Ambrose
looked past his bare and sunburned feet straight down into the sea. The mast to which he clung was nearly
horizontal at the extreme end of each roll that threatened to send the boat to
the bottom. As the vessel heeled back
upright he was carried up over the deck and then off the port side, riding an
inverted pendulum. His hands were
riddled with splinters, one of which had gone clear through the meat between
his thumb and forefinger. The muscles of
his forearms were so cramped that he did not think he could un-hook his arms
from around the pine.
Not that he
would want to. The creature was still on
deck, arranging pieces of the slaughtered crew into perverse constructions,
knitting the flesh together with gobs of caustic saliva that sputtered and
smoked in the howling wind. Legs and
arms ringed clusters of merged ribcages and jawbones, forming grisly anemones
that muttered and moaned long past the point when the sailors should have
died. Had the Captain not been
disemboweled and made part of that horrible work he would no doubt have steered
clear of the heavy weather.
And Ambrose
would not then have been at the top of the mast, debating whether history would
blame him for activating the distress beacon.
--Steve
Kilian
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