“Abandoned Boat,” oil on canvas, by Frederic Edwin Church, 1850.
Having hurled every last morsel in my stomach
into the sea, seven times over like a cruel parable,
I lie here drifting on the boat, while my classmates’
clamors grows distant, swimming away as they are
to their snorkeling spot. Eyes spinning white with
delirium and the Malaysian sun, having succumbed
the vital salts of my own body to the sea that pulls
me through the hull’s hot white membrane, I decide
I am dying. Body shriveled like dried fish, I pray for divine
intervention. We are miles and miles away from land,
my unmoving hotel bed, the closest medicine and
still I pray: O Allah, still this swaying sea. Allah,
airlift me to the closest island. The end approaches.
Even a small rocky protrusion will do. I will
moor myself with the barnacles. Anything
is better than this endless whirling, this
deathly dervish dance that melds sea and sky
and foam and cloud and fish and gull. My throat
is thorny with acid, but my tongue
swirls fast with Arabic prayer when
suddenly a rift of realization bursts open
my sun-ripened head. What am I praying to
but an impossible salvation? Is this how the idea
of god was conceived in ancient minds? Nothing but
a save me-save me-save me against all odds?
I have unmasked an ancient lie. A phantom
limb cannot pull you off the edge, I decide,
so I resolve myself to fate. Death, I think, is
a funny thing. Death at sixteen on a school trip
by seasickness and sun stroke on the South China Sea?
So be it. I close my eyes, render myself
an exquisite, dignified corpse. But, before long,
my classmates come back. The motor roars to life,
and the boat starts its way back to the island.
The cool sea breeze is refreshing.
Someone hands me a bottle of cold water, the shade
of their sunhat on my scorched face like a benediction.
Nafisa A. Iqbal (she/they) is a Bangladeshi writer holding an MFA from Columbia University’s Creative Writing Program, where she was awarded the Felipe P. De Alba fellowship by the Chair of the program. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, The Ex-Puritan, Gyroscope Review, FOLIO Literary, and Fourth Genre, among others. In 2020, she was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2020 among over 5,000 applicants. In 2022, they were an honorable mention for the Robert and Adele Schiff Awards for Fiction.
