DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.
The Story
Danilo woke to the song of the crickets and the light of the moon cocooned in his plastic tarp blanket, which had a hole bigger than the one in his belly. He shivered at the sounds it made as he hugged it around himself against a fist of wind that had ridden off the sea from a place he just might go someday. Not today, though. The world had ended, and there was still so much to do.
He coughed a cobweb of phlegm onto his hand and rolled the strands between his fingers, then in the dirt when they wouldn’t come off.
A cricket chirped beside him on the cardboard mat where someone had slept once. For a moment, he thought in might be her, born into a simpler body for a simpler life, because she deserved better. What he deserved was breakfast.
He placed his hand flat on the cardboard mat. Veins strode over tendons and swerved around calluses, only to be severed by a deep scar that marked the end of his hand. He wondered where the blood went. Maybe it had all escaped from the wound and he was a zombie who didn’t know it yet.
Danilo whistled to the cricket through the gaps in his teeth, of which there were many. Not a harmonica by any stretch, but it did create a semblance of a melody that the cricket answered.
He was a fat one, the cricket. Plump thorax with eyes like jelly beans. Danilo gnashed his teeth imagining those legs crunching on his molars, the squish of juices rolling around his tongue so every tastebud got a nip. Then a swallow to channel the flotsam down the river of his gullet.
Danilo’s hand twitched. The cricket chirped. It perched on his knuckle, eyes no longer jelly beans but pebbles, smoothed by the sea. Fish swarmed above those stones, silver scales reflecting the trickling sunrays like gemstones.
“Sorry, my love,” Danilo said and clapped his other hand over the cricket. He transferred it to a Styrofoam cup and fastened the lid.
After gathering his nets, poles, and tackleboxes, because more than one of anything was always useful, he padded out into the dawn. On the way to the docks, he plucked a few worms waking from the soil to give the cricket company.
The docks swayed like the palms used to. Those trees stood bare now, matchsticks that hadn’t burned to their roots. The sea brought another wind to flick strings tied to one of those matchstick trees. The strings rose and brought the remains of a hammock, which flapped as if to say hello before dropping dead again to hide in the grass.
Other things were dead in the grass too. Big hands and little ones with curled fingers reached above the blades and stalks, and he wondered why he didn’t feel anything. He looked the way he had come, no footprints to mark that he had ever walked the path. Not a zombie. A ghost.
Danilo felt bad for not feeling a thing, so he moved on. The docks were a trap of their own, splitners and nails frozen in an explosion, the only things to keep them together. That and the ropes, still decorated with the festival banners. All shriveled now. Like him.
His stomach grumbled, and he jumped, landing on one of those splinters, perhaps a nail too. No pain came with the blood pooling from beneath his toes, purple and black. This brought tears to his eyes. He dabbed them on his tongue. They did not taste like the sea.
Danilo climbed under the dock where he kept his boat among pallets, cardboard, and bloated garbage bags so no one would find it but him in case there was anyone to find it. So far, no one had.
His boat rocked on the black water, trapped between two dock posts and camouflaged with a tarp not unlike the one that barely kept him warm. He flung it off and stepped onto the boat.
By now the clouds had retreated from the sun, which squatted on the horizon.
“I’m tired too,” Danilo said. A message he didn’t know he was to deliver. It was true, though. His shoulders and hands knotted as he prepared the vessel, using the oar to push away debris. They were persistent today, the bags heavier, the pallets stubborn with their legs locked in the water. He managed to clear a path and guide the boat out from under the dock, where he had to shield his eyes from the sun.
He laughed as the sun embraced him. The hole in his belly laughed, too. A family of water lilies swam up to greet him, but he knew water lilies didn’t grow in the ocean. He decided that’s what they were anyway, keeping them at the edge of his vision to not ruin the illusion.
Danilo bent to retrieve the Styrofoam cup and coughed up a handful of muck, which he covered with his foot.
He wiped his mouth. “Teamwork, eh?” The worm had crawled up the side of the cup with the cricket riding its head, its barbed legs firmly planted on the wall.
“All right,” he said. “All right.” He put the cup down and fetched his net along with his straw hat because the sun was tired no longer.
A deep breath cooled his lungs but did nothing to snuff the fire in his belly.
He sighed. He did not look back the way he had come and tossed the net into the air while the crickets chirped, and the worms writhed, and the water lilies gathered closely to keep his boat steady in the wind.
Danilo thought he should say something, give thanks to the bounty he would catch and the life he still possessed to hear the songs of the nights and see the brushstrokes of the mornings, but there was no one to listen, and there was so much to do.
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