Article for 2012 Apr 15

2012

2012 Apr

Apr 15 Sun

To commemorate today’s centenary of the Titanic tragedy, here’s a story I originally wrote for English home-work, to answer the task “Describe a time when you experienced extreme cold.” The story is fictitious; I wasn’t actually dared to do some-thing that ends up with me suffering from hallucinations.

“You can go first Duncan. All you have to do is jump!”

I crouched over the edge of the little boat, arms out-stretched to the azure sky, and dived. All previous warmth and confidence and exuberance departed immediately, to be replaced by a surreal sense of discomfort, when my skin’s temperature plummeted with my body. As tense as an ice-cube, and as buoyant, I was forced up for air, where I discerned that my eye-lids were frozen over. I was blind.

Yet I could see, a bit. In the darkness of that April morning was the faint glow of bright new electric lights, and the reflection of those bright new electric lights in the waves. However, the stench of black cloaks and scythes was in the water. There seemed to be a blood-stained ice-berg before me, and the bright new electric lights went cold.

I thought I heard sea-gulls screeching through the cold, having discovered plentiful prey. But it was night-time, and the sea-gulls were asleep in a warm place. The titanic wailing was coming from distant life-boats. A thousand were mourning. I felt re-incarnated.

Fear gripped me and shook me like an anxious mother waking a new-born child. She stopped, and I swam breast-stroke instinctively. Then I did the crawl, cutting through the cold confusion. The water around me still felt like liquid nitrogen. I swam slowly, as fast as I could. The moon had already fled.

Finally I touched the edge of a little life-boat, and hauled my frozen frame out of the liquid nitrogen. I thawed, as did my eye-lids. Blinking, I saw the azure sky and the twenty-first century again. Grabbing a towel, I babbled casually, “G-g-go on in. You were next.”