The Adventure Sentimentale (Some Fiction)

I live across the street from the ocean.

Well, most of the time.

Sometimes, the ocean crosses the street to say hello. Then we get real wet and our cars need a good scrubbing.

Below is a story I wrote a little bit ago. The premise was more conceptual than anything: To write a story lacking human beings. Not only could this story not present a single human, but it could not humanize any object or animal. A spade had to be a spade. No projecting emotions, motivations, or personality. Furthermore, the story had to be a story, meaning it had to have a plot line.

The story is called The Adventure Sentientale.

As I write this, I think that it could be fun to pass the challenge on. If any of you out there want to try your hand at a human-less story (It was really fun to write. I swear), send it my way. I may post it here at Inconvenient Body.

The Adventure Sentimentale

Come morning, the bottle passed Seal’s Cove. The sky broiled and then bloomed with Ganguine contrasts against blue water. Between, lolled the bottle. The bottle’s angular glass was yellow, thick, gummy. That was a good and rare bottle floating away from Seal’s Cove into the sprawling gut of the sea.

The bottle moved in a haphazard, breaking line. Often, the bottle chopped back in retreat before veering to the left before lurching forward once again. The churlish waves culled the bottle along a path of spontaneous invention, a collusion of moon, wind, sun and temperature. With artful instantaneity, the bottle blinked and winked, reflecting the ocean and sky inside its myriad angles.

The bottle contained a rolled sheet of paper on which was doodled much ink. A stout wooden cork stuffed the bottle’s mouth assuring the paper a safe and dry passage. The bottle dunked into wet water arches with bright and feckless buoyancy. Its contents remained unharmed. The rolled sheet of paper inside the bottle did not comprehend this scribbled message. A broken line meant nothing different than a line curling back onto itself in a circle. Circle or dot, square or symbol, it was all the same to the paper.

The bottle was similarly indifferent, or more appropriately, oblivious to its purposeful contents. The bottle did not comprehend the paper’s significance or the meaning of its ink markings. Nonetheless, the bottle contained the paper.

That bottle was that message’s vessel. The message in a bottle could be considered an adventure sentimentale.

If the bottle was capable of sentiment–which it was not–it would have most likely felt pride for its substantial endeavour and purpose; but this was just an old bottle, after all, and inside, was just a rolled up sheet of paper. Affectations such as pride, courage, fear, and valor do not calculate into this story about the bottle and its message.

The bottle’s journey told a story that spanned hundreds of miles, but to the bottle, every space was like every other space; there was always sky, ocean and its many transmutations.

One day, the sun burned up the clouds and forced the sky to submit its brightest shade of blue. The color was so thick, the sky seemed daubed with paint. The sun sizzled the air and the sky sighed cerulean defeat, but the ocean did not. The ocean revolted. It clenched onto a murky cold that sparkled and popped around the yellow bottle, and the bottle bobbed brightly.

There was a time when the ocean’s cold was so extreme, the bottle contracted into itself. The bottle shrank and its paper message coiled. Each wave cast a shadow of ice.

At night, the moonlight fell with such mighty gossamer, the bottle bleached white and the ink message rose from its page to cast its own strange and icy shadow.

Then, came one moment, a coup de foudre, and the bottle bumped into a plastic green pepper. The chili pepper was over two times the bottle’s dimension, but the pepper was plastic and skitted away. Slowly, wave by wave, the pepper returned, and with a plastic skud, knocked into the bottle again. When a wave tried to cover the pepper’s awkward size and shape, it popped up out of the water with a cheerful, green ah ha!

For many days, the bottle and the pepper travelled side by side. Because the pepper was lighter, it often rushed ahead only to be blown back in stride with the steadily travelling bottle. A family of puffins flew over the pair like black and white footballs, but the yellow bottle caught their eye and they plashed into the water to surround it.

The puffins swarmed the bottle. They squawked at one another, launching their red blue pinched beaks like aggressive comets, fighting over the bottle’s ownership. They pecked and clawed at the bottle until it seemed the bottle would break and its paper be torn to shreds.

Nearby, the green chili made slopping noises, and a curious puffin left the crowded bottle to investigate. The bird knocked the plastic with its beak, and the pepper sprang up out of the water, smacking the puffin’s face. The bird fell backwards in a confusion of feathers and high pitched crawing, startling the other birds away from the bottle. With thunderous flashing wings, the family of puffins flew away. Then, an eastern wind lifted the plastic chili and carried it away for good.

The sea carried the bottle and the bottle was carried. Past Monhegan Island and Boothbay. When the water was calm, the bottle’s small body created waves that seeped outward and further than that, each wave infinite and like the last. That bottle carried something important, something that would change the world. It could have carried the original thought, the first embodied thought of a universe waking from a different dream, altogether.

Eventually, the ocean’s salt tamed the bottle’s yellow glass smooth like discolored milk. The rolled sheet of paper appeared ochre and fuzzy. The ink, however, ripened darkly. It was only a matter of time, then. When the bottle met the jagged rib cage of rocks off the Pemaquid Peninsula, it surrendered its shape for an extravagant and splendid frothy foam, one of bright yellow splinter and sharp edge, one of diamond-faced facet and hot obliteration. The rolled paper was released into the blue black vacuum and dissolved into a soft salt pulp and the tides, at long last, gently lapped the delivered message from its prison of white and words.