Excerpt of Fish out of Water
I sit up, coughing, my lungs feeling like they’re on fire.
Yet it’s not fire I’m expelling from them, but water.
Finally, it’s out, and I’m breathing oxygen again to replace the new vacancy in my lungs, but the air feels like fire, too.
What. Happened?
Lifting my gaze from the sand, I see the ocean being tossed back and forth by a storm that darkens the world.
Storm. I was on my ship. Now I’m here. Where’s my ship? And where’s that woman I saw in the water?
My head hurts, and I reach up to rub it as I turn to see where on the beach I am.
The part of the beach, apparently, that includes a half-naked girl lying unconscious beside me.
I blink, trying to figure out how I got from point A to point B.
And then I realize what I should have realized right off the bat- shirt falling above the knees of the most shapely legs I’ve ever seen or not- the girl isn’t breathing.
All my summers as a life guard hit me at once, and my training seems to take over.
Checking the girl’s pulse, I’m relieved to find that her skin is still warm. But something is keeping her from breathing.
Her mouth is tilted slightly open, mid-gasp, and I press my lips over hers to breath some air into her. Then I pull back, press my hands to her chest, and push. Push again.
I feel like a version of me in the past is praying over her life right now. Which is a strange, out-of-body experience- but obviously it’s from the past. It’s been a long time since I prayed.
And I don’t have time to string any sort of coherent sentence together anyway as I compress and breathe. Compress and breathe. Compress and-
Suddenly, the woman whose life I’m trying to save pushes me off of her with surprising strength. Especially surprising, because I was beginning to give up hope she would ever move again.
I pull myself into a sitting position and grin. “That was a close one, huh?”
Her answer is a slap to my face.
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