Storytime: "THE FIRST LIFE OF ANACOY MARLIN"

THE FIRST LIFE OF ANACOY MARLIN
by William Pauley III

I only knew that I was drowning.

By the time I realized what was happening to me, I was already fully submerged in treacherous ocean water, riding the current, and no matter how hard I kicked back at the rolling tide, I seemed no closer to its surface. I was tossed and battered and crushed by every folding wave, my body a knot, tangled in every direction. I opened my mouth to scream, an involuntary compulsion brought on by fear, but water forced the words back down my throat. It was cold and dark, and the only end in sight was my own.

I nearly gave in to the punishing tide, however, just before my lungs burst, my fingers brushed upon solid ground, or at least what I first perceived to be solid ground. My body had become so helplessly twisted that I wasn’t sure which way was up. As it turned out, the thing that had brushed against my fingers wasn’t solid ground at all, but instead the next best thing: the underside of a wooden raft.

It was piecemeal and crude, something manufactured within a matter of hours. There was an urgency to its construction, as each of its five wooden logs were held in place by a single thread of rope, entwined at each end and once through the middle. The damn thing hardly held together as I threw my full weight upon it. The logs shifted below me jarringly as I crawled across its length. I had to quickly figure a way to keep balanced, or else risk being tossed right back into those treacherous black ocean waters. I found the raft made my predicament infinitely better, however it wasn’t enough to fully snuff out the fear.

Still, it was a miracle.

Once I was resting still upon the surface, my body fell limp as a white flag, unconscious. The blistering cold and pelting rain was no match for utter exhaustion. With ease, I slipped into dreaming and didn’t wake up until morning.

---

When I awoke, I found I was no longer alone.

Another body was there on the raft with me, curiously sitting at the opposite end. I say curiously, because he seemed totally incapable of being in that position, given his deteriorated physical state. Still, he rode each wave with ease, his body a rock, unmoving.

He was dead. That much was apparent upon first glance of his bloated body. Not only was he dead, but he’d been dead a long time. The corpse wore nothing but a black pair of shorts, and even those were mostly buried beneath rolls of flesh. He was large, impossibly large—and his skin was seeping some thick oily fluid. The backside of his body was tinged such a deep shade of red it almost appeared brown, the result of having been cooked under the sun for several days. All of him was completely absent of hair, which caused him to look like some beached whale, rotting in the morning light. A glass bottle containing a rolled sheet of notebook paper and nothing else was clutched in his swollen left hand.

I thought about his presence, there on the raft with me. How did it happen? No one had been there the night before, I knew that much for certain. And it wasn't a simple case of amnesia either, nor the result of some terrible brain trauma. There was no one else there. No one. I was sure of it. So who was this man? Somehow he washed upon the raft—sometime in the night, when I was sleeping—and now he was just…there. It was believable enough, had he not been sitting. I damn sure couldn’t explain that.

Oh, and there were words written all over his body. Tattoos. They were small and covered every square inch of him, spiraling fluidly, so it was easy to read. There were so many words and sentences that it could’ve been a book, and once I started reading, I found that’s exactly what it was. The text seemed ancient, from some other time, religious in nature, though it didn’t belong to any religion I’d ever studied.