work in progress

Reflections on a Boat
Jon Brodie

His body would have stunk. Not just some week-old tuna stink or flatulence that makes you lower your windows in your car. This odor would have been a perpetuating, achy, eye-stinging stink. But, as it was, the sun, with its harsh licking rays, made it impossible for the bacteria to make that smell live. It was a blessing in that way. In that very minor way.
As he applied the lip gloss, cotton candy, he could fell the moisture sucked into the spreading cracks and rivulets that, when fresh would trickle blood down his chin. His pencil thin lips had been carved and etched with these cracks by the big hard sun. The sucrolose from the cotton candy flavor seeped into the cracks and made him wince. The sweetest things he had had up until that point were some candy-coated memories that he allowed himself to think of from time to time. One of his first real orgasm. One of his daughter hugging him when he got home from a particularly long trip to Japan (he was faithful the entire trip). And one of his first dive under a wave each summer sometime in late May to early June. But the lip gloss had an aftertaste—almost alcoholic. Not sweet, but intoxicating nonetheless. He sat, as still as he could, crusted in salt, nose blistering, with his fingers swollen from the salt, stuffed like the Italian sausages his mother used to get from their deaf Italian neighbor, waiting for some new stimulus to jolt him from life.
His pants fit him loosely around his waist and the shreds of chino pant legs hung—seemingly exhausted like an untied bow-tie after a long night of sophisticated revelry with gourmet crackers and intriguing combinations of toppings—sautéed cayenne glazed pear, tuna avocado puree. They were a very light khaki—not quite headache white but the color of afternoon Bermuda sand. His shirt, a softer, expensive, doesn’t-come-in-a-bag-blue used that used to sit perfectly tailored on his pale shoulders to complete his twice-a-month-to-Europe business man look, now laid twisted, coiled like a rat’s tail upon his receding-hair lined head in an effort to protect him from those little licking rays of the sun—so harsh. One of his shoes–the one that wasn’t lost in the scurry off the boat, now lolled and rolled drunkenly in a pool of tepid, dead skin, urine fogged water in the corner of the raft. He looked at it longingly; that pair had been one of his favorites (his first wife had them made for him ages ago).
He would have felt sorry for himself; should have felt sorry for himself. Sitting in that life raft in that tepid, dead-skin, urine, fogged water in shredded clothes with three others from the ship, lips glittering like a drag queen from a cheap Vegas cabaret’s lights in the relentless noonday sun miles of the coast of some sure-to-be-warring African nation that would never help them if their life raft were to be found.
But for whatever reason, he didn’t. Maybe it was because it was that Karma thing his mother was always talking about finally catching up to him for throwing a dart at his brother over the next game of ping pong in their grandparent’s basement. Maybe it was because he didn’t hesitate when giving Glenn blowjob after blowjob with his wedding ring on. Or maybe it was because he had muscled his way to the front of the life raft line, screaming “I must get to my daughter!”
As Cowardice rose up his gullet and clawed at the back of his throat, he saw a blonde head bobbing at the front of the front of the mass of people anxiously waiting for their turn. It was his way out. He charged forward with complete disregard for all the others who were in the same harried situation as he was. When he heard the alarm initially, he did his best to remain composed; Craig was a man of image.
However, plowing his way through the crowd allowed him to release his fears. Not just of drowning, but of being dead and alone, of leaving a pin in a new shirt, of bidets, of zipping his dick into his pants. The fears rapidly expanded upwards and outwards into his flailing arms and writhing legs like ivory soap when placed in the microwave. He wasn’t used to showing himself. (In the world of banking, expressions lost you money, investors and confidence.) When he had muscled himself up next to the young girl, he, without hesitation, elbowed her out of the way, striking her in the shoulder and knocking her bag from her grasp. As the Hello Kitty bag hit the deck, an assortment of dollar store cosmetics (stocking stuffers, no doubt) skittered across the worn teak like multi-flavored cockroaches from the light. Disregarding this, he immediately attempted to climb down the ladder. The chilled hull of the ship numbed his fingers and made his decent harder as he clambered down the side of the floundering vessel. He looked up for a brief moment and saw the growing tumult of people gathered at the rail, waiting for the chance he stole. One member of the cluster kicked some of the fallen stocking stuffers overboard and as the ship heeled they bounced down the hull of the ship. Craig reached his hand out to stop the barrage from hitting his face and as they scattered harmlessly away from him, one of them landed on the hand guarding his face. He grabbed blindly and continued climbing down the hull.
His first relationship had ended with words. Most of which he had spit angrily into a dated mobile phone on his way to a convention that he was leading in Phoenix.