omnis mundi creatura quasi liber et scriptura

SUEÑA by Wara Vargas Lara

how 2 hold a yeerk

bonus:

THANK YOU!!! he is the funnest ever to draw!!! hes like second nature to me. my favorite little alien

What looked at first like an opportunity to earn money, make friends, and experience the adventure of a lifetime turns out to be a disaster. Your captain's hubris will doom you all, your provisions are poisonous and running short, you're being pursued by an evil bear, the cold gnaws at your bones, one of the other captains invites you for a drink which seems suspicious, and another is ready to assign you to some unpleasant duty if you don't manage to keep your nails pristine using only lead infused water.

But all these tribulations combined cannot surpass the true existential horror of The Terror. You are, at all times, surrounded by men - men whom you have never met before, but with whom you are expected to spend the next two years. At first, it doesn't matter that you mess their names up, they think it's funny. But as days turn into weeks and weeks turn into months, you come to the shocking realization that the only men whose names you know are the captains, who you, a low ranking sailor, rarely speak with; Goodsir, the nice surgeon who treats the cuts you get while trying to open these godforsaken cans; and the caulker's mate who's always skulking around looking menacing and like... caulking I guess? and you've hardly spoken to him, but you remember his name because "Cornelius Hickey" is a hilarious moniker.

After a year or so, morale is low. You do your duties well. You've made a few friends, and engage in pleasant small talk with just about everyone. But the problem is that all these men look the same. 30% of them are named John, so the odds that you won't call them by someone else's name are quite high, but still - not exactly in your favour. You try to steer conversations in such a way that you don't have to refer to any man by his name. You dread nothing more than orders like "find Mr X and Mr Y". When that happens, you just shout their names as loud as possible and hope that the men in question are not standing next to you, since that would prove embarrassing.

Slowly, you become more advanced in your tactics. you befriend two men who we'll call Johnson and Smith. They are both good friends and wonderful sailors, but there is one problem. You do not know which one is Johnson and which one is Smith. Statistically, you also know that they're not the only ones with these surnames on the ship. On a small piece of scrap paper, you frantically brush up on your mathematics, calculating what the odds are of any given man you talk to being named Edward. Surely we must have many Edwards?

As the body count rises, so does the tension. Perhaps it is the cold, perhaps it is the lead poisoning, perhaps you simply miss home, but your mind seems to be playing tricks on you. This goes beyond the minor quotidian frustrations of finally learning a man's name only for him to be ripped to shreds by a bear that night. One evening, when you're in the common area performing a wholesome activity befitting a member of the English navy like... whittling? you notice a man reading a book. You swear you have never seen him before. And yet he can't have appeared out of thin air, you've been here for over a year. He strikes up a conversation with you. Calculating the odds in your head, you call him John. This time, you were right. But how many times can you stumble trying to decide whether to call a man Charles or Thomas before things start to look suspicious? Do the sailors whom you have never seen before and with whom you are now assigned to repair pipes mock you silently? Do they know?

And then the real existential horror - existential Terror, if you will - sets in. You have not seen Captain Crozier for a fortnight. You hear he is sick. You are devastated, because you cannot afford to lose one of the few men whose name you know. You feel slightly better when you see him at the carnival, and you enjoy yourself for the first time in months. Most men wear masks, which lifts their inhibitions. You joke in ways you wouldn't usually dare to and flirt a little, content in the knowledge that you have an excuse for not using anyone's name. And then a man sets himself on fire. And while everyone is panicking and the heat is unbearable and the men all think this is how they're going to die die, the only thing you're concerned with is trying to figure out the man's identity. You later learn that he is Dr Stanley, but looking at his face, moments before it was engulfed in flames, you could have sworn you saw the features of Magnus... someone.

The most arduous months, when you set out to walk, are honestly ridiculous. You feel like you're a character in some comedy of manners, which is funny to the audience, but certainly not to you. The days go by quickly. It seems dreadful to say, but focusing on survival in an environment so foreign to you while being surrounded by crazed men is... refreshing. You dedicate all your energy to walking, chewing, or thinking about chewing. And in the hour of your death, which comes quicker than you would have thought - a small mercy - your skin peeling off, your gums bloody, your leg injured, knowing that you'll likely serve as a last meal for your comrades, the sense of terror returns in an insidious, unexpected way.

Your death is cinematic. a friend - Johnson or Smith - is holding you, gently stroking your hair and giving an Emmy-worthy speech about the power of friendship and poetry and love and stories. You know you're going to die in your best friend's arms so with your last bit of strength you bring your hand to his shoulder, or perhaps, since you have nothing left to lose, to his cheek. With tears in his eyes, he says "James...", his voice and his heart breaking, and you know you're in a story, you know this is art even if there is no audience, save the ice going on for miles and miles and miles and God certainly isn't watching but you must still perform, so you take a gambit, and with equal emotion and pain you say "William..."