Little Toboggans

Yet there was some odd security amid all the tumult, poised as I was on the edge of a precipice, gripping numbly, the roughness scraping against my buttocks, and I felt I could have released my hands or even kicked my legs so perfect was the balance of my position, pressed between wind, waves and barge. Or that I might be lying on the prickly earth, on my back, staring into a fierce sun. Possibly it went on for hours. My body vanished away into a sort of numbness for whoever or whatever was left inside me, watching, listening, a small creature who came to life spasmodically whenever the wind chanced to pry open my lips and whirl down my throat, striking my vocal chords and generating words, half-words, groans, odd scraps of verbiage that seemed like fuzzy caterpillars or thistles glowing so many colors. But how could they have warmed me so much? Words not even mine but only the flogging sea’s, jammed into my throat, uttered? Then vanish? Thistles? Thistles?

- Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine