The Weight of a Thousand Oceans

by Jillian Webster

  “Please, please don’t say anything.” Maia starts shaking again. “I won’t leave this area again. I’m sorry.”

  Lucas lifts himself to his feet. He stands tall, his jaw clenched. “Why are you here?”

  “I…” She hesitates, afraid to tell him the truth. She looks up at him, her demeanor like stone. “Why do you care?”

  “I don’t.” He closes the curtain on her and rushes from the room. The door slams loudly behind him.

  The rest of the day, Maia lies motionless on the floor—terrified. Every noise causes her heart to pound. Questions circle her head like winged demons. Are they coming for her? What will happen to her now? A loud bang sounds from above and she grimaces. Night falls and Davies does not bring her dinner. She keeps her head to the ground, staring at the space beneath the door, awaiting a dark fate that is sure to come.

  Twenty-Eight

  The storage room door slowly creaks open. Maia shrinks into the corner of her nook, clutching her knife. Davies clears his throat and slides a small plate across the floor. Maia peeks out from under her curtain, seeing only his boots under the crates. She scans the floor, waiting for more feet to appear.

  He clears his throat again. She rushes out, sliding her empty plate back, and he leaves immediately.

  She sits on her knees, staring at the food in disbelief. There is breakfast on this plate. She looks up at the early morning sky through her small window. Still dark, a few sleepy stars are all that remain in the violet expanse.

  Nothing happened.

  She crawls back into her nook with her plate and shovels the food into her mouth. She carves another tally on the crate.

  Forty-eight days.

  The next week, life resumes its normal course. Once again, it takes a few days for Maia to stop jumping at every bump through the ship’s old wooden floorboards, but after Davies leaves breakfast and dinner a few times over, her tension begins to ease. Lucas comes in a few times as well, and she watches his feet from the floor in her nook. She does not move or look out from behind her curtain and often hurried, he does not stay long.

  Drifting in and out in a sleepless daze, Maia is startled when the door slowly creaks open. She drops her head to the floor and watches Lucas’s sandals walk towards her nook. The light across the room indicates that it’s most likely midday. He stops just around the corner. She listens for the sound of crates being opened but there is silence. A large folded blanket drops to the ground. Lucas exits the room just as quickly as he came in, letting the door slam loudly behind him.

  Maia hesitates. She saw only one set of feet enter and one set leave … Is this another trap? She sits frozen inside her nook for what feels like hours until the same habitual footsteps sound through the ceiling, marking the beginning of dinner. The banging cupboards, clanking dishes, and echoing voices crescendo until at last they dull into a murmur. The men are eating.

  She peers out from behind her curtain. The blanket sits where Lucas left it, with an apple and a small piece of dried meat on top. She eyes it like an apparition. Straining her eyes through the quickly darkening room, she searches the tops of the crates for anyone ready to pounce. The room is empty. She knows this but is unsure of what to do.

  Davies’s feet pound down the stairs. She jumps out from behind her curtain and pulls the blanket into her nook just as the door swings open. An exchange of plates slide past each other and then she is alone again.

  Kneeling in the dark, Maia gently runs her hands over the thick wool. This … is this an act of kindness? Or a trick? She lifts the blanket onto her lap. So thick. Keeping it folded, she slides it under the thin, ragged blanket she has slept on for the last six weeks and crawls on top, instantly cushioning her aching bones.

  A smile slides across her face and she sighs with relief. She stacks the apple and meat on top of Davies’s small plate of food. She now has two pieces of dried meat, an apple, and a biscuit. Combined, it nearly looks like a normal dinner. She nibbles each delectable piece while enjoying her newly cushioned bed. For the first time in over a month, Maia’s belly is full. She curls up on her new bedding and falls fast asleep.

  A few more days of silence pass before Lucas returns. He sets a large box on the ground and shuffles through, fiddling with something metallic. A loud, crisp snap breaks through the quiet room, followed by more clatter. Maia keeps her cheek to the ground as he places a rattrap under the shelving of crates near the door. He opens another and sets it on the ground before placing a heap of what appears to be a batter on top. She salivates at the sight.

  He is methodical in his arrangement, carefully placing a half-dozen traps throughout the room. Why would he bother? He slides another trap under the row of crates in front of her, his hand so close she could reach out and touch it.

  Lucas seems to be taking his time and Maia cherishes the company. After so many days alone in her nook, she feels as if the brink of insanity is hovering at the edges, like an army about to ambush as soon as she drops her guard. She is losing track of time. Some mornings, she questions whether she has marked a tally and spends a great deal of her day debating whether she should carve another.

  She continues her stationary exercises each morning, as well as saying her prayers, but even those are declining as she finds herself desperate to find things worthy of being grateful for. Her grandfather’s face is fading. Her dreams are often blank, but when she does dream about her mother, the visions are both harsh and terrifying.

  Just one row of crates away, Lucas sits on the ground, cursing in a foreign language as he assembles a rattrap. Maia places her blanket beneath her head and watches what little she can under the shelving. The mound of batter has fallen off the trap and onto the ground. He curses again.

  As he sets the last trap, Maia stretches her hand beneath the crates towards him. Just hearing him breathe, watching his feet shuffle around the room, the sounds he makes when he touches things, moves things—against her better judgment, Maia finds herself craving his presence.

  His visits are but a brief respite from her state of desperate desolation. Despite what was said at their first meeting, it is clear he hasn’t disclosed her presence. He could have. Or he could have kept her his own little secret—even though she would have fought him with every ounce of her being, she knows she is weak and vulnerable. She despises this more than anything.

  After setting the last trap, Lucas packs up the box and places it on a shelf, leaving the room without saying a word. Once again, Maia is left alone with the mind-numbing uncertainty as to how long her next bout of solitude will last. The only difference now being the random snap startling her in the darkness.

  Maia rests her head against the back wall of her nook, completely captivated as imagined clusters of figurines dance playfully in the black velvet before her eyes. Their arms open and close, they twirl on a toe, a dancer flips another into the air. She claps at their performance. Encore! Encore!

  A low rumble reverberates the contents of the storage room. Glass jars clink together as the roar intensifies. Flickers of light. Maia smiles at the effects. What a show.

  The figurines continue to skate on a sea of nothing. Maia’s head flips forward. Again. Why does it keep doing this? Annoyed, she leans it back against the wall. The netting holding the crates in their shelving strains, creaking and popping as it stretches against their weight.

  Gravity pulls Maia forward, breaking her entranced state as she falls through the curtain of her nook. Startled, she looks around. Flashes of light flicker across the tall columns of shelving. The boat aggressively heaves her body back into her nook and then forward again, rolling her into the shelves across the room. Lightning flashes, momentarily blinding her.

  One one-thousand. Two one-thousand. Three—

  Another rumble. Far … soft, then traveling across the sea it resounds a menacing roar. Maia’s body is pulled forward again as the ship travels over another wave. She crawls towards her nook in a drunken, wobbly pattern, her hands slapping over
each other.

  Once inside her nook, Maia lies on her back and braces her feet against the crates, holding the netting above her head. Rain pelts the side of the boat. They travel over another surge. She holds on, nearly standing upright for a moment before the ship crashes back down. Her head smacks hard against the floor. She looks up at her window. Flashes of light stretch across the rolling black clouds of the sky.

  She waits. Please don’t. Please don’t.

  BOOOOONG! The ship’s warning bell sounds from above. Footsteps pound the floor, and the sound of another large wave crashes on top of the boat like an explosion.

  BONG! BONG! BONG!

  Maia jumps up with her beloved wool blanket and grabs the netted crates as her feet slide out from under her. She chucks her blanket into a second-row box and stumbles back to her nook. Losing her footing, she rams into a stack of crates.

  Bong! Bong!

  Grabbing her pack from the floor, she steps onto the first shelf and heaves it as high as she can into a crate. The boat’s floors tilt upward and she tumbles towards the door. Someone runs past the other side and she fumbles to crawl back to her nook. More flashes of light, followed by a loud snap of thunder. The warning bell continues to ring as the sky lights up through the basement window. Maia shoves herself back into her nook, bracing her legs and clutching the nailed-down shelving around her.

  The boat groans as it rocks violently from side to side. Colossal waves batter the ship like bombs, causing buckets of water to stream down the stairs and beneath Maia’s door, drenching her again and again. A few rats scurry towards her and she kicks at their shadowy silhouettes. They fight to climb on top of her and she releases her grip in a panic. The boat tosses her across the room. The men yell and pound the floors above, running back and forth as the storm repeatedly hammers at the ship.

  Maia’s stomach clenches and twists on itself. Her bucket is nowhere to be found. She rolls across the wet floor as they travel up another surge and she retches as her stomach drops. The ship lands hard on the raging ocean, only to get slapped with another wall-like deluge.

  Shaking and chilled to her core, Maia grabs the shelves’ legs as she loses her footing. A stream of seawater splashes against the opposite wall. The last of the rattraps snap and Maia vomits the precious remnants of her dinner. The towers of crates are illuminated in wild pulses as countless critters scatter through the flooded basement. They climb on top of Maia as she retches and heaves.

  The ship travels up another wave. Maia loses her grip and rolls on top of a rat. It pierces her shoulder, biting hard under her weight. Tense anger surges through her as she screams in agony. The boat pummels forward as she grabs the rat from her shoulder and whips it across the room. It hits the wall with a thud!

  Unable to cope, Maia breaks. She climbs to her feet and screams with all her might through the booming thunder. An otherworldly wail pours from her lungs and the storm is silenced. The sea calms. It feels as though their ship has been plucked from the raging waters and set afloat in the sky. The men’s muffled and confused voices yell from above as rain lightly patters against the window.

  Exhausted, Maia collapses to the floor, splashing into the sloshing seawater as the light rumbling of thunder fades into silence.

  Twenty-Nine

  Half-dazed, Maia hunches against the wall of her nook. Her curtain remains drawn. She pulls her knees into her chest and keeps her arms wrapped around them to stay dry. Her head hangs heavy and slumped over her famished body. Empty, like a bag of hollow bones.

  Another loud thump booms from the floorboards above. The men have been hard at work all morning running, hammering, repairing … the constant banging above mirroring the throb, throb, throb of her pounding head.

  The room is filled with an early morning light. Dim, but bright enough to see the state in which she has been left. The ship now drifts along a serenely calm ocean. In the pauses between the banging, the silence of the room is filled with water dripping from the shelves into the stagnant pool on the floor. A stench she can’t quite pinpoint seems to be drifting into her nook in short, foul wisps.

  She doesn’t remember crawling back into her little cave. She doesn’t remember much, actually, since being thrown around the storage room in the middle of the night. All she knows is that she has survived another horrific storm. What she can’t figure out, however, is whether she should be grateful for it.

  She now sits in about an inch of black water. Her wet clothing hangs from the bones of her sunken frame. Her mouth is parched—still saturated with the sharp, foul taste of stomach acid. A trap ensnaring a dead rat floats within reach. She gags and kicks it from her nook.

  With the tip of her finger, Maia pulls back the curtain and her heart sinks. Crates hang from the shelves. Bound by netting, they are half-fallen in midair. Some have lost their contents, which now float next to dead roaches and rubbish in the grimy water. Other crates have pushed through the nets enough to reach the ground. Any crates not secured lie broken and drowned in the shallow water with their contents hollowed out like guts. Lucas had worked hard at keeping most things nailed and netted down, but there is only so much damage that can be prevented when a ship is flipped repeatedly on its side.

  Maia focuses on one fallen crate in particular, immediately devastated. It must’ve been one of the loose crates, sitting high on a shelf. A dead rat lies facedown next to it. Submerged beneath the water below the cracked wooden frame lies her wool blanket. Her reprieve. The only thing that has helped her endure the long, tedious days crouching in a ball on the floor.

  She is disintegrating. Her bones dig into the hard ground, sending a piercing ache up her back and down her legs. The pain is often followed by a general queasiness reeling about her stomach. She wraps her arms around her concave gut, her body tense from the unending shivering. A sharp pang radiates from her back. She winces as she brushes the bite just below her shoulder bone, now protruding beneath her clammy skin to an alarming degree.

  She hasn’t seen herself in a mirror for a long time, but she can imagine she doesn’t look good. This trip has taken much longer than she had anticipated. She thought she only had to make it through a month and she’d be on solid ground again. It has been at least double that. Or has it? She has officially lost track of time.

  Weak, fading, broken. The food Davies brings is keeping her alive, but it is barely enough. She is always hungry. Always cold. And dizzy. Almost delirious. She lifts her head for a moment and then lets it hang back down.

  And then it becomes painfully obvious. This one devastating fact, sinking deep into her hollow gut.

  She is slowly starving to death.

  Lucas enters the room. Or at least she can only assume it is Lucas. His rubber boots send ripples across the putrid water.

  “Meu Deus,” he whispers. It is him. His heavy boots nudge floating traps and debris. Stepping over a broken crate, he carefully treads down the center aisle towards her nook. He stops around the corner. “Are you still here?” he asks after a while.

  Maia keeps her head down, her eyes closed. A broken “yes” stumbles out from her stale mouth, her voice shattered to bits as if spitting out the last remaining pieces of her dignity.

  Lucas doesn’t move. Eventually, his boots tread through the water back out of the room, but he leaves the door propped open.

  Maia spends the rest of the day huddled in a daze in her wretched nook as Lucas mops the water from the basement by the bucketful. The murky water slowly dissipates, leaving small puddles, their surfaces swirling with oily rainbows. In various parts of the basement, he seems to have help from others. The men work and call out to each other throughout the day as they clean the fetid mess of seawater, traps, broken crates, and dead rat carcasses.

  By nightfall, Lucas is alone again, finishing his mopping near the open door. He sets up a few new traps just as the smell of dinner wafts into the room. Maia lifts her arm around a ghost-like Huck sitting next to her. She lays her head upon his shoulder
as he pants, then reaches up to fix his flopped-back ear. She’s always loved the velvety softness of a dog’s ears. She smiles as he licks her face.

  The door to her storage room slams shut and Huck disappears. Her arm drops to the ground.

  Lucas clears his throat. “Bathroom.”

  Maia’s head snaps up.

  “Tonight,” he adds. His voice is clear as day, cutting through Maia’s mental fog like a knife. He clears his throat again and adds “late” before opening the door and leaving her alone.

  She holds her temples and shakes her head as her brain strings words into thoughts for the first time in days.

  What did he just say? Bathroom?

  Why? why? WHY?

  And what does “late” mean?

  Is this it? Now? Now, after everything she’s been through, now he’ll take advantage of her? Kill her? Bring her to the men of the ship?

  She falls to her hands and knees and scans the newly mopped floor. Only a few cobwebs remain, laced with drops of water like pearls. And new traps too. Why save her from the affliction of rats only to treat her like one?

  After it is clear the men have gone to sleep, Maia prepares herself. She cannot fathom why Lucas would want to meet her in the bathroom, but she can only hope it is to talk and not for anything sinister. Either way, she can’t risk not going. Lucas has kept her a secret, a risk he didn’t have to take. So far, he hasn’t shown any malevolent intention. She decides she must go. But she takes her knife—just in case.

  The bathroom smells clean, the crisp tang of soap a welcome smell. She gingerly latches the door behind her and leans against it. Her eyes strain against the blackness. “Hello?” she whispers.

  Only the ship’s traditional nighttime chorus of creaks and bumps respond.

  “Lucas?” Her hands reach out in the dark. Her sheathed knife is tucked behind the cinched waist of her baggy pants. She listens, but as far as she can tell, there is no one in this room.