So that was the Bermuda Triangle? It wasn’t as scary as people made it out to be. It looked like the rest of the ocean the Carnival Ecstasy sliced through, only bluer.
Releasing my iPhone SE from the pocket of my yellow sundress, I checked the radar. Oh, wow. That definitely was the Triangle, but it looked like it was just going to be a brief trip through it. Therefore, I had to make the moment count.
Warm zephyrs brushed through my hair, as I plopped down on the wooden deck at the ship’s bow. The wind sounded like whistling in a haunted forest. It was as if the Whistler himself was there.
I turned to a clean page in my mermaid-patterned notebook. It was the size of a journal. Repeatedly, I pushed the tip of my mechanical pencil in and out. I had never felt so blessed to be alive. If the doctors didn’t do their job last year, when I had my anaphylactic reaction, then I wouldn’t be there brainstorming a new story.
A thought crossed my weary mind. I needed to come up with a better way to organize my books. Merely a week ago, my computer crashed, and I lost a whole draft of Bittersweet—fifty pages in total. Why did technology hate me so much?
My little, seventeen-year-old heart could not take the strain. I could not let the same thing happen to Metamorphosis. Tracey just became a claxton. I needed to protect him from his own moral ambiguity. I needed to write more stories about his connection to the Bermuda Triangle.
“What should Tracey’s new story be?” I asked, jotting down a few notes that made no sense whatsoever.
Okay, let’s think about this. What were some of the theories spiraling around about the Bermuda Triangle? People argued a monster lived in it, while others said it was a whirlpool that doomed ships and planes to the Doom Dimension. Another group of people—the meteorologists, I believe—said it was a cluster of storms.
My Fantasy writing brain wanted something different. I wanted a beast, but I did not want that beast to be the reason behind the Triangle’s death and destruction.
As I bit down on my lips, causing them to bleed, the ocean’s salty taste invaded my mouth like an ugly parasite. I rubbed sweat from my forehead and flicked it off to the side. It was so embarrassing when I accidentally covered my notebook with sweat drops.
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I peered through one of the deck’s portholes, on the wall behind me, and examined the Ecstasy’s green mini golf course. There were lots of activities to do on the ship, but I refused to attend them, because all I cared about was my writing.
Looking away from the porthole, my blueberry blue eyes caught a small island on the Triangle’s hazy horizon. Wait, wait! I got it! I wrote down island, cruise ship, and beast in my notebook. Put them together, and we have a story.
I imagined Tracey swimming in the ocean below. There he was, leaping out of it with his fellow bottlenose dolphins. He was wide-open and free, but not me, and not the rest of the Ecstasy’s passengers. We had no choice but to fall victim to Alcatraz.
The thought crumpled my mind into a little ball, which caused my creative writing genes to let loose. It was amazing how I based so many of my stories on real-life situations, but I put Fantasy twists on them.
I wanted to be free, free from the Ecstasy’s clutches and off on my own to write. I needed to fly into the unknown. There had to be something out there for me, somewhere where I didn’t have to worry about losing all my hard work to the real world: my parents and my computers’ viruses.
The session wasn’t all bad. I caught the rays of the sun on my palms and shook them. “Watch me, Tracey,” I said. “One day, I will be just like you.”
But then I had to consider my new protagonist. Who, what, when, where, and how did they run their world—the world of the beasts?
The Whistler’s beefy hands caught me, before I could fall into a pool of my own emotions. His high-pitched voice tickled my eardrums as he sang a song. Should I give my protagonist a song, too? Now you’re getting somewhere, Vika! Let’s call the Whistler’s song the “Song of the Beast”.
With my notebook under my moist armpit, which I failed to shave, I left the bow and followed the Whistler to the Ecstasy’s waterpark.
Laughing children slid down the yellow slide. They splashed into the salt-filled pool that we humans stole from the ocean.
I rested my tanned hands and wrists over the stern’s railing and studied the endless blue painting in front of me. “What should I do now, Whistler?” I asked.
The deeper we trekked into the Triangle, the more powerful the familiar zephyrs blew. There was the mysterious atmosphere it was supposed to have. Let’s just hope we didn’t wind up like Jack and Rose, when their love triangle was cut tragically short. I wasn’t ready to give up writing yet.
The Whistler’s invisible form hopped onto the railing. “I am nothing but an illusion, Vika. This is not my choice to make.”
He was right. I was a Whistler myself, who needed to decide what was best for the future of my story and the future of my writing. Why did growing up feel more like a curse all of a sudden, rather than a blessing? I could’ve made my new protagonist the enemy, but I still ran on the Disney Channel ethics.
With that in mind, let’s make this Beast of the Bermuda Triangle nothing more than a loveable dragon.