Dagon

More about Dagon

I was once a man who loved the ocean, but the ocean didn’t love me back. It swallowed me during a war that no one remembers anymore and coughed me out onto something that wasn’t a shore and wasn’t a dream either. It was made of black mud and smelled like forgotten fish prayers. The sky was a broken piano. The stars had gone out for repairs.

I walked for a long time, or maybe I just stood still and time walked past me. Everything glistened like the inside of an oyster that had given up on pearls. In the distance, a mountain rose from the muck — but it wasn’t a mountain, it was something else pretending to be one.

When I got close, I found carvings—big as apartment buildings—of things that didn’t know how to stop being worshiped. They were fish and not fish, men and not men, something in between with the calm patience of coral. I felt like a postcard sent to the wrong address.

Then it came out of the sea. Huge, slick, shining. A creature like the idea of a god left to ferment too long. It raised its arms toward the sky, as if asking for a refund on existence. I ran. I kept running until I was back on a ship that shouldn’t have been there, floating on an ocean that looked at me like an eye.

They found me later, half-crazy and half-sane, a perfect mix. Now I live in a small room that smells like disinfectant and time. I write things down because no one listens anymore. I dream of that shape rising, the way a secret rises when you try to forget it.

Sometimes I open the window and think about jumping out, down into the dark water that’s waiting somewhere below the pavement. I think about how quiet it must be there, how forgiving.

And I know one day soon I’ll see it again — that god of mud and nightmare and beauty — and it’ll open its arms the way a wave does when it means to take you home.