Excerpt from “Dark, Twisty Things.”

This is a long entry. It is an extended version of a story I've been working on, and it is a fuller version of an entry I submitted for a different challenge. It's not perfect, but it gives you an idea of the style of my writing. Have fun.

 “Make the most of every situation,” Jay often reminded himself. “Every minute. The good and the bad.”

His mother had once told him that “sand burned when the wind blew.” It was a lesson he had learned several times; first, at the beach, then again in the desert. The interesting thing is not that the sand burns or where it burns; of course it burns, and of course it burns everywhere. The difference is that in the desert, we are aware of the harshness of the grains, and we prepare for it. At the beach, we wholly ignore the possibility, and freely accept the consequences.

Jay had tried to make the most of his predicament now, but when he looked out the window he saw a cold, blue, and desolate landscape. It looked frigid to him, like a chilled heart pulsating to its own gaunt placidity. The sand outside his window would blow in the occasional currents, lifting the grains and casting them down again, the same as the beach, the same as the desert.

It was the water shifting the grains about so restlessly now, not the wind. Jay had often imagined himself being back on the surface, walking on a wooded path, and found himself missing the way loose gravel and dirt and sand alike shifted under his feet. The submarine’s interior was designed to look like a cruise ship, but Jay felt as though he were caught in a cave, breathing in the cool, stale air. He placed his fingertips to the window and wondered if the outside was as suffocating as the inside. It was because he felt so stuck that he often turned his attention to the windows, and for now, glancing at the sand shifting endlessly on the currents was his sole reprieve.

The grains were becoming brighter, easier to see and track as they swirled about the bottom; the submersible was reaching shallower waters. He smiled as he felt a sense of drifting familiarity, and this sense of familiarity pervaded his senses – almost as if he were slipping into a warm bath – and as the cavalcade of porcelain surrounded him he closed his eyes and focused on his heartbeat, the pulse bursting from his chest, along his arm, to the farthest reach of his fingertips. It retrieved the scene; he breathed in the cold then exhaled, a fog emanating from his lips.

A voice sounded out to his side. “Is it cold in here?”

Jay yelped and opened his eyes, his fingers breaking contact with the glass. The connection slipped and his heart skipped a beat as he stumbled backwards. A girl stood before him, roughly his own age; she was young, a kid, with blonde hair and bright eyes, her smile barely standing out against the white background. She was slightly bowed over him, watching him with curious eyes. He clambered to his feet, stumbling on the way up.

“Sorry I didn’t help. Are you okay?” she asked.

“I’m alright. Who are you? Where did you come from? I didn’t even hear you.” Jay was bewildered. He knew he had seen all the kids on the ship by now. It was enormous, the largest submarine ever constructed, over 300 meters tall and another 500 meters long, but given the amount of time they had been on the submarine there was no chance that they had gone so long without meeting each other.

“I’m Kaira. I was just passing by. Who are you? I’ve never seen you around here before.”

“I was gonna ask the same thing. My name’s Jay,” he said, holding out his hand. Kaira looked at it.

She wasn’t offended, nor was she confused, but she had scrunched her nose, as if she were curious about whether she should accept or not. Jay held it out for a second or two, then thrust both hands to the bottom of his pockets, not wanting to force her to decide.

“So why haven’t I ever seen you?” Jay said, brushing aside the handshake.

“Oh… I’m not allowed around the ship much. I can’t shake your hand either. I’m sorry… They keep me in the sick bay most of the time.”

He nodded, unsure of what to say. He let her statement hang in the air a moment, practically watching it develop into smoke around them. The wisps of what she said lingered, and he mulled it over in his head. She was sick, and sick enough that she needed to be quarantined. But she was, after all, an adventurer not unlike himself, and here she was halfway to the bottom of the sub, a quarter of the way to the bottom of the ocean. Jay looked through the fog at her piercing features, and though he could hardly claim to know much about her, he felt that she was significant.

“Are you going to be okay walking around down here?” Jay thought back to where the sick bay was. He remembered the usual red cross that denoted medical services. It was near the third floor which, on the submarine, was almost at the top of the ship. Technically it was the negative third floor, but the main consensus was simply to count from top to bottom, first floor to eighty-ninth floor. And so, knowing it was on the third floor, Jay realized that she was a far cry from home; this section of ship was on floor forty-three. He himself was only five levels from his home; thus, while he was a casual explorer, she was unequivocally adventurous.

“Yes, I can walk around here. They won’t know I’m missing until they come to give me my medicine.”

“Do you feel okay?”

“You sure worry a lot about someone you don’t know,” she stated. “I made it this far without anyone else.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just… don’t talk to a lot of people here. I only have my mom and sister. I guess I don’t know what it’s like not to worry about everyone else.”

“Sounds tiring. But you don’t need to worry about me.” She smiled, as friendly a smile as she could muster. “Where were you going? Before I found you.”

“I don’t know. Back to the dancehall I guess. The one in the–”

“The heart of the ship?” she interjected. “I like it there. Let me walk with you.”

He smiled again. They walked through the hull of the ship, Jay with his hands in his pockets, his head tucked down, with occasional sidelong glances at his temporary partner. Kaira, in turn, took long strides, knocking her knuckles along the walls, all the while humming a tune that Jay was entirely unfamiliar with. She was captivating, and Jay was entranced.

She spoke of so many things that whirled around Jay’s head. She told him that she had been all over the world, even before boarding the submarine. She had seen the coldest winters and the warmest summers, every desert hundreds of times over. She had been in catacombs and in towers, on mountains and in oceans. She had often traveled to multiple countries in a day, and she had been very fortunate for these experiences. She liked art and loved the way pine trees smelled. Sometimes, she had told him, she felt like she was hundreds of years old, or even thousands of years old; like she had been born on the first day the sun shone down on the valleys and rivers, with all the trees blooming across the world. And she felt like she wouldn’t die until the sun set for the last time on humanity. Despite her illness, she said, she was happy.

Jay confessed he hadn’t made many friends on the ship. He knew most of the kids, and some of them were nice, inviting even, but he was hesitant to join them on their daily adventures. He may encounter their group in various parts of the sub, but they usually exchanged common pleasantries and moved in different directions. There was no personality, no genuine interaction, no honesty between them; merely a nod and a half-hearted smile that made Jay feel a little queasy, a little off-kilter, a little more isolated, every time.

He wanted to tell her about everything he had learned on the ship. He wanted her to unravel the universe for him. But they quickly reached the dancehall, and the curtains were coming down on their conversation. As they approached the oak doors of the ship’s heart, Kaira smiled again.

“I have to go in the other direction,” she told him. “Are you going to be okay on your own again?”

Jay laughed a little. “I’ve made it this far. I think I might make it.”

Kaira smiled again. “I guess we’ll see.”

A silence enveloped them, but she gave a broad smile and turned towards the bow. Suddenly Jay remembered a single, solitary moment he carried with him everywhere, but rarely felt, save for the times where he thought no one else could understand the way he saw the world.

It was a cool night in the Atlantic. The submarine had surfaced, and Jay was the only person on the ship’s deck, breathing in the cool night air, catching the salt on his eyelashes. He had sat there for hours as the moon rose. It was full, bright, casting its intense beams on the water around the sub. He was in the middle of an ocean thousands of miles across, and he was alone. This is how he felt now, watching her platinum blond hair bobbing as she walked away, and his mind was superseded by the sensation that he was about to miss out on something amazing.

“Kaira, wait,” he said, reaching out for her.

The pair hardly brushed knuckles, but the second they did, Jay sensed the percussive drop of his heart stopping. For a second, he felt the way the ocean did – cold, windy, and desolate. But the moment his hand broke away from hers, it started again, pounding intensely, the beat echoing in his ears. The effect was not lost on him. He exhaled briefly, with Kaira offering nothing more than a concerned glance

“Are you alright?” she whispered. “I’m sorry. I’m not allowed to touch people… You know, in case I get sicker.”

Jay was listening to the now-calm brush of his blood vessels throughout his ears, soothing his mind with its cardiac beat. For a moment, he thought he had died, and then he considered the possibility that this was all there was; and then, for a moment, he believed he was in love.

“It’s my fault,” he murmured, amazed, as another surge of blood pumped through his body. Then, “Let’s meet back here. Tomorrow.”

“What time–”

“Any time! I’ll be here all day long.” Jay was insistent. “I’ll wait on the second floor on the other end. I’ll wait and you can meet me. You know… If you want to.”

She smiled. “Okay. Tomorrow.”

Jay stayed up late that night. He kept his porthole open, the thin bamboo shades drawn to expose the ocean around him. It was dark. Pitch black, really, and he knew that if they were sailing into the sunrise then it would be a short blackness, but if they were sailing away from it then it would last for an eternity.

As he lay awake in bed, he wondered if he actually was in love. He thought he wasn’t, but then, he didn’t know. Maybe he had fallen in love, right there, and that sensation was his heart beating for her. And maybe, he considered, he was just addicted to the idea. He was young. He never expected to meet someone so early. He didn’t even consider it possible – he had, after all, met the other kids on this submarine, and they were okay at best – but now he was awake, staring at the ceiling as though he were an old man, gazing into the abyss.

And it was certainly looking back. The longer Jay stared at the ceiling, the more he wanted to find land. The more he wanted to exercise his legs, to feel as though there was a sky out there, a world of possibilities. The cavernous shell of the ship’s hull was incomparably restricting. He had watched videos of people climbing through caves, and he felt a sense of kinship as they squeezed their way through millennia of untouched dirt and cave-fed springs. In fact, he had often watched these videos in wide-eyed bemusement, startled at the fact that people would willingly put themselves in such a claustrophobia-inducing environment and yet intrigued by the concept of conquering these underworlds.

After seeing these videos, sharing in their mutual achievement – them of finding where the cave ended and him of surviving as he had for months – Jay considered himself a conqueror of this submersible. He had spent weeks mapping out the inner halls of the ship, then measuring each.

The submarine was built more like a razor blade than anything else. The front was relatively flat, but thinner than the sides, creating an angle that pushed water around the ship rather than against it. The portholes were thicker on the lower levels, and thinner on the upper levels; he decided this was to counteract the inward force due to increasing water pressure in deeper water. The entirety of the interior was separated into a grid-like pattern, split by the lengths of each room and the height of the levels of the ship, and then further segmented by the widths of the ship. And though the halls were split off in segments that appeared even, Jay found that the segments in the center of the ship were shorter than the segments at the ends of the ship. Undoubtedly, this was to make a more rigid structure that wouldn’t be prone to splitting.

Every room had at least one window, and every family had at least two rooms. The sleeping chambers were minimal, and the bathrooms were small, leaving a single, main living room for each family that could be touched by simply stretching out the arms. This forced communal interactions, as the open spaces were in the center of the ship, where there could be no windows, and surrounding the spiral staircases that drilled from the top level of the submarine to the bottommost level.

Jay had drawn the schematics as he pictured them thousands of times, and every time he came to the same conclusion: the front had to be almost entirely acrylic glass, except for the structural supports; the bottom had to have at least 10 meters of mechanical parts, followed by a very thick underbelly to prevent abrasions; the propellers had to be on the rear part of the boat, which would explain why there were no rooms at the very end; and in the singular, enormous hall in the center of the ship, the one that took up three levels from floor to ceiling and the entire width of the ship, the hall that was used as a library in the day and dancehall at night, and the one that all the children would frequent so they could see the ocean life outside, there had to be a central network of all the lights, all of the cables that relayed information to satellites, all of everything that was the ship. This dancehall had to be the heart of it, and in its own poetic brilliance, it had windows that were larger than any other windows in the whole ship, nearly 30 meters high, making the heart the best place to view the outside and making it one of the only places where the outside could look in.

This heart had enormous red velvet curtains and luxurious red carpeting, which could be drawn open for viewing or closed off for special events. The walls were lined with oak bookcases at the front and the back, and walkways three stories high circled this central space, providing an ever-clear shot of the daily gatherings of adults, the wide-eyed wonder of children watching the sea around them, or the regular commensurate events that were thrown for all the submarine dwellers.

Of course, these events could be hosted in a variety of spaces. The hope of the ship was always that only a fraction of the people on board would be at any given event, and they generally sprinkled these throughout the hull. This dancehall was popular among everyone, and given the amount of space they had to waltz beneath the waves, it was wildly successful at attracting guests. But there was something to be said for the gardens and aviaries, for the orchestral halls, the movie rooms, the science centers and workshops, for the life the ship had buried in its belly. There was more to life than dancing, and much more than watching the outside. Living in the heart had value, but living everywhere had fulfilment, and Jay had documented it all.

Yet here he was, months after beginning to document his progress, and he was painfully aware of how small he felt. This city, floating through the oceans endlessly, had promised landfall and a trip home in three months, but it never came. Jay had traced that too – small landmarks that might give him clues as to the ship’s location. Sometimes, when they surfaced, he would lay out all day and gather star maps when the sun went down. It was painstaking, and more than once, he nearly was caught on the outside (the crew had trouble keeping track of everyone that was on the outside during these times, so they could only blare alarms and hope), but he catalogued their route thoroughly.

It seemed they had gone all over, but roughly 6 months into the trip, they were in a familiar location, the Muirfield Seamount. A few weeks after that and they were at the Lō‘iho Seamount. Months later and they were at the Davidson Seamount, and each time, Jay tracked it. And so he had gathered a trail record of every stop, every location they had been for months. Through the Indian Ocean, then south of Australia, skirting the outside of Japan before traveling towards Hawai‘i, and then dropping south from California to the tip of South America. North to the Caribbean Sea along the Cayman Trench, and then eventually to Greenland before heading south again to South Africa.

He assumed there were some deviations, but they never ventured too far out into the ocean, nor did they steer too far from land. Jay brought this up with his mother once. “Jay, honey, it’s okay,” she had said. “The captains are just keeping us close to land in case we need more supplies. This is a luxury trip. We can’t grow everything here.”

But Jay assumed it was possible; in fact, their trip had been well-stocked, but with the same choice foods prepared in different ways. He knew of at least seven different areas that he had no access to, and that everyone seemed to forget existed. Or maybe they just never thought to wonder about it. These spots were likely unpleasant, but Jay assumed it was processing for agriculture, for farms, for a self-sustaining system that could keep them afloat for years.

Of course, this wasn’t the stated intention of the submarine. This was an experimental cruise, a way for people to see the ocean depths with their family. It was meant to be a 4-month trip around the world, but Jay had logged and tracked and logged some more, and he figured they had been at sea for at least 9 months by the time he had run into Kaira. Not that he could be sure; they spent at least half of their time below the point where visible light penetrated the ocean waters, and so all his timing was based off when he went to sleep and awoke the next day. But recently, they had begun staying close to the surface of the water at night, sometimes breaching to allow the crew up for fresh air in the pervading blackness, and so Jay could see the light outside his window in the evenings and mornings, playfully disrupting the ocean with a portrait of shimmers beneath the whitecaps.

Certainly, his stay here had been unnerving because of the apparent time dilation, but his mother often feared that his greater issue was his desire to be away from the other children. Jay knew she was worried about this; she often brought up these concerns in the mornings, before Jay left to sit in the library, or to wander the ship, or to stare out the windows. And he knew he wasn’t healthy.

He took his medicine in the morning, and that was fine, and he ate his food, and that was fine too, but he never connected with anyone in the same way that they seemed to connect with each other. To some extent, he was always the odd one out, and while he was sometimes comfortable with this distance, Jay usually felt slightly uneasy.

And maybe, he thought for a moment, that’s why this is so important to me.

He watched out the window of his room as the last shreds of light were torn to pieces by the waves. The sun was undoubtedly dipping below the horizon, and as it did Jay watched the lights in his room shift from bright, fluorescent beams to low lights, softly illuminating the room so that only the faintest silhouettes were visible.

Outside the window, a few stars were certainly attempting to press their light below the waves. Try as they might, Jay knew they would never connect; the stars were too far away, and the waves around were too deep, too dark. Jay closed his eyes, thinking of these stars and their great distance, and their soft light, and the water that swallowed it whole, and he felt a wave of kinship wash over him yet again, then die in his own depths.

“Hey Jared?” his mother said from outside the door. “You getting up today, son?”

Jay had been awake for nearly two hours already. He stared at the ceiling of his room. It was blank. White. Impassable. Another barrier between him and the outside world. The sky was infinite, but the ceiling was definite.

“Yeah mom. I’m getting up.” He lowered himself out of his bunk, setting one foot on his desk before dropping down.

His room was similar to everyone else’s: small bed, small desk, one chair, one dresser, one closet built into the wall, one window. The desk had magnets everywhere to keep items from shifting about. Most of the bookshelves used this same property on their books, which had metal covers inserted into their bindings; however, other more rudimentary bookshelves in other parts of the ship had employed a chain strung from one shelf’s end to the other, for similar effect. His cabinet was bolted to the wall. His chair had a rubber grip. His window was fixed as far as he knew, though to be fair he couldn’t attest to its location without watching it. The bed, having nearly run out of creative means of staying in place, was fixed to the wall by steel beams.

There was only one time his mattress fell off its base. There had been a storm brewing off the Floridian coast, and as they cut through the Caribbean, the ship had been caught broadsided by a particularly large wave. It jolted, but little else happened; the ship was designed like a top, with its weight distributed to keep it upright. The propellers at the rear were maneuverable enough that they could compensate for any changes anyways; thus, even if the ship were to be pushed completely flat against the surface of the water, they could right themselves within five minutes, and most of their books would stay in place the whole time, too.

Still, Jay was uncomfortable with the ship in high seas after this, even though he never expressed it to anyone. He usually just stayed near the top floor of the sub during storms in case he needed to escape quickly and left it at that, hoping the submarine would never flip onto its head. If this happened, he would be at the bottommost portion of the ship in a heartbeat with next to no plan whatsoever. But even then, the submarine seldom saw high seas or strong waves, and so he generally pushed this fear to the back of his mind.

Most of the ship’s problems actually came from the ocean life around it. One time they had to cut their speed in half as a bale of sea turtles drifted by. Jay later heard one of the captains suggest this instance would’ve been “like Alabama’s summer bugs against a windshield.” Jay was thankful they had slowed down. He asked them how they knew when animals were approaching, and the crew had explained to him that they use radar to find the large animals, and they had spotters at the front of the ship on every one of the 89 floors for the smaller ones. The spotters called out the animals; the captains relayed the information to the head captain; the head captain steered the ship.

Of course, even a hierarchy couldn’t prevent the unexpected from happening. When they were touring the seas outside of the Great Barrier Reef, for example, the ship managed to bear its razor front directly into a whale. The whale had been going far too fast for its own good, but Jay didn’t think that the whale ever even considered being cut in half as a possibility, much less believing this submersible cleaver would be the thing to do it. Jay heard the captains from floors fourteen to seven complaining about the sudden need for window cleaners, and while the submarine had surfaced so divers could scrub the front glass, Jay watched the waters around the sub redden, then watched sharks come and go, obviously drawn to the scent, and the whole time he wondered if the whale really deserved to die merely because it was speeding, or if this really was just an accident, a situation taken one step too far, too quickly.

And then there was the incident with the pod of dolphins and the dancehall. When one of the curtains was closed, there was no problem, but near Hawai‘i a pod of dolphins were swimming towards the ship. They must have seen the ocean through both glass panels and assumed it was very safe, or perhaps even a challenge – another ring to jump through, for example – because the dolphins steered themselves directly towards this “opening” and… well, Jay thought it was very much like the birds that would try to fly through his house in the summertime, only to find out what a window was. And these dolphins learned what a window was that day, and all twenty of them turned out the exact same way as the birds in the summertime, except the dolphins were larger and looked much more miserable when they began to sink to the ocean floor.

This is what Jay was thinking about that morning, for two hours, before his mother asked if he would like to wake up at all. The whale that was one day cut in half, and the dolphins that saw a challenge and broke their necks trying to accomplish something. Today, Jay was the whale, and Kaira had cut him in half with little more than a smile and a nod; and today, Jay was also the dolphins, but the accomplishment was him trying to form a real human connection for once, and he wasn’t sure if he’d swim or sink. And so, when his mother asked him if he would like to wake up, Jay thought, I don’t know, I don’t know. But “maybe” wasn’t an appropriate answer to give to her, so Jay stood up, rubbed his eyes, and stepped outside of his room.