Make Room For Something

We were always careful not to speak about death around my grandmother. She was indeed tiptoeing nearer and nearer to her own grave, and none too gracefully at that. I always pictured the moment she would finally die--alone in her bed in the middle of the afternoon with the light on and the curtains drawn. Choking on a cracker. Her glasses propped neatly on the tip of her thin nose. It will be strange now, not knowing what she will look like at last.

I suppose it's a surprise for everyone--the moment of one's own death. But it was even more of a shock when mine never came.

The wave that got me raised its mighty foam fist, kicked out my surfboard from underneath me, grabbed me by the throat and slammed my body into the churning depths. My arm smashed against a boulder, snapping the two thin bones of my forearm. My left foot snared a jagged edge of the same rock or similar, and the three smallest toes came clean off.

I gulped for air and drew in two lungs full of sand-flecked salt water. My throat tightened and I vomited, which stung my nose.

My vision went black for a moment, my back spasmed and then it was over. My chest relaxed. My mouth hung lazily open, filled from lip to lung with seawater. My sight came back, entirely clear and sharp, and in the tortured sunlight that filtered through I could see the green sea stained red all around me. Then, I simply drifted downward.

I felt the pressure in my ears mount as the water grew darker and cooler. But they soon popped inwards and I felt warm liquid moving across my cerebral cortex, like a brain surgeon had cut off my lid on the operating table and was giving all those pink ridges and valleys a pleasant sponge bath. A shark swam past, upward toward the swirling redness in the rising tide. Another followed. Then an octopus, and a school of silver fish with bulbous red eyes. I looked down at my white feet and seven toes stretching into the eternal blackness below, and I was glad I was going feet first. I smelled the vomit in my nose for a moment and I thought of my poor grandmother and how she will die someday soon in her bed with her glasses propped neatly on her nose.