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Isaiah Jones vs. the Sea (A 21st Century Odyssey)

The Big Blue: This is What the Water Said

At 108 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, Isaiah halted his free dives descent, holding his position in the depths. Above him, the 44-foot sloop the SS Exodus held her place, using an AI-directed guidance system to track his movements beneath the surface. He wore only tiny, round, amber-colored polarized diving goggles, each with a UV lens the diameter of an orange, a white linen loincloth, and carbon fiber long blade swim fins. He gazed at the face of his grandfather’s 1966 submariner Rolex diving watches as the phosphorescent glow softly illuminated the watch’s minstrel face in the darkness. There was no need to check the compass built into the handle of the diving knife, securely strapped to his bare left thigh.

Here, there was no sound. The dimmed, diffracted light from the midday sun above made the surface shimmer with cerulean hues when he looked up. When he looked down, he saw only the impossible darkness, whispering in the silence of submersion, the saturnine voice calling to him from the cacophony of mute voices quiescence screaming from the anonymous deep. Submerged weightless in the depths, the body’s mammalian dive reflex had adjusted to the water pressure, as he emptied his mind of all thought, calmed by the cooling viscous darkness. A sensation ancient and familiar awakened within him; the primordial aquatic reflex slowed his heart rate. The azure stillness settled over him. He glanced at his watch; he had been underwater for 3.14 minutes; it felt like only a few seconds had passed. Time stretched, distorted, as the depth’s dilation warped enveloping him.

He felt as if he were born here, floating in the watery darkness as a great shadow approached; a gargantuan midnight blue shadowy mass moving in absolute silence, gliding upwards towards him. The deep blue-grey hued aquatic behemoth stopped beside him to stare. The century-old blue whale, over 30 meters long (100 feet), an honored elder of his herd, had seen many things in his time, but never this: a human boy in the middle of the sea at this depth.

The whale could hear the boy’s heart rate and pulse slow; in the same way, they slowed their massive hearts when the pods safely submerged beneath the ocean surface in sleep. It was an ancient part of the brain that they both shared. As the creature moved closer, it could see that the dark-skinned young human was not in distress and that his tiny ship hovered above them on the surface.

Isaiah looked at the massive blue creature as it gently glided by in the dim light, moving only an arm’s length away, close enough for him to touch. The great whale swam nearer, inspecting him up close, its colossal body halting as they eyed one another, each wondering what the other was doing here.

After sharing an awkward silence, Isaiah sensed the phthalo blue colored creature was waiting for him to return to the surface. He gently kicked his legs and began to rise slowly toward the light. The leviathan followed silently behind him, as if guiding a lost child home.

Once they reached the surface and Isaiah returned to the ship, the humongous sea creature seemed satisfied that the lost human drifting in the sea was safe. It rolled over once as he dove beneath the azure waters, returning to the depths to rejoin its patrol of the sleeping pod. Isaiah knew it was only a whale, but in the Atlantic’s eldritch depths, it felt as though he had encountered an elder god. He glanced at the timer on his watch; he had been underwater, effortlessly holding his breath, for 8.97 minutes.

The century-old sapphire colored colossus was more than twice the size of his 44-foot sloop. Even now, Isaiah could almost hear its thoughts, urging him to go home. He looked at the map’s longitude and latitude: 4°45’15.2″N, 32°55’16.8″W. This was the halfway mark across the Atlantic, the coordinates from Galveston to Ghana. He hoisted the mainsail and kept heading east, sailing towards the Motherland.

-About the author

JD Cloudy’s poetry has disappeared in the literary journals: Fatfizz, Mad Swirl, Texas Beat Anthology, Danse Macabre, Du Jour, and Death List Five. He has won no literary awards, entered no slam competitions, and never completed college. He lives to write in Dallas, TX.