Little shafts of light broke through the opening of the cave and made shimmering little waves across the clear surface of the water. So, Sully thought, the sun had come out. That meant that he had been stuck for roughly five hours. The water was at his neck. Most of his body had gone numb. He wondered if he would ever experience flexing his fingers once again, and then he stared at the massive wall of collapsed rocks, and accepted that it wasn’t a possibility. The quivering lines on the water made the shadows on the underside of the cave, and it was almost beautiful. Almost. His eyes trailed from the smooth curve of the cave roof and he looked down through the crystal clear surface of the shimmering water and saw the cocked and twisted tentacles of the octopus that had got him into this mess, sticking out from beneath a sharp rock, one or two of them still hooked around his broken ankle. Smoky coils of blood had once twisted up into the water, and now hung like a thickened, foamy layer just beneath the surface of the clear, twinkling pool. It was like an ugly truth infecting rose-tinted memories.
Sully leaned back against the smoothened wall, sighing. His eyes drifted to the opening in the ceiling, where the weak sunlight was streaming through. That would be where he would ultimately end up, torn to shreds as the force of the gushing water and the jagged edges of the natural vent met in horrid harmony and created a twisted, agonizing death machine. Sully would be reduced to snapping bones and ripped flesh and jagged, shooting whirls of violent copper, like flute shaped flowers suddenly sprouting in an instant summer. This was a fact. The whole thing was a blowhole, and Sully had seen news stories before about swimmers and surfers that had been caught in the undercurrent and forced through the blowhole, showering their insides and broken pieces upon innocent bystanders. In fact, he was sure that the only thing that had stopped it from happening immediately was the cave-in that had killed the octopus. But the water had begun to trickle in, slowly but surely, and Sully was sure that eventually there would be enough pressure for the explosion to happen. The only thing that could possibly change was whether or not he drowned before he was shattered by a natural process. So he would die either way. He knew he would. So. What did a dying man do? Typically when someone heard stories of someone knowing that they were going to die, it would be one of those lovely stories where they turned their lives around, and for the next six months or whatever they published a couple of books, or became a firefighter or something and it was this big, beautiful story. But what would someone do when they knew that their life was going to end and couldn’t act upon it?
Sully lay there, and then he did the one thing that someone in his situation could do, almost an act of defiance against the tightening constraints of his dire situation. He began to reminisce on the life that he had had. The first thing that he thought of, funnily enough, was the night that his sister had been born. He remembered, vaguely, and almost halfheartedly, that he had been sitting on a little wooden chair that had stood for years in the lounge of his parents' old flat. His little legs had been swinging contentedly, innocence personified, when the door had opened, and in had come his mom and his dad with this squirming creature swaddled in blankets. Sully was sure that whatever had actually happened had been ripped up by the way that age and life changed things.But the thing he was sure of, the thing that he was absolutely certain had actually happened was when he first saw Claire, and she had looked up at him with her big, round, brown eyes, and she had reached up and grabbed his finger and tugged at it with a toothless smile, as though to say I’m taking you with me.
Sully smiled, and he remembered him and Claire as teenagers, learning to skateboard together, he remembered tumbling and skin tearing and scars forming. Flashing lights and the world rolled over and over and there were purples and blacks and sudden sparks and then he was lying on his back, legs curled up a tree trunk, staring up at the branches and Claire was laughing in shock and delight as the white bone of her shin gleamed through the lightning shaped wound. Their skateboards were rolling away, a guttural throttling sound along the gravelly tar. Claire had a childish laugh. Not in a frustrating way, but in an innocent way, a laugh that was unbothered by everything except joy and happiness. He remembered her laughing after she and her ex Zach had broken up. No. She had started by crying, and then he had tried his best to make her happy and make her laugh. And it worked. That was the thing with them. Everyone else had always talked about how their siblings were always fighting, and about how you didn’t love your siblings if you didn’t always fight with them. But he and Claire had never argued with each other. They had always been on the same page. The water was almost at his mouth.
There was the car crash when he was eighteen, when the car had flipped, and he and Claire had pressed their hands to the sides as it tumbled over and over and over itself. Life had flashed before eyes, metal had screeched, glass had shattered, and then the car came to rest against the curve of a tree and a smooth rock. He remembered hearing Claire’s laugh, delirious. He remembered the smell of blood and the feeling that his brain was still rattling around in his head. He looked over at her, and saw little rivulets of blood running down her face, and that same shocked laughter, unbothered by the pain that she was feeling. There was a bit of a sharp memory there though, something that Sully had been shying away from. But if there was any time to remember it, it was then. He remembered his parents, and how they had blamed him. How it was apparently his fault that the accident had happened, that he shouldn’t have been driving with her so late at night.
But that was how they saw Claire, that was how everyone had seen Claire. He twitched. The water level was past his mouth now, and when it reached his nostrils, that would be it. He had to take a step, and for a moment, be honest. Because Claire had panicked when they had been skateboarding and she had grabbed at him desperately, just like how years later, she had grabbed at the wheel when he had driven them around the corner. The tire screech, the twisting metal and the shattering glass had all been an extension of her, like she was some kind of evil magician, waving her hand to manipulate reality. But that was the worst part. Was that she wasn’t evil or malicious or anything like that. She just panicked easily. And Sully had enabled her by always taking her out and on adventures and then getting frustrated when her fear and panic would cause issues. At the end of the day, some stories didn’t have villains or evil people or heroes, some stories just had people and mistakes. Which brought him to the moment when his breathing was becoming difficult. The water level was still rising, and with every breath through his nostrils, he made little currents across the surface. Reminiscing was a dying man's art, while lying still belonged to the living. Everyone knew the dangers of the undercurrent that sucked the water into the blowhole, Sully knew it damn well. So he stopped lying to himself. What was wrapped around his broken ankle was not a crushed octopus, but a set of mangled fingers.
He remembered how Claire had panicked as she toppled from her board and grabbed his ankle, wrenching him into the water with her. Grabbed his ankle even though he had told her not to panic over and over again.
There had been a sudden, vicious tug, his ankle joint had groaned from the force, and then they were sucked away by the current.
He looked at Claire's broken fingers as he took his last breath. The water rose past his nose.
He hoped that she had suffocated slowly under the weight of the crushing rocks. He hoped it hadn’t been a quick death.
Sully finally stopped lying to himself.
He had always hated his sister.
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