Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

Alphabet Soup - O

Help Me Obe Wan Kanobe - You're My Only Hope.

How often I thought of those words while I was waiting for someone to rescue me. I don't know why, but they played over and over in my mind, in an endless loop of futility.

Perhaps if I had appealed to God or to the Coast Guard help would have come quicker - but all I could think of was Obe Wan Kanobe.

I should never have taken the boat out that day. I knew it but I was in a foul mood and figured my anger was grander than the sea - that not even the ocean's fury could touch mine. Such a ridiculous and arrogant assumption. But off I went with nothing but a bad attitude and a pack of cigarettes.

By the time the boat started taking in water I was down to my last Marlboro. I had been lost in my foul mood and by the time I started to bale, it was too late. Down we went and with a herculean effort that to this day I cannot explain, I managed to flip the boat over and crawl on top. My last cigarette was soaked, but I stuck it behind my ear to dry off - because it was my last one after all.

I never thought I was going to die. I wasn't that far from shore, the weather was fine, the sea was calm. It was a colossal inconvenience and did nothing to improve my spirits.

But then I started to drift. The tide was moving out, taking me and my bad mood with it.

Help me Obe Wan Kanobe - You're My Only Hope.

Again with Obe Wan. And again.

I don't know how long I was drifting before the sun started to set. It could have been hours, minutes or an entire lifetime. I waited for rescue. And waited. And waited. I grew inpatient but really - what is there to do in that situation? Shake your fist at the sky? Tap your feet? Proclaim that you'll never drift in that ocean again?

Help Me Obe Wan Kanobe. You're my only hope.

I checked my cigarette. It was dry. I dug my lighter out of my pocket and lit up. A tiny spark on a vast sea.

I sat and I smoked. Until a family sailed by in their yacht and scooped me out of the ocean like a baby out of a cradle.

Stupid boat.

More writing by this author

Blogs on This Site