A true story told in the style of Edgar Allen Poe
‘Twas the third day. The third day that the incessant sound of water being sprayed from a hose onto the echoing metal of the ship stirred me from my sleep and slowly filled my bosom with annoyance. Droplet by droplet, the annoyance accumulated until it was like a Sisyphean boulder made of water that your hands and body can find no purchase to push. Try as you might, the watery gargantuan grows with each watery pebble added to its girth and simply envelopes your hands, arms, body and soul.
How long had it been spraying it’s aquatic taunt? For the previous two days, it must have gone on for several hours, and today seemed to see no end as well. Time skews as I drift in and out of sleep, trying to ignore the aural leviathan. What possibly needs to be sprayed with that much water so often? The walls? The floor? The ceiling? In an echoing metal ship, the sound is impossible to precisely locate and yet sounds as if it comes from within the very walls themselves. It gets softer, as if perhaps they’ve moved on to a section further away. Occasionally it stops, giving me hope that once again slumber might take me in its welcoming embrace, but then it returns and with each subsequent visit, my heart beats faster in my bosom. Is this what going mad feels like?
Each rivulet colliding with a metallic cackle pierces me like a meteor shower to my planetary body leaving me cratered and pock marked and pushing my sanity slowly out of its orbit. Three days of this seemingly perpetual hydrolytic cacophony buffeting my eardrums until my very heart in my bosom has no choice but to fall into a rhythmic duet. This hydra is my master now. I will arise from my bed, giving up my dream of sleep, for the only other choice is madness. I am awake now, resigned to my fate as a slave to the dancing duo of hydrogen molecules in a ménage-a-trois with their oxygen lover, and their countless identical allies. Why, I myself am made primarily of these trios and never stood a chance. They are inside me.
And then silence. Now that I am awake, silence. Where the mocking marine melody once made its music, now an empty, silent, and all too awake space in my bosom, like an empty bed after a lover’s all too abrupt departure. Its work is done. I’m not mad, I’m simply virtually and aurally hydrated. Look into my wide and watery eyes and you will see I’m not mad. The glistening teeth, tongue, and lips of my enveloping smile are well lubricated, but I am not mad. Perhaps you just feel my water calling to yours.
Bosom.