Cold-stunned sunfish wither in Rock Harbor. Debrided by sand, water, and wind, shore birds pick their carcasses clean. We build rafts out of reeds and pretend we’re sinking.
We are obsessed with capsized boats, fascinated with the Titanic and shipwrecks. We succumb to a watery grave, waving like seaweed. Then we are stiff with death. Our souls ascend, dissolve like oxygen bubbles into air.
“Everyone dies,” my sister says, dragging a stick through the sand.
“Everyone seems afraid,” I reply.
Our parents evade the topic, but the inevitable hangs over our heads. Birds starve in trees. Animals appear skeletal in the scrub.
“They would be better without us,” my sister says, gesturing to the seagulls and seals bobbing in the waves.
We arrange stones and grass into flower shapes.
On the playground, we steer our classmates toward an iceberg. Everyone screams, clawing and gasping, climbing the jungle gym to avoid their fate.
We leaf through books in the school library. Pictures of dining saloons, cafés, luxury rooms, a jagged gash in the starboard helm. The lack of lifeboats baffles us. Most of the workers died. Fifteen-hundred people: drowned or froze in the Atlantic.
Our teacher calls our parents after we tell the lunch lady she wouldn’t have made it on April 15, 1912.
“The crew fared the worst,” my sister says.
The school counselor is concerned for our mental wellness.
Our mother says humanity is the Titanic, so why wouldn’t we be fascinated with the systemic inequity of a sinking vessel? She bought the film on VHS in 1998.
We start asking adults about death. Their answers vary. At a family cookout, Uncle Derek quotes a motivational speaker and asks us if we’re humans having a spiritual experience or spirits having a human experience. Behind him, our aunt’s Great Dane devours a groundhog. We shrug. Uncle Derek shrugs and takes a sip of beer.
Our cousin sits on the porch. He says we get so absorbed in the details of our own lives, we become oblivious to the vastness between. His girlfriend just broke up with him, and all joy is drained from his face. We get him a ginger ale and a brownie.
“You think you know someone,” he says.
We float in the pool and stare at the clouds. My sister says Jack. I say Rose, like a weird game of Marco Polo.
No one has good answers.
Fireworks explode.
After the party, we sleep outside. We shine our flashlights at the top of the tent. We talk about ants and capsized boats. We talk about dinosaurs and meteors. We tell ghost stories and wonder whether the band aboard the Titanic held onto their instruments as the boat tipped. We imagine gentlemen in water-filled rooms. We make our flashlights shudder like the ship’s dying electrical system, a twinkle into blackness. We imagine the future. The future is bleak. Our mom apologizes for bringing us into the sixth extinction. She says she was being overly optimistic, she had hope. We respect her delusion because we love her. In the morning, we walk to Rock Harbor.
My sister and I know we are hurtling towards the eschaton, the final event we all know is coming. We can’t help but speculate that there is meaning in existence. We spend hours staring at the insides of wood lilies. We hold our magnifying glasses up to beetles. Pollen clings to the foot of a bee. Many lifeforms are still left. Time dissolves in hyperspace. We wonder how fast human thoughts move relative to other processes: cellular division, bacterial proliferation, rain cloud formation. We estimate how long the coral reef that has formed in the ruins of the Titanic will last. We linger at the bottom of the ocean with the crabs and fish that live in the wreckage. Iron rusts, the walls bend, there is motion and flexibility, distortions in sound and vision.
“Pretty soon everything will be nothing,” my sister says.
“I just don’t understand why it has to be so gruesome.”
***
Rumpus Original illustrations by Madeline Kreider Carlson
