What stood out was the silence. The quiet was louder than any alarm could be, heavier than the ship could be expected to carry, and stiller than the motionless ship.
I sat up in bed with a start, confused, afraid. I couldn’t hear a thing. Not even my breath.
Had I gone deaf overnight?
I knocked on the wooden table beside my tiny cabin bed. Not a sound. I was deaf! No!
Movement at the periphery of my vision. Captain Rainbow, my snow white wood duck, was flailing around. The terror in his eyes mirrored the terror in my bones. Why did it look like he was trying to scream? Wait, no, I was trying to scream.
I was not deaf. Oh no, I wasn’t. It was the air that had stopped moving.
I held my palm in front of my face and blew air at it. My cheeks would not balloon. Where was the air? Was I even breathing? I placed a hand on my chest and tried to take a deep breath in. Nothing happened.
But I was certainly, certainly awake. Captain Rainbow was now attacking me in fear and I felt every talon mark on my face.
“Yaaaaaaaaaah! Stop!” I tried saying. The air did not move. I ran out of my captain’s cabin, straight upstairs to the deck. Running would be quite an overstatement. I made it up there in about ten minutes, what with Captain Rainbow clawing at me, the complete absence of air throwing me off, and my missing hearing making me a tottering toothpick.
I threw the loathsome pecking fowl overboard. It bounced on the water and landed right beside me again. What was happening!
Where was everyone? The deck was empty. So were all the cabins I saw on the way. The water was black. The sky was black too, but the Sun was overhead, an overwhelmingly large fireball, larger than it usually appeared. There was… no atmosphere.
I looked for the rest of my fleet, and discovered, with every inch my eyes moved, more empty ships. They were all gone.
Maybe it was untrue that you could not feel pain in your dreams. Maybe this was a dream. But I knew, I just knew, that it was not.
My stomach knotted up. I looked around me in dread. That Sun. The fires of hell burning in a large ball in the pitch black sky, reflecting off pitch black water, reflecting off my orange hands, reflecting off the wooden deck. All I could think of was oil, slimy oil, pretending to be the sea and hiding depths of torture that my crew might have sunk into. Were they underwater? Were their lungs filled with black oil? I could swear mine were. Was it slime my tongue was coated in? I looked up again.
At that moment, the wind hit. It hit with the force of a missile, and slammed me against the staircase. I lay there, gasping, taking in deep shuddering breaths I had not realised I needed until then. Shaking, I rose up, and walked forward with my hands out, trying to feel if the wind was real. Ah, when had the feeling of air on my skin ever felt so blissful? I closed my eyes and stretched my hands out to the side, forgetting about the devilball Sun.
“DUCK!”
Instinctively, I dropped to the ground. Who was that? Who had yelled? Feeling foolish, I looked around. There was no one and nothing to have ducked from.
“JUMP!”
I jumped. Nothing happened. Senses buzzing, I looked around carefully. Reassessed my situation. I was in the middle of somewhere I could not recognise, in a world I could not recognise, amidst familiar ships without their familiar crew. What was to be my next step?
One step back. I was jumping too hastily to deciding steps. What did I want as my next outcome? Did I want a normal world? Did I want my crew? Did I want to be home where nothing was waiting for me?
I went to the railing and looked down into the black water. There were tiny, scattered ripples. What dwelled under that surface?
“JUMP!”
Cursed if I listened to that disembodied voice agai–
I landed on my back with a thud. Something had pulled my legs out from under me! I saw a tentacle slither off the deck into the water. What was this voice! Was it the frightball Sun playing with me?
“STOP!” I yelled in terror. “ENOUGH!”
Yes, yelling at a dreadball Sun was such a sound strategy.
“IF YOU DON’T STOP MESSING WITH ME, I WILL DROWN YOU!”
Of all the plans I could have come up with. What a dead duck.
Captain Rainbow! Where was Captain Rainbow? I regretted trying to throw him overboard. He was probably equally terrified.
“JUMP! SPIN!”
I did something vaguely resembling a pirouette and landed on my butt. Captain Rainbow quacked in indignation from his perch on my head. Nothing else happened.
What a mystery. What a mystery I did not care to solve.
I looked around at the deck, at the ships around, at the monsterball Sun, at the oily water, at the complete absence of my crew, and I shrugged. Crazy world. No way to deal with it.
I went down to my cabin and got into bed, closing my eyes with a sigh.
This story was written to a prompt:
A captain wakes up to an empty ship in calm seas. It should have three ducks.