Low tide, so I remain thankful, awakening--alive--to the sound of breakers. You see, now on my seventh morning, only my head remains above ground.
I was planted in this hole on the beach by my inventive punishers. I should never have underestimated the ingenuity of those I had crossed. Now, I suffer their final disposition on my life: suffer — submerged in a prolonged torture as psychological as will be suffocating.
I note the tides.
I sink a little lower by each sunrise. I try to loosen myself from my incarceration, spitting out grains of sand, tasting only defeat. I know that before noon my captors will come to nourish me with a mouthful of something awful and with water.
Just enough.
It's a game, you see. It doesn't matter what I tell them. It doesn't matter how much I plead. They just laugh, like every day. They define their joys with others' miseries.
On that very twilight I watch the moon rise. Just a sliver of crescent, waxing from the New it was just yesterday evening. While I'm far enough from water's edge to have survived the week, I worry about the rising moon I see each night.
As so it waxes, so my life shortens.
At some point it will be full and my life over. Then it will begin to wane and the waters will recede, to reveal what's left of me. The Moon stays the same but I will change. The tide will come in then out, but I will stay.
I re-examine my life. My mistakes, my foibles, my pride. They got me here, and now I live on the beach — in the beach — under the haunting moon. It visits me nightly as my tormenters visit me daily. They keep me alive while my nightly visitor comes to kill me progressively.
The flow is steadily precarious; the ebb is insidiously insufficient.
I am alive, so I am still thankful. As long as I breathe, there's hope. I savor each breath. There won't be many more I can, but I do now even as a larger moon revisits me tonight. But I yet live.
Or perhaps it's just a phase.
__________
For Sunday, May 12, Day 133 of the Story-a-Day Challenge.
366 WORDS (without A/N)
All pictures are AI-generated, but the headache is not!
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• Gerard DiLeo (some other guy)
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