beating of his heart. Blood evenly trickled from the corner of his eyes, replacing the salted tears, but not the emotion. Gingerly, he turned his work back to his hand and tried to close his fingers. Then his hand exploded, bursting outward from every point with a hurricane of blood and bone. The fingers though were against his palm, because he had felt nothing.

His child’s children had run, the oldest backwards into the comfort of his father, the youngest into the approaching tidal wave. It roared above their heads, sucking the air like a vacuum and growing, turning the coral reefed ocean floor into rabble. Eyes wide, heart a series of irregular palpitations, Charlie plunged forward through the muck and after the youngest. Fear addled his sense and screamed urgency into his ear. One foot was torn with the sharp edge of a shell, and blood moved behind his path in a twisted river. Bothered by the tear and limping badly, he broke into a heavy run. Breathing was becoming difficult and troubled, a deep hitch embedded in his side. The youngest, seeing the brutality and destruction of the coming wave, wavered and then fell. Behind him the calls continued to float. A single tear escaped his eye, and he drew breath in, preparing to drown. Heavy arms lifted him from the armpits, and dragged him backward. They raced together toward the shore, turning to see the wave approaching closer and closer. His child’s youngest closed his eyes and fainted, so Charlie carried him. He turned one last time, a glimmer of hope in his eye, and the wave swallowed them both.

A crack slid down the smooth glass and the red water rushed outward. His smile though remained in place as his eyeballs pushed outward out of the socket and the helmet shattered. The pressure torched his exposed body, turning him into use for the fish, and he was no more.

Charlie Adams, a deep sea diver with high, ambitious, and lofty goals, smiled as death claimed him—at age 27, with no wife, no children, and no surviving family.




**
Like fire, a torment
A morbid liar, a refusal to share, a hardship to care
Always there, always vacant with shadows
Not enough just to be enough
Not nothing but never something
Always it grows, a sapling from the vine
One taste
Not enough just to be enough
One savor
Not something but never nothing
One lasting
A withered branch from thought
What wanted never sought