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We landed sideways.
We rocked with horror.
And for a moment, I feared this was it.
The moment we capsized.
But...like all the other moments, the ocean cradled us at the last second, keeping us upright even while drenching us in fresh brine.
Everyone gasped for breath.
Everyone clung to the sides, the benches, the broken rigging, desperately holding on, all knowing our strength was fading with every wave.
“It’s okay, canim,” my mother crooned, using the term of endearment I’d heard a thousand times before. My life. My soul. To my mother, we were all her life, even while that life was so terribly threatened.
She swallowed back tears and did her best to be brave for us. “Listen to baba, Melike. He says the land beneath the waves will save us. We will touch it again soon. You’ll see.”
“I hate the sea!” my cousin, Afet, yelled over the howling storm.
“Emre, what are we going to do?” My mother shouted at my father just as another wave crested against the savage fork of lightning and smashed heavily over us.
Spluttering.
Coughing.
Our fingers clung to anything and everything.
Each time the hull was battered by another wave, it grunted as if the waves were knives, slowly disembowelling it.
Another thunderclap punctured our eardrums.
The boat groaned a little louder. A dying groan.
We’d started this journey with twelve others.
The small boat had been overcrowded, unbalanced, and with a motor that coughed and spluttered more than it propelled.
I’d had my doubts when my father helped us into it.
But he’d said this was how these things were done.
Covertly, quietly, smuggled across the sea by moonlight.
But the storm had decided that twelve were too many.
The rain had come.
The waves had arrived.
And now...there were only five.
“The storm will pass,” my father bellowed, gripping on to all of us as if he could fight the storm and swim us to shore. “Just hold on. The boat will last. We will look back upon this as our greatest adventure!” He forced a grin, his teeth startling white in the storm-churned night. “We will live the life of safety and happiness that I promised. You will see.”
My sister didn’t buy it. My cousin cried harder. And my mother just looked at all of us as if imprinting our faces on her heart.
Another roil.
This one tossed us into a heap and made us cry out with fresh bruises. Blood coated my forehead from smashing face first against one of the benches. Blood smeared my cousin’s upper arm, mixing with seawater until it swirled with morbid patterns.
