Thoughty published a post on Ko-fi
Featured Image ©Beau Jágr Sheldon, 2025. Image description: The ocean off of the Bahamian islands at night with the moon shrouded in clouds, glowing through and reflecting on the watery landscape and shore below.
Battle At Sea by thatlittleitch aka Thoughty
It was a lost eye tooth that took his soul that night.
He wandered and wended o’er the mossy lane down the hilltop and into the valley, the trees too friendly and the darkness clinging like film on the lip of a drunk. It didn’t wanna let go, and he wanted it to. He wanted morning and mourning, and to be done with it. And yet he did, he did just keep walking.
It was three hilltops and two valleys before he rose to the seaside, by then he’d frankly given all he could muster. It was a sauce. The whole of it. The sea was wet. It was salt. Full of savories and unsavories alike. A sauce. He ate it. He bit the sea.
The sea bit back. It ate at him. He licked it like a kitten dinner, cried into it like he knew the wails long ago and all into the forward, too. He shoved his fists deep into the waves, screaming at it, punching like the worst of brawlers and kickin’ like a cockroach on its back.
“You gave me life and WHAT FOR?”
The sea roared.
“WHAT FOR I ask ye?”
He screamed it but words weren’t going to form in the splash of liquid that claimed them. The jetsam was on him more than flotsam and he fought it, he raged against it, and in doin’ so he bound it to himself. Like an armor, a protection, the sea against the sea.
The sea roared more.
It kept him drenched as he clung with all ten toes to a shore that was no more. He cried but the sea took his tears, too. He bit it, growling and begging.
“Why can’t you take back this life?” His beard ragged, rivers of saltwater sluicing between sparse hairs and the foam of the sea choking him back. “I cannot use it. I make nothing of it. I am here and I hurt and I scream and no one saves me and I cannot save myself!”
A wave buffeted him, no need for rocks to rend his body, and he was thrust under and then raised, the bounty of a trebuchet of aquamarine. He left a smudge of a shadow in the sky with his thick body, knotted like the ropes of so many sailors and just as scraped raw by use and abuse. When he met the sea again, it was anguish.
“Give me my death! Let me breathe you in and know no more air or light,” he crowed, his mouth filling with blood then water and blood again as waves tossed, “I am not meant to live!”
Salt sweet rushing in his ears and around him collided with the pain and he felt his eye tooth, the right, ripped from him with the impact. He screamed, and gasped, the strangle of his scream caught in his throat like a garrote of his own sinew. He felt himself sink into the waters, the waves beating him like driftwood.
Above him, he was swimming back to shore. The sea had taken his life back without him. Through the green tinged slosh, he sank with his canine, his eye tooth’s blood run out. In the dark, the enamel almost shone like new.