advent-dissidence

advent-dissidence

1. Advent

Circa 2015-The Aegean Coast of Greece

The floodlight from the dock groaned as the workers struggled to rotate it on its mount. 

The floodlight sat upon a wrought iron base, and it cost a lot of effort to turn the wheel. 

Mostly, it was considered to be a waste of time and energy.

Afterall, one could always wait until morning to regard the corpses either floating in the sea or washed-up on the shore. 

What was the sense in disrupting a good night’s worth of keeping warm within the shelter, playing cards, drinking Ouzo, and boasting of imagined conquests in long dead days?

The two workers on duty, Tassos and Giles, had been notified by the magistrate that there was some pressure being placed upon the harbour master to search for the corpses of any Westerners who may have washed up with the others.

Apparently there is also a hierarchy among the dead.

Of course, Tassos and Giles had heard the cries from the Aegean. 

That had been hours earlier.

They had been warm within the shelter.

But, despite the ancient stone walls of the structure, the two men had heard those sounds at the same time that, had they cared to look unto the horizon, they would have beheld the suggestion of doom as some vast but inexorably nearing distance strangled usable light from the sky and replaced it with a crimson, insipid hew.

Of course, there might have been a chance to save at least a few of the desperate women, children, and men who had been swept up in the storm, separated from their rafts or dinghies, and had come unto that shoreline clinging to little more than some faint hope after having fled the desperate and tumultuous circumstances from which they had fled.

But one supposes that life is just a construct of cycles.

Beginnings and endings.

Tides coming in…

And then receding unto some quiet and eternal deep.

No one who had ever known Tassos well would have described him as a pensive, astute, or contemplative man.

More likely, they would have been compelled to impart to anyone seated in a circle by a fire in increasingly boisterous tones on drunken nights that…

Truth be told, it was said that the man had quite a way with the goats in the fields.

And the locals would laugh together with the acquaintances, and they would speak in their own language and continue with the merriment.

To the exclusion of anyone outside of the circle.

Such is the nature of circles.

But on that evening, amid the stygian wail of wind, sea, and death coalesced the suggestion of a thought that had come to Tassos. 

It had occurred to him that the sea always offers up its gifts irrespective of what anyone does or does not do.

Whatever anyone does or does not want… 

Whatever people do or do not choose…

There is balance.

It is as certain as the tides, themselves.

And some people somehow come to feel justified in their indifference to that which occurs around them. 

For instance, earlier when those vague and unknown husks were out in the harbour drowning, Tassos had cringed at the disruptive nuisance of the voices crying out in desperation. 

The evening had begun so well, and now this.

Now, some hours later, the two men strained against the wheel at the base of the floodlight, that was trained upon the flotsam. 

They scanned the vacant eyes and the bloated figures bobbing in the foamy water with only marginal interest or attentiveness. 

They had seen it all so many times.

Nevertheless, one of the corpses stood out from the others for its pallor. 

Tassos and Giles laboured in unison, turning the wheel to train the floodlight down upon the wretch that had become entangled in a morass of seaweed.

The body moved with the tide at first, lightly bumping up against one of the wooden foundations of the dock as if in some soft, innocuous dream of gentle harmony.

But soon, it was unable to recede for the seaweed having bound it to the foundation, and so it smacked again and again with increasing force against the pole. 

The two men released the wheel at the same time… neither bothering to say anything to the other, as scores of other corpses made landfall twenty meters away at the beach, upon the tide in the only condition in which any nation in any age, whether in antiquity or in contemporary times, would truly and without complaint receive them…

Quiet.

Unobtrusive.

Dead.

Finally, Tassos went away from the wheel… taking the long pole with the great, curved hook at the end of it that was leaned up against the side of the ancient stone shelter in which he and Giles had been meticulously anesthetising the burden of days, and he clambered unto the end of the pier.

Giles followed dutifully in his wake.

“We have a winner,” said Giles cynically.

The two worked in tandem, and eventually succeeded in fishing the bloated body from the water.

They panted from the exertion.

Giles threw up a bit into his own mouth for the stench.

A moment or two passed in relative stillness.

Each of them, in some way or other trying to grasp the idea weighing on the sky… 

As if there had never been any substance or relevance to the lives that had preceded any of this…

This…

End.

And then finally…

Absently…

As though he had just emerged, however fleetingly, from beneath some debilitating existential murk, Tassos remarked…

“This doesn’t feel like something that’s going to end anytime soon…

This feels like the start of something…

More.”