by Jim Eigo

Once I owned a boat. I was a very young man at the time, the vessel already weathered. A wayward uncle had bought the small boat secondhand. When he told us it was a pleasure craft, he orally caressed his words. He was not much past young himself when he died. Natural causes, the certificate read. To my great surprise, he left his boat to me.

Where in hell am I going? I wanted to yell on my first voyage out, not yet far from land and already beyond my depth. But, not wanting to frighten Kurt, standing beside me as I took the wheel, grinning dumbly as the surf sprayed his improbably trusting face, I swallowed my words with the wind and said nothing. Had I lashed Kurt to the mast instead, would he have looked as grave as the situation? Would his future have risen before him, one unbroken wave, surfacing like the Leviathan, as clearly as it now rose before me? We no more had a mast than we had a captain. I could no more will him away to a warm, dry bed on the other side of the world than I could will myself there with him. Instead, the image of my friend’s drenched frame, more helplessly naked than if he’d been naked in fact, would loom on and off through the storm till at last we went down.

I might wish that I’d had more experience, the boat had been in better shape, the night cloudless and Kurt not the love of my short, clipped life. But that would be a futile exercise, and experience, if it teaches anything, should teach us not to waste the time we’re allotted, searching the skies for guardian angels or guiding stars or the seas for monsters to blame. And besides, here on the other side of eternity’s dateline, it is said we no longer wish.

Jim Eigo is a writer-activist living in New York City. His work on ending the AIDS epidemic is profiled in the documentary How to Survive a Plague. His short fiction, visual poetry and essays have appeared widely online and in print. His latest flash fiction also appears in Antler Velvet Arts Magazine and Coalitionworks Online Journal.