---

Mistress

by Shi Y, Arizona, USA, Age 16

That morning I remember waking early, just as the sun was spreading itself across the sky, like butter on toast. It was a very beautiful sunrise over sea, and I watched it in its entirety for it filled me with an oddly wonderful feeling. I was so taken with the moment that I did not realize the emotion I felt until later, but I think now it was an odd mixture of awe, wistfulness, and hope. If it had only been for that emotion, and that magnificent dawn, I would have remembered the day just as clearly. As it is, I maintain a powerfully detailed picture of the moment, frozen in my thoughts forever. I glance back on it now sometimes, as one flips through a book in search of a particular illustration; it is now, though, only bittersweet.

I know I slept again after daybreak, for the next thing I remember is disaster. The ship’s sudden jerk starboard, followed by the shouts of the captain for crew, roused me from my peace. All round me, slumbering men were disturbed with the shrill sounds of despair. “What’s happened?” I muttered groggily to myself. “What’s happened?” Nobody answered me, but I saw soon enough.

The ship had plowed right into a coral reef, and there was a huge gash in the bow. Water was ripping angrily through the hole in a torrent of sand; quickly, so quickly, the ocean’s lining came bursting through the damning portal. I joined the men bailing, but it was only a fool’s task. The water was vicious, and so was the sand; it whipped all around us, so that we could barely tell fore from aft. Wood was groaning and already weakened with age; the weight of gushing ocean threatened to demolish our precious timber. It was hopeless; I was hopeless. I fled with a vision of rosy skies behind my lidded eyes.

The water was bitter, chilling to the very soul. I struggled vainly against the current. Sand choked my every sense, it flooded my vision; it filled my mouth; it folded me into its embrace and threatened to swallow me whole. I believe I was walking through water upside down, my body buried in the grainy deeps, struggling through death into eternity. I remembered a song. “Bury me out in the lonely sea that I never may leave thee, O cruelest misery….”—my favorite song. What irony, I thought.

I felt the sand shift underneath me, or through me, or into me. The world was shifting; the world was sand. My heart was sand and it was blowing away. I saw the blushing sky again, and I cried out in overwhelming grief. “I love you!” I screamed mutely. “Oh, I love you!” I smiled, euphoric then, and opened my mouth to greet my mistress. She flooded my lungs, she flooded my mouth, she surged all round me, and gently opened my eyes, and brushed the sand off my face, and clothed me, and fed me forever. She sang to me angel’s songs and turned the skies pink once more, and she loved me patiently, for she knew it would be quite some time before I was released from the cold grips of the watery depths.

She was dawn, and I was alive, wistful, awestruck, hopeful.