Coral Blossom

• Zoe Gangell, Grade 12, The Friends School
• Short Story
• 2022

Excellence Award in the 'Summertime Fun ONLINE' competition

Crackle, pop. Crackle, pop.
It fills my ears like the ticking melody of a music box. Sharp, stabbing and sweet. Gusts of wind swirl and collide, pushing up dust and sand as if a hurricane were sweeping through the land. Barren plains stretch untouched between zestful cities like valleys of death and demise. Skyscrapers rise above the dwellers, the current swaying their movement but never forcing their way. Instead, they flitter amongst themselves, familiar within this world.
It all seems too much and just enough at the same time. All the sounds and sensations blend to capture my absolute awe.
Crackle, pop.
My thoughts drift to when I had danced, drank, and dared Death to do his best. With nothing left, everyone had cheered, throwing their crazed joy and left-over happiness with whole abandon into the starless night. Now. Now I feel the full weight of loss that I forget with the rising sun. Now I stare into Death’s soulless eyes.
Crackle, pop.
It’s consuming. Eating away like the slow drip, drip of a dainty droplet atop my skull. My ears fill with a silent ring as I glide through the endless world surrounding me, suffocating me. It blisters and grows a sore inside my head. Scratching and scraping at my eardrums until I have to flee to the blindingly bright surface. Gunpowder is thick in the air when I gulp and flounder at the sun as a fish would while stranded ashore. Scanning the water’s surface, I try and try and pray and beg and beg to God.
Crackle, pop.
She did not jump. There is nothing under the fractured sky. Her name is on the tip of my tongue; the weight of its body and metallic taste. Her name was in Death’s mouth.
Crackle, pop.
Thunder rumbles without a cloud in the sky before a cloud of water erupts from my right. It breaks my skull and sears my face with its boiling grasp and forces me below. The ringing silence can do nothing to mask the echoing screams inside my head.
Rising with clusters of bubbles, I think to yell ‘Tanya!’.
Salt digs into my eyes, pulling them from their sockets and leaving behind a polaroid of reality. Shaky. Blurry. The water has become tainted. My ears feel slick and when I raise a hand and flinch from the stinging contact, warm red blooms against the white canvas of my fingers. My hands refuse to stop shaking. Pale. Blue. Trembling with every attempt to stay afloat. My legs are numb, caught in Frost's tight hold.
If I live, I think to myself, If I live, I may never walk again.
Regardless, I cry out, ‘Tanya!’ in pathetic anguish.
It’s drowning. It’s drowning her. It’s her drowning in the sea of sound and sight. She is drowning in the terror and the panic and the pain from where she sits in the cockpit. I can hear her static, sharp, shuddering breaths and stifled sobs.
Crackle, pop.
‘Tanya!’