journal entry, handwritten.
2041.07.09
Down into the Styx we fall, my bird and I, nose-first into the dead brown water. Writhing slivers of light between the rotten green weeds, the water leaking through the canopy cold as the ice we broke through our twelfth February. The muffled sound of my useless fists on the glass. Heartbeat like a drum stumbling faster and faster after an unpracticed band.
The ferry's creaking hull blots out the light as it drifts overhead and halts. Shadows thrown across the water, the distant dull red of torchlight, while the corpsewater crawls higher and higher. Number and number.
Charon's oar cracks the canopy like the ice splintered under our boots — the deep gunshot groan and the horrible still moment where everything might still be okay before jagged lightning-lines scrawl everywhere. Spraying water turning to nothing but water as the canopy collapses, air swimming away toward the surface.
The flight harness won't come free. Nothing left to breathe.
I wake up on the first breath of water, choking on the weeds that aren't there anymore.