Linda stepped out onto the deck. Her legs were steady despite the rolling waves. The sun was warm, but the drops of water in the air were cold. She was happy to be wearing a coat.
A sailor approached and was waved away. She didn’t come outside to talk. “These damn men can’t wipe their own asses without asking me about it first,” she thought.
Looking up at the sky, and then down to the horizon the direction of travel, she knew the storm would begin just before making landfall. “A little rain never hurt anymore,” she thought. But she didn’t mean it. She knew it would hurt a lot.
When the ship came crashing into the dock on the storm surge, she was glad that she had not expressed the sentiment out loud, despite how banal the experience had become. All the same, she had no plans of going out to sea ever again anyway. She didn’t care what happened to the ship. She dove into the black water as the ship was dragged back out in the receding surge. Her and her crew had had to abandon ship at a port due to storm surge too many times to count. In this instance, she waited until everyone else had abandoned the ship before diving in.
When Linda first went to sea, things like this didn’t happen. She had heard things like this would happen some day, but the media and politicians all implied she’d be dead by then. They were wrong about how quickly the world she grew up in would deteriorate, along with just about everything else.
She clamored onto to shore and could see most of her crew had survived. “Human hubris is the root the of all evil,” she thought as she waded through the garbage.