Ocean Heart

They were fighting again.

Sonya could not understand why. Everything had been perfect. The weather was fair when her family had sailed out of Half-Moon Bay in New York, and the ocean waters were smooth. Yet as the sun began to set, casting its drifting orange glow across the endless blue world, the raised voices of Sonya’s parents struck like thunder.

“This stupid boat, Angel?! All of that money, and you spent it on this stupid boat?!” Sofia yelled.

“It’s not just a boat, Sofia! It’s a yacht! A Lord Nelson 37!” Angel retorted.

Sonya squeezed her eyes shut. She was in the cabin stairwell, pressed against the bottom step and the wall- a little thing, not a part of the confrontation raging above.

The deck shuddered when her father stomped to show the sturdiness of the vessel.

“I don’t care that it is sturdy!” Sofia yelled. “We were supposed to get a new house on Staten Island!”

The ocean at night was choppy. The small yacht, Lucky #13, her father called it, raised and crashed against the rough waves. It groaned like a thing in pain as light began to die.

“We’re on a trip to Bermuda, a beautiful trip that most people don’t get to experience, and you want another house?” her father hollered. “You’ve had a drink in your hand and an attitude all day! I’m done with it!”

Sonya winced and closed her eyes. She’d had a headache all morning and didn’t feel well now. She had tried to tell her parents that she didn’t want to go out on the ocean, but they had not listened.

Hidden in the stairwell, she wished they would stop fighting. All the screaming hurt her ears. It was easy to imagine their voices carrying deep below, drawing some curious thing to the surface.

Sonya’s eyes drifted to the underwater porthole. The last rays of sunlight danced like golden spirits on the disturbed waves. The water looked radiant and beautiful.

All of a sudden, Lucky #13’s engine cut out. The pocket yacht steadily lost momentum. She rose and fell on the rocking waves, drifting aimlessly.

“Son of a bitch!” Angel Dominguez hollered. “What now?”

Sofia made a face rife with judgment.

“Maybe I wouldn’t have an attitude if my husband wasn’t spending our lottery money on stupid shit!” she said.

There was a moment of stillness, where the small yacht seemed like a silent island, one with the lapping waves. Then, the argument began in earnest.

The things shouted between the two parents were beyond anything Sonya had ever heard. She tried to scream over them, barreling out onto the deck, but they glared at her with eyes full of hate and sent her below, to the cabin.

Lucky #13 swayed at the mercy of the ocean. Sonya felt its every lift and lurch. Outside, a storm picked up and began to rage. She felt the wind and surf as it churned against the cabin window. Her parents fought, their raised voices somehow worse than thunder.

Crawling into the small bed- a cave of groaning, brown wood, Sonya squeezed her eyes shut and slept.

***

The sounds of screaming tore her awake.

Sonya opened her eyes. The cabin was dark and wet, filled with cold ocean water. It poured in from the stairwell, adding to the churning bubbles above. She was underwater, floating above the bedroom nook and breathing perfectly. Despite that, Sonya’s eyes went wide and panic surged through her.

She kicked off the cabin wall and swam upward as fast as her little legs would carry her. She gasped as she broke the surface, crying.

Lucky #13’s electricity flickered, briefly plunging the small yacht into darkness, but the skies held flashes of illumination, and in the lightning strikes, she saw it.

A creature larger than anything Sonya had ever imagined, it draped its tentacled mass across the back of the trawler, lifting the yacht’s nose clean from the water. Sonya gripped the stairwell railing, nearly flung into the churning ocean. Her scream mingled with the terrified shrieks of her parents as the monster yanked them from the deck like playthings.

Their screaming voices floated over the twisting metal and wood. Sonya gripped the rail as tightly as she could and turned to see the horror’s eyes locked on her.

It was like staring into a world beyond comprehension. As the tentacled leviathan brutalized the ship, turning Sonya’s parents into bloody chunks of chum, Sonya gazed into its black and crystal-blue eyes. She felt frozen in place, unable to scream or even breathe. It split the yacht in two like a child snapping a twig, then slowly sank below the water.

***

“There’s someone in the wreckage! It’s a girl!”

Sonya came to. Her head throbbed, and blood crusted her eyes from a gash on her forehead. The world was bright, and she squinted at the rough arms holding her. Someone, a man with blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail, lifted her from the bit of hull she’d been drifting on and pulled her into a boat. He had wild, tiger-like eyes and a handsome, concerned smile.

Sonya could not explain why, but she felt she was exactly where she was supposed to be.

“Are you all right?” the man asked, brushing blood from her eyes. “My name is Special Officer John White. Can you remember your name? Do you know what happened here?”

“Sonya Dominguez,” Sonya answered automatically.

Her hands shook as she remembered the creature, enormous beyond belief, like a god from another time.

“What did you see?” John asked gently.

Sonya Dominguez locked eyes with her savior. Though over a dozen men and women swarmed the wreckage of Lucky #13, only John had eyes that had seen true darkness. She swallowed hard and tried to put the images into words, but only one came to mind, over and over.

"What did you see?" John whispered.

“A feeding,” Sonya said.