Fiction: Drowned

In case you have been wondering I drowned last week. 

I sunk up to my knees in the muck I created and decided that once it reached my thighs (which it shortly did) that I would dive the rest of the way in. 

So here I am at the bottom of the pond, at the bottom of my world, at the bottom of my understandings and accomplishments and misses. 

I swim through the darkness slowly and carefully, hands outstretched to sift through the mud and sticks, the decomposing squirrel bodies full of decomposing nuts. 

My toes dig into the dense fabric of the water, lines of swaying algae and dots of fish stretching to the surface I can’t see. 

The sharks are tiny and sharp in this pond. They nip at my ears and whisper secrets into the holes they create. They imagine themselves into my belly and flutter as underwater butterflies in an unknowing cage. They squish themselves between my ribs and dance in my heart, their fins swirling in the blue ocean of my blood. 

The pond isn’t deep enough for me to disappear into the wonder so I wriggle myself deeper and deeper through the thickness. My body breaks down, breaks through to the night sky below. My eyes become stars, my fingernails planets, my mouth open and hot, the sun.