Hopeless

I feel the sun burning my face. I can even see it with my closed eyes. I cannot say that it woke me up, I am not even sure when I am dreaming and when I am sleeping any more. The hunger has crushed my body and the thirst started to obscure reality. I am so tired I cannot open my eyes, I cannot even close them tighter to block the sun - I just stay there, unable to move, I suffer.

Hopeless, I try to keep a log of the events in my memory to keep my mind busy - maybe even keep it sane. But it always comes up as flashes of horror. The first image is my brother and my dad fishing on the stern of the boat. Then is the explosion of the gas tank. We jump into the kitchen to see it in flames and my mom is screaming on the floor. She is covered in blood and all kinds of debris from the kitchen. We drag her and we realise in terror that her body is completely destroyed from the waist down. Her legs are hanging like pieces of meat. We drag her as fast as we can all the way up the stairs and on the deck. Behind us a river of blood that leads to a flaming hole. My brother, a doctor, stands petrified above her. I look at him and he looks at me hopeless. Our mom in our hands is still screaming. I look at her. Her face is an amorphous screaming pulp. I turn my head away. She stops. I realize that my dad all this time is taking things out of the kitchen and putting them to the dinghy. He grabs us from our shirts. His hands are bleeding, his grey hair is almost all burned and half of his face is full of blisters. He is shouting but I can barely understand what he says. “What the fuck are you doing? She is dead. There is no time for crying. Take any provision that you can and put it in the dinghy.” He leaves and goes back into the flaming hole. Me and my brother just stand there. Looking at the fire mesmerised and hopeless. He gets out again with tanks of water. His whole body is smoking. “There is no time! To the dinghy!”

We stay shocked and speechless in the dinghy, looking at our burning boat drifting away. Our mom's body is still on it. Like a viking funeral - she would hate it. After two days I wake up and my dad is not in the boat any more. We are not sure why, maybe he was too proud to deprive his sons from their food and water - we’ll never know.

And the rest of the days are the same. Only the food and water is getting lesser and lesser. Until there is no more.

And that’s where we are now. Hopeless. I said this word so many times in my mind that it lost its meaning.

Hopeless, hopeless, hopeless.

Now I feel the sun burning my whole body. I hear the eternal silence of the wind and the sea, and the waves flapping on the sides of our little boat, and a soft moaning - what is it? I open my eyes and the sun is blinding me, my vision is blurry from the exhaustion. It’s my brother. I can barely see his face, something is wrong. He is covered in blood. “You are bleeding!” I shout and the last bit of adrenaline I have left pushes me to roll over but I can’t. He jumps back and starts whining “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry!!”. I try to move, but I can’t, I am tied to the boat “What is happening?”. “Oh Fred I’m so sorry…” he cries. I look at my legs, and I am also bleeding. I look at my brother again, he is looking at me terrified and covered in blood. It takes me some time to realize what is happening. “What? Are you, are you eating my leg?” the words come out of my mouth in a sentence that I would never think I would say - I feel my stomach trying to force itself out of my mouth. “I’m really sorry, but you, you are not going to die you know, it tied it very tight. You shouldn’t even feel anything”. “Are you out of your mind Patrik?” I want to start screaming but I also want to reason the whole situation. I cry. “Why didn’t you just kill me in my sleep Patrik?”. “I cannot kill you Fred, if I kill you...” he hesitates. “If I kill you the meat won’t last as long…” I want to say something but I can’t. I open my mouth and I scream, he crawls on the corner and covers his ears shouting “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry...” And I scream even harder so I cannot hear him. And then he stops and stands up and looks around. “Did you hear that?” he says. I am coughing from all the screaming, but I hear it. It’s a ship. “We are saved!” I try to say between my coughs, “We are saved!”, “Yes!” he says, and he turns to me and he looks happy, but immediately gets serious, “But no...” he says. “What no?”. “They cannot find you like this, they will think I am a monster.” his eyes are big and glowing, his mouth covered in blood is firm and serious. “Are you serious now? You don’t mean this.” I shout with a trembling voice. “I’m sorry Fred” He gets closer to me and grabs me from the shoulders. “You are not thinking straight, Patrik, please no! Please!” my words are muffled by the water. I fight as much as I can but I am all tied up. I go deeper and deeper, screaming, looking at the bottom of the boat getting smaller and smaller.

Hopeless.