What does it take to survive?

What do you prioritize?

How do you face the unknown?

Stranded on a small boat that was dead to the waters, Gary Chamberline struggles to survive long enough to be rescued . But it’s not just the sun, or the lack of food and water, that he must worry about. Beneath the ocean lies creatures both deadly and… strange?

Atlantic Ocean, August 2000

Somewhere in the vast ocean between South America and Africa, a small cabin cruiser boat not meant for the deep seas floated there, dead to the waters. For two days I survived aboard the visibly damaged vessel, hiding from the sun in the tiny bit of shade near the helm. By my calculations I had a day’s worth of food and perhaps two days’ worth of water if I really stretched it but neither of those were my immediate concern. My true concern was far worse.

I was nearly out of cigarettes.

Woefully, I stared into the mostly empty pack and at the two remaining smokes. Which was soon to be just one. It had been almost five hours since my last and I couldn’t hold off any longer. With a decent overcast to the sun, I decided to get up and stretch my legs by walking the small hull of the boat. I walked to the stern and stared at the place where the engine had once been and wondered yet again how I’d been so unlucky. I like to think of myself as a person who’s always prepared, but nothing in this world had prepared me for this situation. Surviving without cigarettes. After some time, I lit the cigarette that had been dangling from my lips and took a long slow inhale. The soothing burn of the smoke set off my dopamine receptors so hard that after a few drags I started to think that maybe I could make it through this. Then I remembered I only had one left, and any thought of hope went up in, well, up in smoke.

I moved from the back of the boat to the side, resting my arm against the rail while watching the steady rise and fall of the ocean. As I stared out into the vast emptiness I couldn't help but think ‘at least it can’t get any worse’.

I should have known better.

As I stood there contemplating mortality and death, the form of a slender woman rose out of the ocean blue. Naturally, my first thought was that I was hallucinating the incredibly beautiful woman who had suddenly appeared before me, but then she spoke and I wasn’t so sure.

“Hello there, sailor. You’re looking a bit worse for wear.” The woman smiled widely. A flirtatious drawl to her words.

“That’s one way to put it,” I said, still not sure if I was actually speaking to something other than a figment of my mind. The woman laughed and started moving closer to the boat, which was when I got my first glimpse of what lay just below the surface. “So, you’re a mermaid? Huh.”

“If that’s what you’d like to call me,” she said. “Sailors have called us many things over the years, so I don’t really mind which term you use.”

“Fair enough. I gotta say though, your English is pretty good for someone who lives in the oceans.”

Again, the mermaid laughed. It was an angelic sound, one that was starting to loosen up my weary heart.

“Language comes easy to us merfolk. And I’ve had a long time to practice. I am much older than I appear.” She paused, then added, “I hope you don’t mind.” The bashful look she gave me was so obviously practiced it was almost cartoonish, but for some reason I chose to ignore it.

“Not at all. In fact, I’ve always found myself drawn to more mature women.”

“I see. That’s good. Tell me, sailor, what is your name?”

“Gary, Gary Chamberlin. And what might I call you? Oh beautiful mistress of the sea.”

“My name is Ariel.”

Hearing that name, given what I was talking to, left me absolutely stunned. “Ariel? The Ariel? Holy crap, really?”

“No,” she said in a fit of laughter. “My name is Seripha.” After that, she asked me what had happened to my boat, and I told her about the large shark that had bitten off the engine.

“Ah yes, I know him. I know he didn’t leave a great first impression, but he’s really not a bad person. Or bad shark, as it were.”

I wanted to question her declaration, but the more she spoke, the less I seemed to care. Indeed, I found myself utterly enamored by the creature that was before me. Everything about her was inviting. I understand now why so many sailors told tales and made songs about them.

We talked for a few minutes, and I did my best to put on the charm, but the only one who was charmed was me.

“I don’t suppose you have a boat or something that could get me to shore?” I asked jokingly.

Suddenly, it was as if there was a cold chill in the air that wasn’t there before.

“No, but I could carry you. Why don’t you dive on in, and I’ll take you wherever you want to go.”

Have you ever found yourself making a decision that you know is bad and it’s like you’re a spectator watching it? You even seem to have enough time to sit there and yell “No, no, please don’t do it!” That was me as I started to climb over the rail.

Out of nowhere the boat began to rock back and forth as something bumped up against it from below. I quickly found myself thrown back hard onto the floor of the boat. Panic set my heart racing. I started to shout as the massive form broke the surface tension, but my shouts were cut short when I realized what it was.

“Oh wow,” I said. Even in my desperate and distraught state I couldn’t help but marvel at the beauty of the large creature that had come up beside me. A fully grown humpback whale. It’s hard to imagine just how big they are up close. Or how beautiful. This one seemed extra special. A large ring of barnacles had grown around its head, almost mimicking a crown. Momentarily forgetting about the siren who just tried to lure me into the waters, I asked, “What are you doing here, big guy? You know you scared the hell out of me? But look at you. One hell of a last thing to see before I go.” The thought of death brought me back to reality and I began searching the seas for the mermaid who was surely out there still. It took several minutes to think that I may not hear the famed call to the ocean’s depths, but I remained wary.

 Eventually, I turned my attention back on the whale and found that I was still in awe. Slowly, almost subconsciously, I took out the pack that contained my last cigarette. I knew I would regret it, but everything that had happened over the last few minutes was too much for me to handle. Hesitating for only a moment, I lit it and inhaled but it did not bring me the relief I was looking for. In a bout of rage, I crumpled up the pack and threw it at the large animal. It bounced pathetically off the creature’s hide, who probably didn’t even notice it.

“Hey, that was awfully rude.”

The voice sounded close.

I immediately whipped around expecting to find someone there with me on the boat or perhaps a new mermaid hanging off the side but there was no one to be seen.

“What the hell?” I muttered. “Must have been my imagination.”

“No, over here.” Frustrated, I stood in the middle of the boat and turned around in all directions again but still couldn’t find the source of the voice. “Seriously? You were looking right at me.”

I slowly turned to face the whale, whose large eye stared back at me.

“Am I really hearing voices already? I haven’t even finished my last smoke. Is there even really a whale here?”

“Uh, are you feeling okay, pal?”

“I don’t think so. Not unless all whales talk and I just never heard about it.”

“What? No, I’m not the whale. I’m up here.” Confused, I carefully looked about the boat for signs of anyone else but as far as I could see it was only me and the whale. “No, you keep looking right at me. Here, on top of the whale’s head. See?” I just stood there staring for several moments but the only thing there was the semi-crown of barnacles. “That’s right. You’re looking right at me.”

“You mean…” Gary made a circle overtop his head

“Exactly! Geez. I was starting to worry that your brain might have been fried by the sun.”

“Oh, uh, sorry. I never met a sentient barnacle before. My mistake.”

“No need to apologize. The truth is, I don’t get many opportunities to speak with people.”

“Yeah, that makes sense.” My mind was reeling. How on earth was I talking to barnacle? “Umm, I hope you don’t mind me asking but how is it that you are, well, you know, speaking?”

“That’s a great question.”

“Uh-huh. And the answer to that question would be?”

“I don’t know. I just started talking one day and, as luck would have it, old OOOahOOO here understood me and started speaking back. Speaking of, say hi OOOah. I call him OOOah for short.” The whale opened its mouth and let out a haunting cry.

“Uh, hi Oh-ah-oh, it’s, umm, nice to meet you. My name is Gary. And what about you? I don’t suppose your name is King Barnacle or something?

“Oh, no, that would be ridiculous.”

When after a few seconds it became clear the talking barnacle wasn’t going to supply more information without being prompted, I took a slow, deep breath before I asked, “What is your name then?”

 “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“Well, the thing is, I don’t really have a name. OOOah here calls me OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO but you can call me something different if you’d like.”

This was nearly too much, and I was just a few drags away from being entirely out of smokes but after a few moments a name did pop into my head. “I suppose I’ll call you Benny.”

“Benny the Barnacle… I like it!”

Benny, as it turned out, was the overly curious type. And that’s coming from me. For several minutes the barnacle launched question after question. Mostly I didn’t mind, as they were largely about me, a subject that I could talk near endlessly on. Eventually the questions slowed and I finally got a chance to ask him where he was from and, better yet, what the hell he really was.

Benny was more than happy to answer; unfortunately, his answers to both questions were, “I don’t know.”

“As far as I remember, I just kinda was one day. Growing on top of my best friend here.”

“Are there others like you?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never met anyone else like me, but I had to come from somewhere, right?”

“Yeah, I suppose so.”

We talked for several minutes before the sun peeked through the clouds and reminded me just how thirsty I was. Which then reminded me just how little water I had.

“Hey, listen, I don’t suppose your friend could pull this boat to land?”

Benny didn’t immediately answer. It wasn’t until the whale splashed his tail a few times that Benny finally said, “Yeah, that’s not gonna happen. There’s nothing for him to grab onto.”

“Ah, well, that’s that then.” Instinctively I reached for the pack that wasn’t there and was hit with a fresh wave of despair. “I don’t suppose you smoke?”

“Is that a serious question?”

I let out a defeated sigh but then shook my head, a soft chuckle escaping my lips. “No, I suppose it isn’t.”

Nothing was said for a little while after that, I was lost in my thoughts, no longer able to push off the fear of impending death. The other two also seemed lost in thought, although what those may have entailed is beyond me.

OOOahOOO let out his haunting call, finally breaking the silence.

“That is a good idea,” Benny said. “Why don’t we just give you a ride?”

I didn’t answer right away. I just stared, trying to judge how serious he was being. “You’re kidding, right?” The thought of getting onto the whales back and riding across the ocean left me feeling queasy.

“Do you really have a better option?”

Silently I turned to look at the small cooler that held the last crumbs of food and the last bottle of water.

“How far are we from land?”

“OOOah says it might take a couple days.”

For several minutes I just stood there weighing my options. Already I had floated out at sea for almost three days, and it didn’t seem like anybody was coming to rescue me. Which made sense, no one really knew that we’d come out here. After a long deliberation, I finally said, “All right, let’s do this thing.” I went and retrieved the cooler and with careful grace, got atop the whale. While I admit at first my balance was quite rocky, it didn’t take me long until I found my footing. There I was, standing atop this majestic creature, cruising across the ocean, heading towards unknown –

New York, 2016

“All right, enough,” Robbie said, shaking his head in exasperation. He sat in a slowly rotating chair that he had dragged into Gary’s office. With Ilya and Emily out on a weekend spa trip, Robbie, Marco, and Gary had decided to go out for drinks and ended up back at Gary’s place afterwards, where he, as usual, began to regale them with stories of his past.

“What?” Gary asked indignantly. “I was almost at the end of my story.”

“I’m sorry, but no. I’ve heard you say some wild stuff, but this is ridiculous. I could believe it if you said you’d met a mermaid. Hell, I can almost believe in sentient barnacle. After all, I’ve seen my fair share of the weird and wacky, but there’s no way you ran into both and you sure as hell didn’t ride the whale like a surfboard or like some kind of mythic beast tamer.”

“Well… I mean… it’s not like I was standing the whole time.”

“Uh-huh,” Robbie laughed but remained unconvinced. He got up from the office chair and stretched aching limbs. “I’m going to use the bathroom and grab another beer from the fridge. Do either of you want one?” Both men said yes and Robbie left to relieve himself.

The room sat in silence for nearly a minute; both of its occupants lost in their thoughts. Standing stoically off to the side, as he so often did, it was Marco who uncharacteristically broke the silence.

“So, what really happened?” For a second it seemed like Gary didn’t hear him, his expression unusually somber, but then he puckered up with his trademark smile.

“What are you talking about? I just told you what happened.”

“Come on now. I’ve heard so many of your ridiculous stories and while some of them are clearly more bullshit than others, I know that there’s always at least some grain of truth to them.”

Gary put up his hands as if in surrender. “All right. Fine. Fine. I didn’t actually ride the whale. They just hung out until I got rescued.”

Unamused, Marco said, “Look, if you don’t want to tell me what really happened that’s fine, but I don’t need to be like Robbie and read your aura to tell that there’s something behind the story that covers up something darker. It was written all over your face.”

Gary laughed, but it was a humorless, bitter sound. “You know, a therapist friend of mine once told me that we often make up stories to deal with things that we don’t understand or that our minds can’t process. We even have this amazing ability to lie to ourselves and almost believe it, when it’s particularly bad.” Gary went silent after that, and Marco thought it was all the older man was going to say on the subject. “I had just recently turned thirty-five and had traveled to South America with a handful of old fraternity buddies as a sort of pseudo reunion slash celebration, because a couple of them had recently gotten married. There were eleven of us in total. A week of good food, heavy drinking and of course, good old fishing. Now, we had already gone fishing one of the days and hadn’t had much luck, but you know me. I quickly made friends with some local deep-sea fishermen who agreed to bring us out to a secret spot that they promised was so perfect that it was impossible not to catch a fish. We were still a little drunk from the night before when my friends and I packed into two short range boats before the sun rose. Realistically we shouldn’t have gone more than a couple hours out to sea in those things, but the fishermen said they had plenty of extra fuel, so we thought we’d be all right tailing the much larger vessel. Four of us were on one boat, three on the other. I was in the boat furthest from the fishing boat with two others as the sun was starting to come over the horizon. Already we had been traveling for over an hour, and if I remember right, we had at least another one to go. Everything was smooth sailing up to that point, so, when out of nowhere the water began to churn, causing the ships to buckle and dip dangerously to the side, we were unprepared. There was no warning, besides the ocean’s sudden, violent turn. During our journey we had been making sure to keep more than a safe distance from the others, so the two other boats were a little ways ahead of us when a colossal mouth breached the ocean’s surface. Even now, it’s hard to put into words what I saw. It was like a massive, prehistoric mollusk or something had reached up out of the ocean and, just like that, swallowed up the fisherman’s boat and the boat containing four of my friends. The monster’s mouth was lined with giant feelers. One of them clipped the back of the boat that I was on, knocking off the engine and flipping the boat on its side. A mix of luck and quick reflexes saw me grab onto the rail of the boat and when it righted itself, I was able to pull myself back onboard. The other two with me weren’t so lucky. Everything happened so fast that I swore I was dreaming but I never woke up from that nightmare.”

“For two days I floated out at sea, on a dead boat, scared witless, my craving for cigarettes a footnote in my panic. And then on the second night, it happened. A strange, haunting melody woke me from my slumber and lured me to the back of the boat. What I saw out there was unlike anything I’d seen before or since. While her upper half was humanoid, there was no doubt that she was a creature of the sea. Scales, bulbous eyes, and webbed hands marked her as inhuman. Not to mention what lay below the ocean’s surface. Still, there really was an ethereal beauty about her. She spoke to me, though in what language I’m not sure. I imagine it is the language of the sea. For a while I just stared, bewildered. Stories of deadly sirens roaming the back of my mind. Then it started to sing. The creature’s voice was otherworldly. I wish I could describe to you what it sounded like but no instrument nor creature I know of does it justice. It is a chilling sound that haunted me to my very core but also captivated me in a way like nothing else ever had. It is a sound that I will remember on my deathbed.” Gary’s next words seemed to fail him. The memory of the merfolk’s deadly aria reached across time and beckoned his focus.

“Anyhow, it didn’t take long for the siren’s song to implant insidious thoughts, and I began to think that now was a perfectly reasonable time to go for a swim. What exactly would have happened if I had answered her call, I have no idea, but I can’t imagine it would have been anything good. Luckily, her song was abruptly cut short, and I watched as she dove beneath the water. For a second I stood there, confused, but it wasn’t long before something rose up from the dark depths, its large eye looking right at me. Now, it was a majestic creature to see during the day, and under better circumstances but the behemoth of an animal’s sudden appearance left me unnerved. I might have screamed. Oh, who am I kidding. I screamed and began to blubber. I didn’t know much about humpback whales at the time, or whales in general for that matter, so when this enormous animal, with its crown of barnacles, began to circle my boat, I thought that surely I was a goner. I had simply traded one form of death for another. I thought for sure that the whale was stalking me looking for the best way to tip over the boat but then something happened. In the light of the moon and the open night sky I watched a dozen of the deadly sirens poke their heads out of the sea, perhaps a hundred feet away. For a while they just watched me. But then they began to sing in deadly harmony. A chorus that had led countless sailors to their graves. However, their song did not last long. Unbeknownst to me at that moment, the whale had dove beneath the water, only to emerge in the center of the gathered merfolk, causing them to scatter and breaking the spell.”

“I came to with one leg over the boat’s ledge and quickly threw myself back on board. I got back to my feet in time to see the whale roll over, forcing the strange and haunting creatures to scatter even further away. That’s when I realized the whale was trying to protect me from the insidious predators. Over the next hour, the whale, who I eventually started calling King Benny, played the aggressor until the sirens finally went away. Once they were gone, King Benny came alongside the boat and stayed there. We met eyes and, even though there was no talking barnacle, it was as though the two of us had an understanding. For another day and a half, the whale stayed with me, until at last a merchant vessel finally passed close enough that someone happened to spot me.” Gary trailed off once again, his eyes seeing something that only they could see. “It’s funny, I owe my life to a whale, and I have no idea why it protected me in the first place. I’ve heard that scientists recently discovered that humpback whales will sometimes protect smaller animals, but that’s usually in regard to orca or shark hunts. I don’t know. Perhaps they also have beef with mermaids.”

Marco started to say something, but Robbie returned, three beers in hand, and he decided that Gary probably didn’t want to retell the story.

The somber atmosphere did not go unnoticed by Robbie, who nearly asked what was wrong but pivoted and instead asked “So, what’s next? Are you gonna tell us how you met a group of talking animals in Madagascar?”

“Ha, ha,” Gary mocked before taking a sip of his beer. “Speaking of animated properties though. Did I ever tell you about the time that I met an actual panda who knew kung fu?”