Golden Sea

I caught a stirring in the rear view mirror from the corner of my eye and gripped the wheel tightly.
Despite my best efforts, Oliver was waking up. He rubbed his eyes and sat himself up.
“How much further Dad…?” he asked. His voice was dreary. He’d surfaced, but it was about a fifty-fifty chance if he’d resubmerge under Mr. Sandman’s grip again or not.
I glanced down at the glowing digital clock. We were long past midnight. “About an hour and a half,” I answered. I broke my concentration on the road for mere milliseconds at a time but still caught his gaze in the mirror. “Sorry bud. Did the bump wake you up?” The dusty road we were on was about half as maintained as I was expecting, but five times less than I hoped for.
His tiny head barely had room to nod as his jaw stretched wide in a yawn. “‘Ea,” he tried to answer before closing his mouth. He looked down at his lap and I felt a pang of nostalgia. Either he inherited his urge to look at the box of his new game on the car ride home, reading the cover and imagining all the fun he’d have, or it’s a universal experience. He was so excited when he unwrapped his birthday present “from Papa” a few days ago. I thought he’d rocket high enough to hit the ceiling when he leapt into the air. He thanked his grandfather more than I’ve ever seen from him before.
I tried to think more about myself in his place, cartridge in place of the sleek disc box in his. But my thoughts kept trailing to the receipt for the game in the glovebox with my signature at the bottom. If they hadn’t made their way to a landfill, it was one in a nest of many.
There were a multitude of reasons why visiting family had become a complicated affair, with only one of them being the drive to and from. Between my current home and the one I grew up in lay a sprawling city. Long since before I was born it was a nightmarish gorgon of concrete. Tendrils of lanes upon lanes, roads upon roads, snaking out to surrounding townships until they too amalgamated over time. When I was young it was a conquerable beast if you knew the right time to pass through. But these days your travel time could easily double. We had to find creative detours to avoid the stone-still traffic.
Ideally, Oliver would only need to be woken up once pulled into the dimly lit driveway before being carried inside and tucked quietly into bed. Although there was now no chance either of us would be up at a reasonable hour tomorrow morning, and my white knuckles ached from my nervous wheel-gripping, I was thankful for the company. The radio sportscasters I’d been listening to at a whisper volume had long been lost in a sea of static.
“Is this another game you played at Ben’s house?” I asked. I knew he would hang out with his best friend after school and asked for whatever they played together once he came home.
I did my best to listen to all the details of the two’s adventures, but my mind couldn’t help but drift away to our visit with extended family that ended mere hours ago.
My relationship with my relatives was deteriorating fast. I tried my best to make time for them. I guess I felt like being related made it an obligation, but it was by no means a mutual effort. The most they ever did was invite the two of us to rowdy football parties that neither of us had much interest in. But it was the only way for us to visit with anybody. Outside of that, we were left to our own devices as if they had merely picked up new furniture. They still went to parties, to church, to ticketed events, to gambling halls, to places we had no invitation to join. As soon as we arrived they practically pushed past us out the door.
A book of all the reasons they hated my immediate family and I would outsize the bible. A lot of them are immaterial. A lot more are intimate. The most I’ve been telling friends who aren’t closely familiar with the matter is “I’m not the successful man they raised their pious son to be”, and they’ve been able to make pretty educated guesses.
But I couldn’t bear to let my son know about any of this.
I couldn’t let him learn lessons this complicated when he was still so young. He was still watching cartoons that taught him about the power of friendship, and how everybody can be your best buddy with a 22 minute redemption arc. He wasn’t ready to learn that people could hate you. That family could hate you. That family could hate you for things entirely beyond your control. For things you didn’t even do.
He wasn’t ready to learn that his dad was such a disappointment to his own father.
I put as much as I could into making visits with his Papa and Uncles the best time ever. They gave him the best gifts on my tab, he ate all his favourite foods and snacks since I bought our own groceries, and we’d always pick out a movie to watch together while they spent their nights at the casino. I’d even sometimes break up the long drive with a trip to Chuck E. Cheese or something. Just anything to distract him from how bad things were around him. I knew even the prettiest, shiniest boat couldn’t distract from the growing storm and towering waves forever, but I had to try.
“Hey Dad?”
My eyes refocused on the mirror. “What’s up, Oli?”
“I gotta pee.”
A string of curses ran out in my mind. That’s what I’d been afraid of. “Can you hold it?” Oceanic fields stretched out into the darkness for forever and I had no idea how soon we’d clear them, let alone when we’d next pass a gas station.
He shook his head no.
I put on my fourways and gently pulled as far over as I could. “Sorry bud but there’s no place else to go.” I slowed into a gentle stop. “Let me help you out; there’s a pretty big ditch to your side.”
The high-beams cast sharp shadows on the surrounding wheat, a burst of colour washing over it in frequent blinks. The slightest breeze broke the crop’s surface out in light waves as it spread out to the unseen horizon. Aside from a thin waning moon that peeked between overcast clouds, the rest of night was impenetrable.
Scratchy gravel crunched underfoot and broke through the quiet like rolling thunder. As I stepped into the shallow ditch to scoop Oliver out of the car, I heard an orchestra of bugs calling out in the distance. I hadn’t seen another driver since the turnoff. If farmhouses lay in the dark beyond anything I could see, their residents had long since left the fields to their beds. 
We were alone.
I hoisted Oliver out of the car as he squirmed a familiar potty-dance. Within moments he was doing his business into the tall grass as I gave him what little privacy I could. The car was in dire need of a bath, but I gave my best efforts to fan out a clear spot in the dusty trunk to lean against and pulled out my phone. I brushed past notifications to send a text home to more immediate family that we’d be later getting home than expected.
The gentle wind carried the familiar cold of approaching rain, the kind that presses tightly against your bones. My thoughts wandered back to summer camp, where a long but thin dock stretched into the lake. Most kids knew better than to walk the length of it barefoot with such a high risk of splinters. I however dared to walk out and ease my legs out over the edge. They were barely long enough to give my toes a siren tear’s worth of a dip and I’d watch fish dance under the murky surface. Decades-old trees lined the shore, wind whistling through their canopies in a rushing fshhhhhhhhhhh as heavy clouds covered the sky. The soft percussion of this fall’s crop was just like the squirming foliage on those bright summer afternoons.
As I heard the stream of liquid stop, I began putting my phone away. “Alright, let’s-”
Gone.
My stomach immediately dropped to my ankles. I pawed frantically through the brush. Twigs snapped and scraped my palms. Nothing but weeds.
“Oli?”
Gone.
My phone was back in my hands. I snapped a bunch of photos by mistake to reach the flashlight. I nearly dropped it.
“Oliver!”
Gone.
A puddle trailed off into the field.
“OLIVER!!”
GONE.
I barreled through the wheat as fast as I could stumble. Stalks bent and folded as I pushed through but I felt them snap straight on my back. A sea of tarnished gold.
I called and called and called for him but no answer came. Only the wind and bugs whispered back.
I was losing light, losing time, my voice grew hoarse. My son, my boy, where? How? Gone.
Golden sea. Cicada gulls. Waves of wheat.
Fsssshhhhhhhhhhh.
Gone.
I heard a cry far in the distance and sprinted towards it, no regard for the black absorbing my vision. 
I tripped and fell hard into the soft mud. Grime and tear-stained eyes peered back at me, and I pulled Oliver close. 
His knees were scraped, his clothes were torn, and dirt covered so, so much of his body.
“What happened?” I asked, “Oli, what happened?”
He shook against my shoulder. With his mouth grimaced and quivering, he was well beyond screams or sobs. He fought to catch his breath.
“Feh- Iiiih- Ih- Ih- Ih- Iih- Nnnn-nnn-nnnnnn…” He pushed out with all the effort he could muster between gasps. “Feh- eh- eh- eh- eh- esh- sh- sh- shhhh…”
I hoisted him into my arms and stood. The ground seemed to sink deep underfoot, like wading through a tide. The dark seemed to froth just out of sight, and I thought I saw something circle past us.
The comforting lights of the parked car cast wide across the field behind us, and I made my way back at as brisk a pace as I could manage. My body ached and protested, step after step I waded back to our lighthouse.
I pulled Oliver back to the road. His hyperventilating continued to echo out across the empty farm as I buckled him in on autopilot. Fat raindrops slowly began to plat heavily against the tarmac. When I got around to sitting behind the driver’s seat again, the tinny smack against the roof eased into a deafening roar. Water streamed down the windshield in sheets as it began to downpour.
I buckled myself in and looked into the mirror. I found that I too had been sobbing.
I tried so hard to keep him safe from the terrors real life held deep below the surface. I put my whole self into keeping my son afloat.
But in the end we both drowned.
 
Category:Liminal Spaces 2022
Category:Beings
Category:Weird