Munity on the Icebox

"We're going east! I've had enough of this! We're going east!"

I blink my eyes several times, shedding the sleep from them. The sea spray has formed a thin layer of dried salt on my sunburned face and it hurts a little when I do this. The blazing sun momentarily blinds me and I have to shut my eyes again.

"East! East! East!," the voice cries again. It flirts with madness.

I am still disoriented when I open my eyes and see a bearded man standing over me and pointing a shaking finger at me. For a moment, my scrambled mind thinks that we have been boarded by pirates, but the man has no eye patch, no parrot on his shoulder, and no blunderbuss at his side. It is only Tim.

"Calm down," I say.

"East! We have to go East!"

Our fishing boat was overturned in a storm and the only seaworthy vessel left in the wreckage was the icebox. It smells of fish and is just big enough enough for two people with a little legroom to spare. After Tim and I recovered from the freezing waters and returned some of the existing inhabitants to the sea, we decided that the best plan of action was to steer towards a bouy we saw in the distance. Tim remembered our boat passing it and since we were traveling east at the time, we surmised that we were going west as we passed the bouy. In the daytime, we were able to guide ourselves by the sun's position, but it was a crapshoot at night; we didn't know how to read the stars, even as they shined so brightly.

"East!" He is still pointing at me.

Tim is normally very mild-mannered, but a week and a half stranded at sea can do things to a man, and I fear his mind gone for a temporary sabbatical. Eating the raw fish might not have helped either. I prop myself and that causes the icebox to shift, causing the water in our rain collecting bottles to slosh around and Tim to fall into a sitting position.

"East," he says, but with less conviction, his voice less excited.

"What is it, Tim?"

"We've been going west for days and we've seen nothing. Nothing. We should change direction."

"Who knows where we are," I say. "We could be anywhere. We could have circled all the way back around during the night. Even if we're sure we've been going west would just mean backtracking for a week and a half. Maybe we should just wait, hope that the search and rescue crew will find us."

"We should go east," says Tim stubbornly.

"Fine," I say with a sigh. A week and a half stranded at sea can test friendships and I would rather placate him than hear him go on and on.

The sun is still baking us straight overhead as he searches our 360 degree unobstructed view of the horizon.

"Which way is east?" he asks.

I go back to sleep, wondering how far into dementia Tim would have to be before it was morally acceptable for me to throw him overboard.