Maybe I'll End Up in Disneyland

It’s not that I’ve never been on a sinking boat before, it’s just I’ve never been on one that’s been going down so fast. And the noise this time, all these kids yelling and screaming, it’d give anyone a migraine. You’d think I had been strolling through an elementary school and a sinkhole had opened up beneath it, what with all the kids sliding past me.

         The water, cold enough to make you think it should be a solid, is already almost to my feet. The water here in the gulf is just as cold as it was the first time I was on a ship that went down up by Newfoundland. This time I don’t flinch though as the water sloshes its way around my ankles, ruining my new Nikes that I’d mostly just gotten to impress the girl who had been working the counter. The water’s biting around my waist now, so I look up towards the front of the boat. The hull or the bow, whichever it was called it’s the top now, and there’s no sail which is wrong. Looking up that way, it’s like the water is pulling itself up, instead of pulling us down.

         My headache from the kids yelling is going away now. All this water in my ears has muffled the world and amplified the beating of my heart. I’m rocking with more bass than the car my neighbor had when I was ten and first knew he was cooler than my own dad. Now that I’m in the water I can just lay back and relax. I see the children around me doing the same, some splashing, but most just resting on the waves. They’ve started teaching kids to float in kindergarten now, everyone can do it.

         I hope I wash up somewhere warm. The first time I ended up near England and it was raining so hard, I didn’t realize I had hit land. This is my fourth time. If I aim towards the sun, I think I might make it pretty close to Disneyworld. I hope the kids around me know to stay together. I’d read somewhere that a ship by New York carrying a bunch of kids on a field trip to the Statue of Liberty had gone down, and one of the kids had washed up all the way over on the Ivory Coast. His field trip buddy, who hadn’t been holding his hand like instructed and had washed up in New Jersey, got a weeks’ detention when they got back to school.

         Some people have taken to sneaking on cruises and then tampering with the boats to make them sink. It’s the new lottery way to travel the world, if you don’t mind where you end up. I wish those people would get eaten by sharks, but it never happens. They did a whole day about that during Shark Week last year, but I’d had work and forgotten to tape it.