On Such a Full Sea Read Online Free PDF

thigh-deep water, which was very slowly rising, other than maybe a jab from the pointy ends of a dorsal fin? Though even that was not a concern because of the training all B-Mor children receive, including units in piscine biology, hatchery operations, and free-diving techniques, this last area mostly meant to identify future divers. Joseph had, in fact, dived with Fan on several occasions, as she sometimes demonstrated her techniques for those classes. Joseph might have become a diver, as he was a superbly athletic boy with tangles of orange hair (his line no doubt including some blood from the first European settlers in the area) and the captain of the only Junior Bs soccer team that ever made it to the regional quarterfinals, nearly defeating a Charter squad that ultimately won the championship. In fact, school sporting contests are the only real extended contacts we have with Charters and the few better-organized counties areas, as otherwise there would be a sore lack of new playoff competition. Joseph, in this regard, was something of our champion, and Reg and Fan would watch him play matches whenever they could, this boy who had that special ability to configure himself, dynamically and instantly, to whatever was at hand.
    This was likely his doom, for another boy might not have had the instinctive confidence to do what Joseph did when the water started to recede in that impromptu pond. Despite the torrents of rain, the level was going down, which would have seemed strange if the boys had even noticed, and they kept on wading after the fish, the schools of which seemed to be heading toward one end of the pond. The younger boys were in the lead, hurdling with slowed strides through the water, when for some reason the fish were turning around and swimming back through their legs, which delighted them. But Joseph could see why the fish were turning back: a hidden drainage pipe that ran beneath the entrance road had opened up. It had likely been dammed by some branches but it was now free and making a horrible gulping sound that you could hear even above the threshing rain.
    The boys tried to run against the suddenly fierce current but the friend slipped and fell beneath the surface. And then he was gone. Sucked into the pipe. Joseph tugged his brother to the shallows and then without saying another word dove in, letting the strong flow of the brown water take him.
    He can’t have known, none of us could, that his brother’s friend had already been shot out the other end of the pipe, to the far side of the embanked road, coughing and frightened and with a belly full of dirty water but otherwise fine. But Joseph, three years older, just that bit wider, got stuck three-quarters of the way through, and though fighting as he must have to push himself back out, the force of the water held him in place.
    After an hour, emergency services was finally able to extract him, almost losing one of their own men in the process. Despite the duration, they attempted to revive him, but it was no use. When they brought Joseph back to his household, they say, he was the most startling shade of blue, transparent but still darkened, as if he’d been dyed by the cold evening sky.
    Oh, the lament on the blocks! The outpouring! As mentioned, there were others who died during the storm: a couple who drowned in their vehicle when they tried to ford a submerged intersection; a man who was electrocuted as he attempted to pump out his flooded basement with a self-modified vacuum cleaner; some people who were inexplicably rowboating in the harbor and whose vessel immediately sank. The observances for these people were suitably somber and modest (and perhaps especially subdued, for the faintly embarrassing circumstances of their deaths), but for Joseph it seemed that every row house in B-Mor emptied onto the streets for his ceremony, all of us gathering outside his family’s row house in an awesome silence, the only sound the shushing of hundreds and