Dreams Adrift

Tooot, all aboard! Dreams aloft. Setting sail for new possibilities, a ship without compare, and bearing a boatload of opportunities, from glittering rooms to one lucky ticket, top to bottom you're a winner, fated, honored, Everyone! Bring your hopes and baggage on this ride beyond all your greatest imagining, one and only, inconceivable, inevitable, irresistible... The Titanic!

(None other like it, save the one they had some trouble with.)

Rooms of gold, filled with treasures untold.

A journey of a lifetime, a transport to distant lands.

Ferried into the next realm, the cost is already paid,

for your ways through the waves.

We must move quickly, set our record, keep the course. Nothing will stand in our way.

(We see it now! It is too quick upon us, you cannot reverse what has already collided. But surely - it cannot sink - is what we said, were told, and insist on believing.)

Come my child, let us rest, the day was long, and night beckons us to bed, let me stroke your head, look at your pretty face, and we will dream about tomorrows that may never come.

(It was a soft thump, no cause for alarm, or that was the official story, yet many knew something was wrong.)

(Nothing is wrong, just get into this little boat, and I assure you, you'll be back by breakfast time, chuckling over this mild inconvenience over your eggs benedict and champagne.)

Close your eyes, the waters rise, as we imagine all the little fishies, tucked safe into their beds, visions of seaweeds dance in their heads, with bubbles for pillows and moonlight for blankets, and nary a worry to trouble them. They look forward to tomorrow, playing with the seahorses and penguins, and us.

Pray the Lord our souls to keep.

(Sing a hymn as we go down.)

A chorus of angelic voices sang into the night.

(The screams were like a cutting of a thousand knives.)

And then the silence of sleep.

Upon morning, there were hundreds of white seagulls landed on the waters, feathers shining bright in the sunlight.

(Faces cast up, lifeless eyes searching the heavens.)

(Aboard the other ship, children searched for mothers, while the ghosts of the living searched for the dead.)

Where are our dreams, our treasures, our loves?

Lulled by the waves, cast far adrift

(Lost, lost!) into the ocean deep.

(And then...

The captains of then saw only one body, and lots of white dots far away. Explorers today did not see the graves, only many many pairs of shoes. Two matching pairs, one big one small, left lying together on the blankets. With a mirror by their bedside, in which we are too blind to see ourselves.

What is worth more than the cost of a life? Or hundreds, thousands more?

Why must we live this again, why must children die again?

Let them line their pockets, our pockets, your pockets - it cannot do harm - engorged with pride and power, oiling the wheels of convenience where it goes unnoticed, or simply find it simpler not to rock the boat... until it cracks in two and sinks far below. Topples from a weight of too much more of just a little too much. Never again, until the next time.)

Will you wake to face the day, or close your eyes and sleep?

----

Author's note: When I first saw this challenge, I doubted it could be for me. Historical fiction intrigues me as a reader, but as a writer I remain too aware that no amount of research will ever capture the details and mindset of a previous era. And while we can speculate and extrapolate on common human experience, it will unavoidably be colored by my own context.

The Titanic tends to feel like a topic that is over-done, so what else could I uniquely bring to it? At first, I thought to take my own angle with sci-fi, playing off the extravagance of the disaster, imagining it as a tourist spot for time-travelers, and the irony if this supernatural overcrowding was the "real" reason for its demise! But other than stretching that concept to time-travelers ruining everything... what else was there to say for filling up a Titanic-centric story?

Digging even a little deeper for content to work with, the true tragedy of it really set in. Everything about it is sad, unfortunate, and ghastly. So many deaths, for no reason at all. Though an accident, there's a sting to how avoidable it could have been, with more safety measures and less hubris. One of the first accounts I found was a transcript, the testimony from the captain of a nearby ship, who essentially denied what he must have seen. Recent explorers finding shoes of a mother and daughter on a bed... as I think of what would normally be a comforting nighttime scene, but wonder how much were or weren't they aware that it would be their last on Earth? The videotaped story of an old woman, who was a young girl then, all she saw and how she survived. And it was those haunting stories that took root.

The foreshadowing of a poem, a soft lovely song that is a lullaby into death. The promise of invincibility and opportunity, the lure of a pied-piper's tune, that leads to the opposite, utter demise. The two girls, one who dies in blind calm, the other who survives a harrowing experience with eyes open to the horrible truths. The continual disconnect between what was being said and what actually happened. Before, during, and after.

Admittedly, it is still a work in progress. It may not yet capture all my drifting thoughts... and connecting dots to other tragedies. The shoes, the ferries, the children, the denials. But that became my role in this, not making a new story per se. Seeing the parallels, revealing the ironies, weaving together the voices of many ghosts, both living and dead.