seamonsters/this part

The films are done and he is ready to take on the worst day.

On the worst day, nothing at all happens at all, it’s like a Sunday, one of the days when everyone in the world is resting.  Or they say they’re resting.   They rest because it’s in their religion to rest, and those of us who are not in their religion don’t find anything very restful going on.  They rest very aggressively, and we do not, and that doesn’t matter in the belly of a beast, but it doesn’t matter, because it feels to him exactly like being alive on one of those Sundays, and he feels like he should be doing something the whole day but cannot do anything, because all the shops are closed, for one thing, and he’s in a monster, for another thing, and it’s just dreadful, because when restless people are left to their own devices, they come up with interesting things, except when there is nothing to do and that’s the very worst thing that could happen.  

So he thinks about escape.  And it occurs to him that to escape here would be to escape to somewhere else, and right now, the monster seems to be going in a direction that is interesting enough, because really, he has nowhere that he has to be.  Lost in the ocean is exactly where he wanted to be, and this is certainly that.

And so, for seven more days, and seven more nights, he is waiting, waiting inside the belly, and that will be the most important week of his life, not because anything happened.  Nothing happened.  But for the first time in his life, he got to learn how to love the waiting.  Not because there was something surely sublime or ecstatic on the other side of the waiting.  But because there is nothing on the other side of it, and this waiting is exactly this right now, and he is eventually not mad, but right now he is mad, wondering how anyone could go on like this, but of course, so many people do, this is exactly how most people do go on, and he is becoming like most people.  Suddenly, so suddenly, and suddenly nothing happens again.  

Except suddenly the sea monster gets so bored of this day that it opens its mouth and lets him out because it’s so boring that anything is better than this, and once he’s out, he’s

He’s just in the water, nothing more than that.

And all the things that he loves are phantoms, floating to the surface of the water to tell him everything he needs to know right now.

We should probably mention that he is a warlock, and these kinds of things happen to a warlock, because who knows why because.  

“Every incarnation of a desire begins with a wish, but most of us stop with the wish, and never go any further than that, but that, that, that, that is what spells are for,” he says, surprised he can speak so clearly when all there is to drink is salt water.

And that’s when the last person he would have suspected shows up, but of course, she was buried back there in the wishes, and this salt water is the perfect thing to bring her up from the bottom of the sea, and this is how that part of the story begins.  

“What are you doing here?” she says.

“Finally,” he says, “I was waiting for you, and then I just gave up.  And here you are.”