The Lost Star - SCP Foundation

The clouds passed slowly overhead, unbothered and passive. The sea rolled over itself to rock the fishing boat again and again, gently rocking the groaning metal as if it were a fussing infant in its crib. But now, at what a fisherman would call the end of his life, his thoughts were only on staying awake. The lull of the ocean jostled him back upright in a steady waltz timing.

He was slumped against the railing that surrounded the bow of the ship, eyes half lidded in exhaustion. Anthony hadn’t done any physical work for some time, but he still felt so drained by his stationary situation. The only evidence he was still alive and kicking was the open pocket journal in his lap and the pencil that just barely rolled out of his hand as the waves bucked against the boat once again.

He was weak, hungry and alone – he thought so, anyway. None of the other crewmates on deck had moved in four days, and no sound had traveled up from below deck since last week.

There wasn’t much to do to try and stay awake except for Anthony to reminisce about the six decades that led him to this point in time.

His full name was Anthony Jean-Paul Adams. It was written in scratchy almost-cursive on the front page of his journal. Sometimes he’d read it just to make sure he wasn’t making up his middle name. He focused on his last name, something common but his own, and how he’d chosen to share it with one woman in particular, Anthony was studying abroad in England with a group of other students – mostly the artsy type, he remembered. He was the only science major on that trip. Something about a semester in a place he’d never been to, on a sea he’d never traveled, made his marine biology degree itch with curiosity.

He got more than he bargained for, however. Anthony had agreed to go with the rest of the group to see an opera, playing in an English university as a way to see their music program. It was about the orchestra, but for Anthony it was about the lead actress.

Anthony never remembered the actual play, or the story of it. All he knew was that the lead actress was beautiful and her voice was incredible and he needed to speak to her before he went back to America. He met Jacqueline after at least an hour of her turning him down, and they sent letters back and forth overseas for the rest of their years in college until they could move in together. Three years later, their daughter Anne-Marie was born. Nothing else seemed to matter after that, except for the feeling of loneliness that those memories dragged up. He wondered if Jacqueline or Anne knew he wasn’t coming back.

The fisherman thought back to the beginning of the month. He’d been at sea for the 50th time in the preceding month, with nothing more than phone calls with his wife. It wasn’t that the sea was inescapable, even if that was the case; Anthony was devoted to the crew and his ship, now determined to commit the story of his demise to his heart’s memory.

27 days prior, the crew was boarding their beloved fishing vessel, Esther’s Resolve. It was named by one of the other men’s wives, after some woman from the Bible that Anthony was not familiar with. He’d only ever really picked up the title of “letters to the Corinthians” from Sunday masses, and that was all he’d cared to remember of the scripture itself as he considered himself a laid-back Christian. Anthony still believed, of course, he just wasn’t always willing to drive three hours for a 45-minute mass once a week. It was fitting for their ship though, as a great imposing mass of blue steel and tightly wound nets. They were tasked with fishing for lobster off the northern coast of Maine, but it was a plan and not reality.

Not two days into their journey, late into the night, Anthony had been tasked with the next four-hour watch to make sure they didn’t run aground or anything else. Unfortunately, he didn’t do his job very well; 4:44 was the time when equipment started to blip and beep and chirp into oblivion. Everything broke in a spontaneous shudder that rocked through the boat, a deadly unseen wave that deluged Anthony with fear. The very last thing he was able to do was send out a radio distress call to any Coast Guard ships that were in their vicinity.

Breaking the news to the rest of the crew was one of the more difficult things in his life. People cried and yelled at Anthony, who was riddled with guilt for the first day afterwards. Anyone would be frustrated and panicked if they too woke up to not an inch of land in site. The mechanical engineer aboard assumed that there was something greatly wrong, possibly an electromagnetic change in the environment. People cried and yelled at the engineer instead.

They’d had enough food to last for another month of sailing, but it was hard not to overindulge. You had to keep your strength up in a crisis situation, especially if you weren’t sure when your last meal would be.

After that came the emergency flares. One of the other fishermen had the idea to send a flare at midnight to any passing planes or other ships to attempt to get their attention. Anthony hated the whistling of the rocket flare, the shrill call like an angry falcon as it shot into the air spitting sparks. It might’ve been necessary, sure, but it felt like the last resort. It was a taxing thing, watching the bright red omen of inevitable death that called for help falling, flailing into the ocean like a bleeding sacrifice. It reminded Anthony of the way blood turned to scarlet wisps in the water in shark documentaries, cementing the nausea in his gut.

The crew ran out of flares 7 days ago. The engineer cried.

Anthony ate his last square inch serving of the chicken pot pie Jacqueline sent with him in silence under the faded light of the moon. His crewmates had all but run out of their own rations, and the lack of drinking water emptied their heads. They either laid down on deck unmoving or stared at the wall of the cabin until their eyes filmed over.

He sighed out a rough breath, the salt stinging his throat and palette. The taste of the sea bit at him, something he loved so much now cursed his very existence in its realm. Anthony couldn’t help but let out a gruff laugh – more of a bark, if he had to admit – about an old friend like the ocean now spitting back at him for intruding. It was his life’s work to study the ocean and now he was doomed to lose his life to it; the irony made him smile in the whipping wind across the deck.

✧

Some time passed. Anthony watched the sun set again, mocking him with its disappearance beyond the sea. The moon rose behind him once again, and the stars dropped into place. The little glittering lights remind him of the shooting star he very nearly forgot about. It seemed like such a small speck of hope in the story of his demise that it slipped his mind. On the night the final flare was shot into the midnight sky, he found himself staring up at the emptiness above him. A brief memory of a space documentary about stars living in a distant past because of the time it takes for their light to reach Earth crossed his mind as a dry smile crossed his face. In his awe, Anthony’s attention was stolen by the night returning their request for aid. A shooting star, the pale glare of it streaking across the blue-blackness of midnight, that felt like a response from the Heavens as if to say, ‘We see you’.

In his present state, Anthony felt like that star was from a different lifetime. A week ago was a century before him, the only sense left in that memory was the hope that made his heart full. On this remembrance of the wonder of the night sky, the fisherman allowed his eyes to close and fell asleep.

Upon waking, rain pattered against the deck of the ship and the fisherman’s face. It brought about quite a foul smell with the waft of the sea as well as the possible corpses aboard, the stench choking Anthony as he was roused from sleep by the inertia of the boat’s rocking motion, his head thudding against the railing behind him. The sound echoed in his head as the rain poured down upon him, his coat already drenched from the storm. Even if he was now awake and able to do things, the dizziness that overcame him was incredible; Anthony was more than satisfied to sit in the pelting rain if it meant he didn’t have to move.

With the pain that now pulsed through his skull coupled with the rain falling in loud globs against the deck, there was enough noise to briefly drown out the groaning of the ocean. When his head finally cleared, Anthony could make out the low wailing of something very much alive – unlike his crew. In an attempt to change his position, Anthony begrudgingly and stiffly gripped the railing to hoist his upper body over the edge to look out at what was making such a caterwaul.

Laying atop the crushed remains of a Coast Guard ship was the gargantuan glowing form of something almost unrecognizable. That was, until, the fisherman could make out the golden wisps of hair buried in many spindly arms. It was whispering, it was crying, it was singing and sobbing and yelling as it wept into itself and the navy tarp that had covered the response boat. Sprawling wings emitted kaleidoscopic rays of burning light, painting the boat in red and green and gold and white and blue, this odd celestial glow of ever-shifting hues. The being seemed to be nearly the size of a sperm whale – the half of it that breached the water, at least.

Anthony was struck with shock, but some other unrecognizable feeling made its way under his skin through his stomach up to his throat only to settle in his mouth as a shout of disbelief. Only when the angel hiccuped in its misery did the emotion register as reverence. This thing had both destroyed the Esther’s only hope of returning to land, but had made his faith real. It had made decades of Easter and Christmas masses, Sunday school, praying before bed at night even in college when there was no one left to make him believe very real all in one instant. He had half a heart to ask the angel why it had fallen, or why it was sobbing atop a Coast Guard rescue boat. But the fisherman elected not to, for it seemed rude to disturb its peace.

Watching the crying angel led him to watch the trail of its wings, miles long feathers that melded into nebulous colors under the waves. A sickly green ichor dripped steadily from the downy fluff on its back, seeping into its skin like tar as it flooded through the wreckage and into the sea. There was a trail of it through the waves, decorated with a parade of floating carcasses of fish. In its bleeding, its voice rang out in a choir of languages of which some Anthony understood.

“I bleed for this?”, it shouted. “I was inevitable. I was born to suffer, and this is my demise? This is what I was waiting for, My Lord? Is this what you wanted from me?”

Seeing its despair was quite clear to the fisherman, and he would have wanted nothing more to soothe the crying thing if only to say he had felt the warmth of an angel’s tears. As he watched its back stutter with its sobs, it abruptly turned to face him with the scorching light of an exploding star as icy tears ran down what could have been their cheek.

“Look away! Do not look at me! I am a creature of shame, I have fallen!”, it commanded, voice breaking like the ear-piercing shatter of glass. Anthony was too busy basking in the amazement that his God created such a beautiful thing to notice the great wing that rose from the sea as the angel shifted. Its wing crashed down in a looming chromatic wave that ruptured the surface of the ocean and broke the bow of the boat into shreds of steel. The fishing boat poured out the bodies laying on its deck like a pitcher into a cup, the moaning of metal as it started to capsize mimicking the growl of a beast that would swallow Anthony whole.

And for the last time in his life, the fisherman contemplated his purpose. He was what scrounged up sustenance from the great blue unknown, and he would return to that unknown now, to become part of the cycle that would return him to life and death again and again and again. It was funny, in some morbid way, that the sea was what devoured him now. By the cast of an angel's wing, Anthony thanked the universe for providing him with a death that brought him euphoria in knowing that the God he prayed to was real, that He heard his pleading from the first childhood memory of sitting in mass sandwiched between his brother and sister. As he suffocated in the salt water, the fisherman thanked his wife for her excessive cooking, and apologized to the angel whose sadness leached into the water above him. His vision was of the blue-green net of seafoam and angel’s blood, and he felt glad that the fish around him could ascend from the depths to see such a holy brightness in the hour of their death.