In the folds of thick fog, down by the curved Bay of Moon, a stillness descended on the ocean after a swift storm had passed. As the fog slowly lifted, a boat was unveiled; it was adrift. It swerved off course. I was right under, singing a primordial tune—a blue song. A man slid off the deck and fell into the ocean. It was a leaking boat.
I watched him plop. Into the ocean, he plunged that very moment like a dollop of cream into a coffee cup—floundering. I surfaced and wagged my fin in front of him. He caught it. It slipped first, then he held it firmly in a grip. I sailed in the current’s slipstream some nautical lengths until sunset in search of land. Was there any land nearby? Any show of land at all, in all the world, besides these vast stretches of the seawaters? Hope piqued, a sandy shore emerged along the Emerald Bay. I rushed towards it and reached its sandy shores within minutes. I rolled him over onto the beach in the midst of knotted weeds, oyster shells, and ponded waters cupped in footprints.
The tired man looked at me. I expelled a fountain of delight and saw how he curled up in a fetal position. In the meantime, his vessel nose-dived into the ocean as the ocean swallowed its parts in bits until all was galvanised under. His mates on the vessel were scattered on the waves like little debris as though they didn’t matter.
Fate had it that I rescued this dunking man from a sunken vessel. He looked at me, and he wondered how such a miracle ride was even possible? What are you—God? Who are you? He mumbled. I smiled, somersaulted in the air, and submarined, like a vanishing blink from the stars. I resumed singing; he heard it far from the ocean’s depth. Exotic to him, the tune haunted him for days on end—the blue song, he called it. Mysterious it sure was.
But the mysteries of the universe were locked in the layers of the lyrics which were decipherable through the Aboriginal dreamtime—inter-relation of all people and things—workings of nature and humanity—land and spirit. The deep connections which elude the eye—spirits more powerful which connected every life on earth such as the creatures of this blue soul.
The man waited for the saviour dolphin to return. But it never did. But it continued to convey the existential connections through its lyrics. Connections of abstraction communicated through the senses alone—through dreamtime—far beyond any human language.
©2022 Mehreen Ahmed
All rights reserved
Mehreen Ahmed…
…is an Australian novelist born in Bangladesh. Her historical fiction,The Pacifist, is a Drunken Druid’s Editor’s Choice and an Amazon Audible bestseller. Gatherings,is nominated for the James Tait Black Prize for fiction. Her short fiction has won in The Waterloo Festival Competition, Academy of the Heart and Mind contest, A Cabinet-Of-Heed Stream-Of-Consciousness Challenge, shortlisted, finalist, nominated for the 3xbotN, Pushcart, Publication of the Month, and Honourable Mention. Also, critically acclaimed by Midwest Book Review, DD Magazine, The Wild Atlantic Book Club to name a few. She is a juror to the KM Anthru Award, Litterateur RW Magazine, and featured writer on Flash Fiction North and Connotation Press. She has published books, articles, essays, and short fiction in international magazines, online, and in anthologies. Her works have been translated into German, Greek and Bangla.
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