Trapped Inside His Mind

• Olivia Yun, Grade 6, Matthew Pearce Public School
• Short Story
• 2022

Excellence Award in the 'Summertime Fun ONLINE' competition

He was trapped. A prisoner in his own mind of monotony, taking comfort in the putrid stench of diesel and mouldy tar. He curls his weathered fingers around the wheel and gazes at the immutability of his surroundings. Remnants of glass bottles, cigarette butts and other ocean debris lay scattered across the ocean, helplessly bobbing to and fro, puny compared to the strength of mother nature. His eyes flicker forwards. A brilliant haze now rests on the low shores that run out to the sea in vanishing flatness as stringy silhouettes of spectral illuminations of moonshine sparkle. In another seaman’s eyes, the ocean was a tranquil escape from reality, polluted…yet strangely beautiful.
However, a change comes over the waters.
The petrichor smelling wind becomes bitter and the sky turns into nothing but a dark immensity of gauzy darkness. The sun seems to fade completely, and the oceans churn with a growing drive. And the once brilliant haze becomes less spectacular and more profound. Moments pass. The ocean waters churn, its claws crashing through the water as if they were flames. Violent flames. Pursuing, hunting, roaring, combining into great currents of powerful surges. What wreckage had been caused by these hungry beams of power! The lives, the dreams, the opportunities of men…lost.
The ocean’s patience is wearing thin, and with an infuriated leap into the air, it crashes down, pouring onto the boat. The old seaman is launched out and thrown into the murky depths of the sea. He lays there on his back staring at the night sky, in the midst of the incomprehensible. His entire body, motionless. A mere piece of garbage bobbing up and down in the fury of currents.
For a long time, he floats there. Darkness enveloping the world to pitch black. Perhaps he has fallen asleep… or worse. He is unaware of anything, stuck in his mind.
But something flickers in his broken mind.
Fluffy feckless clouds hurrying across the vast expanse of warm hues of blue, with shadowed fragments of mountains and cliffs. A chubby young ginger haired adolescent with bright blue eyes waddles through rows of pollen-filled honeysuckle as songbirds of greys and beautiful yellows chirp their own merry tunes. The young boy extends a pudgy hand and grasps a red ripe apple from the padded grass. He smiles as he takes a sweet bite out of it, juice running down his fingers, blinded by his childlike innocence.
The old man stares, and slowly reaches a trembling hand towards the boy. It was himself. His past. The boy looks up, and smiles a sticky grin, offering the half-eaten apple to him. The man laughs, eyes sparkling with happiness. Yet when he touches the apple and notices it’s slimy…wet. Puzzled, he blinks, and realises he is falling. Falling into the ocean’s murky depths of despair. Down. Down. Down…
The old man closes his eyes, and smiles, as his world fades to black.