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Bloody Yolk

Joshua Copeland

    I began as a white thread that licked the beach. I was next to nothing. My spine twisted and wrung itself as I lapped the shore. I was as weak as they come, I nudged whoever I could with my feeble tongue. The traffic of minnows darted this way and that below me. All this, for two millennia. It’s the repetition that kills us, only if we had the power to commit suicide. Doomed to live. Little kids played in me like I was a limp thing. A child actually walked on me. The nerve! He did not step through me but literally walked atop me.
    Then, one day, what science designates as an “Undertow” came for me and yanked me away and carried me in its ivory arms far out of sight of land. He sucked me by the hilly breakers, and I watched the beach grow tinier and tinier, until there was just salty air and water. He had uncaged me. There was no end to the similes. I was beyond language. I was starlight on a movie screen. I took on weight. My whole, blue mass. My wrinkled, oceanic skin. I was a taut, aquamarine muscle. I rode over fish and animals I had never seen before. Dolphins blew out the water that I was. Whales bellowed a sad song. I stretched like a knotted rope across miles. I was not thin and scrawny, like on the beach. I was all pyrotechnics in need of a simple, dainty match.
    The undertow left me, and I surged over pink and orange coral, octopi, dunes of underwater sand, and kelp. The kelp I noticed in particular, it was like the scalped skin of some long haired woman. It strung itself out in a rainbow of colors. Onward, onward, and onward, the water and wind pushed me. A gaggle of jellyfish, like emerald sparkling umbrellas, followed me for a few days. I collected water until I was a heavyweight. What a false ethereal past I had, a next-to-nothing, a dimple of a wave, slapping lightly at the beach. Here, out in the middle of the sea, I was a monument, a ligament chisled into sandstone.
    Then, below me, a muffled thunder sounded. I saw the sandy floor shift like a puzzle piece shoved into a gap it didn’t fit into. And I grew even more. And sped up. I shot past airliners in the sky. All before, for centuries, I had been an egg, something harmless. But the powers that be broke me, and out I came, an ooze of juice and blood. I turned into something with stopped up venom, ready to bite. This humungous van guard carried me. I’d like to see your little kids play with me now. Cause I’m just a pockmark on the sea, right?
    As land came into view I rose bigger, bigger, and even bigger, until I was a cauldron of white foam, three stories high. “I will make skeletons of your people!” I roared. Men of books write that if something awful happens to one of your prime characters, they have to make a mistake that leads to their downfall. As I approached land, I spotted many villagers on the bare, naked sand that appeared when the sea receded half a mile. They saw me and ran, but it was too late, and I shoved myself down their throats, I carried them like wet sacks as they choked and screamed for their mothers. Like a lion’s stretched jaw, I encompassed the breath out of them. I filled them like a toxic blood. I smashed through bamboo huts, bamboo sticks covers me and jostled on top of me. I picked up dilapidated cars and carried them for miles. But the people, the island, I broke them. I squashed them with the debris. They ran, but there was no hope. They were mine. I dragged them as they swallowed me and if I had eyebrows they would bend downwards, and if I had a mouth, it would smile an evil smile, like a V.
    I am no longer a limp weight for your sons and daughters to tussle in.
    And here is what I came for: I rammed open the doors, frothing and smashing through the purple pews, and lifted bibles out their shelves and tossed them around like the unholy debris that they were. I teethed and swallowed the coward on the cross. First I broke his bony, outstretched arms, wrists painted with red paint, and tore him from the cross and slammed him back and forth across the room.
    If you’re going out, why whimper and offer forgiveness? I can see him up there, nude and blood caked, the red his righteous color, nails in his wrists, struggling to breathe. I imagine he cried like a high-pitched little girl, “Father, forgive them! They know not what they do!” The purest illustration of pusillanimous. “Oh Father, why have you forsaken me?!” He was overcome with fear to the point of humiliation. At least go out in a supernova, anything but your girly screeches.
    I seethed myself into the organ, rendering it useless, and watched it drown. I swelled higher and higher, and damped out the candles that had burned above me, like the worthless detritus that they were and always will be, like muffled buoys. Slowly I rose, and when I reached the colored windows I smashed through them, turning them into multi-colored shards, and I mixed with water outside.
    And I was done, and it sucked me back into the deep waters, into the anonymity of nature and its creatures.

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