Placid

The water splashed him awake as he hit it, and his hair bloomed around him. He sank slowly, trying in vain to thrash himself to the surface. Bubbles formed on his skin and his clothes, and flew upward. His shirt billowed around him as he tried to pull free from it. His heavy jacket, and pants, and boots were pulling him down and he couldn’t fight the weight of the water. All around him guillemots and cormorants dived. His impact with the water had spread out a tight packed school of glassy minnows and left them open to attack. The birds pulled in their wings and cut through the water snatching the small fish, curving towards the surface, and breaking it to sit and swallow their food before diving again. Hundreds of them did this, sinking and floating up all around him while he sank deeper, out of their range, with water filling his lungs.

His body sank through the darkening water, his neurons firing one last dream into his mind; a world that, for him, would seem to last hours. Some minnows from above still nibbled his skin. He fell to the bottom, it was still shallow at the end of the pier, thirty feet deep at most. He had come to rest in a bed of silt, it churned as he hit it and followed the currents, dissipating around him. It was decaying vegetable matter, leaves from trees near the water that had settled over years and liquified to form a layer above the sand of the sea floor. The silt settled again covering his body. Sand fleas bit as he rested.

Over time, hours not days, the undertow of the waves pulled the man down; through and out of the silt and into the open sand. He dragged leaves and branches behind him, pieces that were light enough to not be pulled deeper. Fishing line weaved through the mass, with hooks tethering to his skin and his clothes. A current caught him, using him as a sail for the dead trees, holding him level but pulling him farther into the water. He passed beneath sailboats and steamers, and newer electric fishing boats, narrowly missing nets, but catching on hooks and breaking lines, and starting two rumors in the town, one of a sea serpent and the other of a mermaid. At the bars, old fishermen would recite these stories, swearing they knew all the secrets of the deep, then have another pint.

His body slipped out to sea on the current, the few branches he still trailed hid the eggs shore fish: pipefish, and wrasse who would not survive in the open water without cover. These branches slowly fell away, floating close to the surface as homes for young fish until they waterlogged and sank. The current carried him on, and the sea began to glow around him; luminous phytoplankton lit up in defense leaving a ghostly aura along the surface. Tuna and mackerel made glowing lines as they darted by. A pod of whales lit up the area like great, slow moving, lanterns. They circled, herding krill, and left again, the water slowly darkening in their wake. The current picked up around the man, swirling against itself and agitating the plankton into a shining vortex. It caught his body dragging it to the center, and down; until the last bits of bioluminescence were no longer visible and the world was dark.

There are lights deep in the ocean, natural lights from creatures that want to see but not be seen, and there is light at the surface too; but between these two lights there is a thin strip where the water is as dark as ink, with nothing to be seen in any direction. This is where he rested. More than eighty percent of life on earth is in the ocean. It is full, and vibrant, and thrashing, and curious life. But the ocean is far more vast than the land, and as much life as exists, there will always be emptiness. The man's body floated here with enough pressure to keep him suspended but not enough to push him down. He was deeper than most things would dive, and higher than the deep things would venture. If you’re accustomed to a life under that much pressure, leaving it can pull you apart from the inside and leave you a grotesque blob of what you were. His body was invisible, but the few things that do inhabit that zone rely on smell, and eventually they found him. These things were small though, and there were few of them, that they had only eaten a small amount before a slow current, started by the wake of a larger than usual boat taking a different than usual path, pushed the man down again; till the pressure was strong enough to catch him and pull him further.

If his eyes had still seen he would have imagined himself in space. There was nothing around him in any direction but small bioluminescent creatures that could be seen far away, above and below and to every side. Green mostly, but some a dull red. Some of the creatures ventured close, large things that had never been seen alive by humans before. He could not see them, so they cannot truthfully be described, but some theorize that ancient things still survive in the deep; and who has been there to disprove it? These creatures moved on, fleeing something larger.

His body sank for hours, the ghost of a current still pulled him. It was pitch black, nothing to illuminate the massive distance except for the far away lights, and nothing to brighten the almost perfect flat plane he was sinking towards. The sea floor was only broken by occasional pits and trenches, and by lumps of long dead creatures. It was a place where nothing moved, till there was food to be had; then the world would shift, and out would pour a multitude of life. More otherworldly creatures passed him, crustaceans that traveled in bubbles of their own chiton, malacosteus’ with their jaws separated from their throats and a glowing red sack under their eyes to hunt prey, octopi with wings that resembled ears, and squid that looked like the devil himself but were the size of a thumb. They didn’t pay him mind. A grey shark took a bite from his flank and swam away. It was a test bite, the shark was three hundred and fifty years old and blind from parasites that dangled from its corneas like strings. It could have swallowed him whole. It was nearing the end of its natural lifespan, but still growing, it wouldn't stop ‘til it died. The pressure contorted the man’s body, pressing his flesh close to his bones and caving in his stomach.

He reached the bottom and was swept by a strong current along the seafloor. He passed across the top of an underwater cliff. It was the edge of a trench seven miles deep and sixty kilometers wide. His body was not pulled down there. He passed volcanoes spitting sulphurous fumes into the water, toxic to most life but the area was practically a city. Tube worms pulled back their frills when he grazed them, and crabs with arms twice the size of their bodies reached out for him. He flew over a low vent and the billowing sulphur boiled his arm and part of his chest. He pushed on. The floor was smooth, but looking closer it was covered in tiny wrinkles. They were formed as water pushed over everything that was raised, and caressed it into a near perfect plane. The current slowed and the man was snagged on the bone of a long dead whale. He came to rest in its ribs’ embrace.

It did not take long for him to be found by scavengers. Shrimp and lobsters, hagfish who swirled together creating a viscous mass, mites the size of an index finger and starfish that ate him slowly, sea urchins, crabs, isopods, another grey shark, or maybe the same one. Bits of him floated into the water and were swept up in the tentacles of sea anemones and the frills of barnacles. They ate him to the bone, swirled in his brainpan and hollowed him out.

His bones laid next to those of the whale that had died years before, and waited. The almost imperceptible current pushed grains of sand over him and off of him again. Bones decay over time, his laid still for twenty years, slowly breaking down. Giant octopi passed over him, with tentacles as long as he was. The last of his cartilage was picked away by spider crabs. A manless submarine passed, and its beam came within feet of him but he wasn’t found. The corals in a reef far away and far above released their polyps in unison; they were fertilized and spread out, some landing in the reef and taking hold with their forebears and some venturing far before setting down. Many of them fell deeper, off of the continental shelf and down to the barren sand; most found nowhere to hold and were swept along until they died. A few landed on his bones, and caught in his joints and his crevices, and were able to latch on.

Now he is overgrown in coral, it grows into his fingers and his femurs and latches itself down to him. It has bored holes in his bones and eaten his marrow; it flicks out its net-like mouths and catches bits of other drowned men, and of whales and grey sharks and eggs of shore fish, dragged down on branches. They build and grow and defend against the pressure of the deep. At a time they let out their polyps; some of which travel far, die, or hold to other bones. Others come to rest close, growing next to him and building up on the seafloor piece by piece, building around him till he is truly gone.