SHORT SHARP FICTION

Barini’s Choice

Barini cinched tight the strings of the cork vest as the liner’s stern rose from the sea. Jump now, into water so cold he’d freeze in an hour, or ride Titanic down where he could be crumpled in a short second. 

Some choice.

An hour ago those on deck were civilized creatures, queueing calmly in front of the davits. Now all was frenetic savagery: adults stripped children of life vests; swimmers fought over what little flotsam drifted below the leviathan’s exposed keel before the icy water numbed their muscles. Now, gun shots rang out as crewmen tried launching a lifeboat.

Water. It would be a drop of forty feet. He shivered, not from chill, but fear. Stepping over the railing he launched into the night.

Next he fell sinking into a frigid abyss. Weighed down like an ingot, water pressed his skull like a choking collar. Legs flailing, fighting being sucked to the bottom, he surfaced suddenly, as if a great hand snatched him from the depths.  

Groaning, twisting metal, breaking steel fell around Barini. From somewhere came the muffled cough of an explosion.

Cold, so cold made him yearn for the brilliant warmth of a Baghdad sun, but knew only a  frigid sleep awaited him. Or did it.

Upon breaking the water instead of an icy night, a desert heat had become a searing pain. Flames licked his face.

Someone pulled him from a burning wreck of steel.

He didn’t know why, just that he knew the place was called Anbar. The vehicle,  a Hummer. The girl whose eyes stared through him, had come from Iowa. Rifle shots. Grenades. Rockets. A friend, Marl, shouting in the distance, “Barini, the medevac’s here.”   

            Breathe. Try. But it was as if he were trying to suck sea water into roasted lungs.  

            He closed his eyes in hope.

Back in the dark water, amid a mass of bobbing sleepers. All quiet now, borne along,  aimless in the black calm.

Drifting, weaving out and in of dreams, Barini just wanted solitude. That man Marl kept shouting nagging words. Words like “hang on.’ ‘Hang on’ as if the choice of life was his to make.

Thankful for the choice he possessed, Barini rested his head on the cork of the vest. Marl’s voice fading to an annoying echo disappearing into the vastness of time. Toilworn, he closed his eyes, welcoming the promise of slumber as he drifted along on the cold calm sea.

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