Working Title: A Lack of Color, Part 1

From his towering perch a full three feet above an endless expanse of water, Matthew surveyed what remained of his father’s crop in the early morning light. The shifting blanket of color billowed gently over the now peaceful, perhaps tired Atlantic ocean. Here and there a pale yellow orb stood out starkly from what otherwise offered no challenge to the crop’s namesake—orange—surrounded above, below, and on all sides by a continuous expanse of dismal blue sea and sky. Orange, Matthew saw, and blue, and dots of yellow, and the drifting brown body of Edmundo Antunes dos Santos.

“Edmundo!” Matthew called.

He reached into the ocean and scooped up a bobbing orange, then chucked it at the body. It bounced off the naked chest with a calloused thud.

“Edmundo, Wake up!”

The body rose and fell along with the oranges—silent—a blotchy pale brown except for olive green cargo shorts and a bright orange life jacket, and close enough to see his dark eyes opened wide, staring into the blue above as if deep in thought. His right hand clutched a clear plastic carton of water, which sometimes bobbed out of sync with the rest of his body, causing his arm to gesture toward the rising sun as if something in that direction might interest the boy in the lifeboat.

Matthew’s face went from desperate to perplexed, then grave. He leaned over the bow and threw up, wiped his mouth, sat up, and passed out. The morning continued on without him, while Edmundo's eyes kept keen watch on the brightening sky.