ST2.4 | "Floating Blossoms on Still Water"
PROMPT: We all know what April showers bring—Lots of water. This month, we’re looking for stories that involve water. Lakes. Rivers. Oceans. Boats, commercial or personal. Send us your best nautical noir, or drown trying.
FLOATING BLOSSOMS ON STILL WATER
by Russell Thayer
Pauline drifted on her back in the sun. Bruised legs spread wide. Still as death. The water in the bay rolled with delicate swells, which sometimes broke over her chin. She dared not choke or sputter as she drew slow breaths. They might hear. The soldiers on the beach who had marched the able-bodied men around the headland to be shot, returning with blood and lust on their haughty faces. Afterwards, the women were made to wade into the surf, stopping when the water reached their waists. An officer then ordered them to face the sea as the team set up its machine gun.
She floated, a bullet gone straight through her, tendrils of Beryl’s long red hair tangled in her curled fingers.
Evelyn’s head nestled into Pauline’s armpit. They’d met at school in Ballarat. Her oldest friend in the Australian Army Nursing Service. Their fingers sometimes brushed as the waves rocked them together. Others had died holding hands. Sister Rubina and Sister Lorna. Ada and Olive hung in the water near Pauline, hand in hand.
For a bright young woman from New South Wales, born on a sheep station populated with rough, uneducated men, the AANS had been a romantic dream. A way out of the dry life. A path to adventure. After extensive training, Pauline was sent to Singapore for nursing experience, then to a field hospital near Bakri when war broke out. When defeat was the only clear outcome, she was sent back to Singapore to await her fate.
Perhaps Minnie or Ellen would float by. Her best girlfriends. The two who always joined Pauline for a beer and a smoke on warm nights in hot clubs, eyes keen for men who could dance. She recalled their visits to Chinese photographic exhibitions and Happy World amusement park. The three of them should have been holding hands as the bullets came, just as they did sometimes while marching half-drunk around the waterfront. If those girls would glide by, she’d pull them close, making a raft of memories, of feng, laksa, and bak kut teh purchased from market stalls. Kaya toast with afternoon tea. What would her mother think of that? After raising her daughter on mutton and potatoes. What would her mother think of her now?
Pauline hadn’t seen Mona since the evacuation ship was split in two by Japanese airplanes. The screams of children still echoed in her submerged ears. Many of the nurses had died before the survivors took to the boats. Mona didn’t make it. Mona, who had taken photography classes with Pauline at a Japanese studio near Queen Street. They’d purchased cameras together, and would explore the Singapore neighborhoods looking for exotic flowers to capture on film. In still life. Pauline had won a competition with a mounted photo called “Lipstick Plant in Water on Bedside Table.” Her commanding officer got word of the prize and complained that the photo displayed a phallic eroticism unbecoming a woman serving in the AANS. The officer hadn’t gotten word of the brazen night Pauline and Mona photographed each other in the nude, in a hotel room, later developing the pictures in secret during time rented at the studio where they studied their artistic diversion.
Then there was Cedric. An English doctor with a trim beard and black hair, a man who liked tall, awkward girls with pale coloring and sandy locks. He wouldn’t be floating by.
“We should wait,” she’d told him, unsure about giving her virginity away to a near stranger in his rooms, hungry hands pulling at her clothing until she stormed out. Angry. Cold. Had she waited too long, she wondered, finding out on the dock that he wasn’t coming, that he was butchered with all the other medical personnel at Alexandra Barracks Hospital?
What would he think of her now, torn apart as she was?
To stop dwelling on the pain and the bacteria that washed into her wound with every roll of the teeming sea, Pauline considered the island where she would die. Where was this place? It had felt like paradise the few hours she’d spent on the white sand drinking fresh water carried by men from a nearby brook while she attended to other men who couldn’t walk. She knew the evacuation ship had gone down while they were still east of Sumatra, but she wished she’d been told the name of the island, remaining motionless as she listened to the screams of the men who couldn’t walk being bayonetted one after the other. The men in her care. She wondered what had gone through their minds as the two dozen nurses were raped in front of them.
Eventually, the soldiers collected the machine gun and left the gutted men on the sand. Turning her head slightly to the side, Pauline watched until the setting sun moved over a clump of red-trunked trees in bloom. She lifted her head to scan the deserted landscape, feeling her legs sink. She could see where the bullet had come out through her diaphragm. She’d treated many wounds just like hers. Men who had lived.
Wondering when other creatures would come to taste her flesh, or when her blood would finish bubbling out of her, she noticed something in the trees. A man hobbled onto the deserted beach, ruining the still life she would have called “Dead Men on White Sand”. He was one of the able-bodied men that had been taken out of view and shot. Gripping his stomach, he dropped to his knees next to the bodies of his comrades. Maybe the photo wouldn’t be ruined.
The rosy color of the vast sky, clouds gathering in the east, made her lower her head back into the water. She was ready to float away under such beauty.
But the man had gotten to his feet again. Pauline could hear him crashing into shallow water. She lifted her head to watch him discover the half-dressed female bodies that had drifted to shore. He’d staggered back to this stretch of sand because he remembered the nurses, that they had set up shop here. On the beach. The tarp still rippled, flapping in the trees. The banner with the red cross crudely painted on it hung from the tarp. She could see the supplies in canvas rucksacks.
The man needed help. Perhaps he was a good man. Pauline smacked her palm onto the surface of the water to attract his attention, her feet touching the sandy bottom. He splashed in, but fell, crawling back to dry ground, clutching his abdomen.
Moving her arms, still life in her, she rose and waded toward shore. And duty.
Russell Thayer’s (Twitter—@RussellThayer10) work has appeared in Brushfire, Tough, Roi Fainéant Press, Guilty Crime Magazine, Mystery Tribune, Close to the Bone, Bristol Noir, Apocalypse Confidential, Hawaii Pacific Review, Shotgun Honey, Punk Noir, Pulp Modern, and Outcast Press. He received his B.A. in English from the University of Washington, worked for decades at large printing companies, and currently lives in Missoula, Montana.