short fiction · 2026-10-29

Keel

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The ship does not sink all at once. First the cargo shifts — certainties sliding across the hold, the heavy crates of I know and it must be listing to starboard. Then the timbers groan. A plank springs. Water rushes in cold and indifferent, rising past the ankles, the knees, the waist.

The Pyrrhonian does not swim. He does not clutch the mast. He lets the deck tilt beneath him, watches the horizon cant at impossible angles, and finds his breath steady in the dark. The water is not the enemy. The water is the truth the hull was built to keep out.

When the wreckage settles on the bottom, he walks the sand among the scattered timbers — I thought, I believed, I was sure — and picks up only what he can carry. The rest stays where it fell. The surface is a memory. The pressure is a kind of peace.