The Sinking - L.Paige (best beach reads of all time .TXT) 📗

The captain’s ball. That is what is gracing everybody’s lips. Talk of what people are going to wear, what they think others are going to wear, how excited they are. First class to steerage. There is no difference. The joyfulness is tangible. Preparations for tonight’s extravagant celebration are under way: the workers hurrying, finishing final preparations. The kitchen producing an abundance food, enough to feed ten more ships and still have food to spare. I feel all the work is calming me. Something I will regret within 24 hours.
In my bows, I feel something scraping me. Like a kitten scratching against a post. The water is far too cold. I can feel it chilling me to my funnels. Call it ship intuition but something will happen tonight. And it won’t be all positive…
Underneath me I could feel something quite blunt scoring me, like nails gauging at cheese. At the moment it only scratches me slightly, so nothing major. The sun isn’t warming the water. At this rate, we will come across an iceberg fast. Just because the sea is tame, I refuse to be lulled into a false sense of security. How can I warn the crew about these small, but fast growing, icebergs in the water? I wonder…
Holy Cricket! Are humans so oblivious? I can feel icebergs nearby. Why hasn’t anyone clocked all these icebergs? One hit in the wrong place and this sea will become a killer to over two thousand humans and one ship. That is a sicking thought. Irish businessman Thomas Andrews, who had overseen my construction, must know of the structural weakness. Olympic, my sister was my test run. I didn’t get to set sail properly until I had all my passengers on-board. Any number of things could go wrong now…
For all that is holy! We are on a collision course with a huge iceberg. I know this because I can feel the vibrations, like a lion on the prowl. The longer this killer stays there, the bigger it will get. I suppose that the lying, cheating sun has single handily caught everybody out and trapped them into thinking that it is super-hot and that nothing could be the silent killer. I suppose that because it is nearing midnight so people think that the chill in the air is down to the lack of sun, not my impending doom and thousands of deaths.
I make a sharp turn, well… however sharp an 882 feet 9 inches ship can turn, port left. I know that this will go to waste. My death is looming. Nothing can prevent it. I feel the iceberg gauge me as if I am merely a chocolate brownie. I feel water barrel into me like I am a glass being filled with coke. The trepidation is finally seeping into people. They are finally realising what I realised hours ago. I am going down, and I am not going alone. My crew are rushing around; trying to stop the water and running to the lower decks to lock the ‘dirty’ steerage people down so that the first class and the second class can get off. It is getting harder and harder to keep myself above the water as I struggle to refuse my fate. Many people will die innocently. Children. Mothers. These are the thoughts that keep me from submerging. Drowning my fear as well as others. The rain is acting as my tears. The ocean merely my death bed. Anything between is out of my power. From the time the lookouts sounded the alert, the officers on the bridge had only 37 seconds to react before I hit the iceberg. That was too short an amount of time. If only the lifeboat drill from earlier went ahead… We could save a lot more people…
I could feel myself beginning snap behind the third funnel. I can’t help but think this is ironic. I had thought that I would go down if I got hit behind the third funnel. I knew this because it was three ‘working’ funnels and one show funnel on me. This made me more susceptible to go down if said decoration funnel got hit. no one will be able to escape this nauseating fate. I can’t help but think that this is MY fault. If only I had tried a smidge harder, then many of the poor, innocent humans might have survived. Lived to tell the tale of the struggle I had to keep them alive. More lifeboats can’t be deployed now because of the unholy angle I am hanging at. I feel the burst of pain like flesh being seared at two hundred degrees, course through me. Not just my pain but the pain of the victims of this unfortunate event. To think that in just twelve hours, screams of excitement have turned to screams of terror…
Now here I lay. My death bed with the people who didn’t manage to escape. But I am being disturbed. Can’t these silly humans leave me alone? I want to be at rest. I want to wallow in silence. I find this extremely Fescennine.I am still mourning after one hundred years. Why doesn’t anyone understand?

Publication Date: 12-27-2012

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