A cloud break drifted under the moon and mercifully passed after lighting up the no-man’s-land ahead; natty white manes and disfigured faces howled the pleas of all the lost souls of the sea, crowded that night in tumultuous endeavor. They stood on their heads, turned cartwheels or fell rigidly down on deck like dead men dropped on pavement. Or they vanished, leaving the moment weightless, hopeful that somehow hell had passed. The sickening fall came next. Crunching tons of Whirlaway in the boil boomed in our hearts and heads beyond doubt: disintegration, destruction, annihilation with no trace.
An hour into it, numbed to amazement that life went on, Jack yelled to go below and rest.
I lay in a berth listening to the war outside, knowing the rig would come through the deck and kill us quick. The nauseating noise of wood and fiberglass fracturing pounded my ears. Driving fingers into them, I said God. An hour later I went up to black and horizontal spray. “It’s building!”
“No! You forget!” He stepped aside to make room, so I could brace at the helm. He watched me dodge two and take a third on the chin then yelled instructions for steering through the breaking seas. Words were lost on the wind, drowned in the spray, and he went for his hour of hell below, away from the pummeling on deck, below, to questions of fate, free will and circumstance.
Whirlaway, the rule of the sea, in hardcover, paperback, ebook & audible: https://www.amazon.com/Whirlaway-rule-sea-Robert-Wintner-ebook/dp/B0DL3VTZDT