A Wash Of Waves
by Monika Duvnjak
The splash of the water behind the rocks surprised me. It’s a calm day, so why is the water moving? I picked up my bucket and walked around the rocks. The sand was warm and soft between my toes. The water felt nice though. I might’ve gone for a swim if dad let me. I crawled onto one of the bigger rocks and sat down, peering into the turquoise water to see what could’ve splashed.
I spotted a crab, not two rocks away. Excited, I got up and started chasing it. I couldn’t catch it though, it went into a tiny dark space. I looked into the water again and put my bucket underneath the surface to catch some fish. These rocks sure were slippery.
A dark shadow moved in the water to my right. I turned. It’s bigger than a fish. My eyes didn’t move from that spot, but I started moving towards it. It moved! I took another step but fell into the water instead. I panic and try to swim back up to the surface. I finally come up gasping for air and swim towards the rocks. I can’t see that shadow anymore, but my eyes sting from the saltwater. I keep them shut.
I climb up and start walking back to dad. I lost my bucket, he might get mad at me for that. But that’s okay, after I tell him what happened I’m sure he will understand. I see him on the beach, he’s still making that sandcastle. I call out to him, but he doesn’t turn. Did I yell loud enough? I call again, I’m only a few meters behind him now. Again, he doesn’t turn. I think he might be pranking me. I walk out to the front of him and wave my arms in front of his eyes. He doesn’t react. Why cant he see me?
I’m scared now. I don’t know what’s happening. He turns to look at the rocks I was at, then gets up and walks toward them. I yell out for him again. Nothing. He’s at the rocks now, he calls out for me. He starts yelling my name, but why isn’t it in my direction? After I climb the rocks I look down near the water where my dad is. He’s holding something.
It’s a small body. It’s wearing… my clothes? He turns over the body and my face stares back at him, red draining down the sides of it, staining the water. I run forward and start to claw at my dad. I’m right here! He still isn’t listening.
Rationale
This creative piece is narrated from a small child’s perspective in the first person. It’s not set in a specific time in the past, present or future, as time is irrelevant in this story, except that it occurs during the day. The child is not named throughout the story nor is their gender revealed. This ambiguity was accidental but lets the reader interpret these parts of the story in their own way. These interpretations are not essential to the story, but they are a channel where the reader can express their creativity.
An unreliable narrator is one whose narration is compromised in some way and so is unable to tell the full, truthful story (Oxford Dictionary, pg268). A small child narrates this story, and this is where most of the unreliability comes from as children can be naive and fallible. There are 3 main points of unreliability: active imagination, description of the state, and clouding emotions.
Children have very active imaginations, therefore, it’s very easy for imagined concepts to feel like reality for them. In the story, this is shown by the dark shadow in the water. It’s implied the child has never seen a thing in the water that’s bigger than a fish, so perhaps they think it’s a mermaid or some other fictional creature. The unreliability is then maintained as an overactive imagination is easily able to overestimate or make up things. As shown in the story a few times, the child also gets distracted very easily, which further adds to the unreliability.
When the child dies they don’t even know they are dead. It’s implied they die by slipping and hitting their head on the rocks (as shown by the blood on their head at the end of the story). They think they’re alive throughout the whole story and so become very confused when they see their own body and don’t understand why it’s not moving and why the dad can’t hear them. This is important because it means the narrator can’t even accurately describe what state they are in, adding to the unreliability.
Towards the end of the story, there is a lot of strong emotion coming from the narrator. Since these emotions become so strong and overwhelming, this clouds their judgement of the world. For example, at the end of the story, the dad isn’t responding to the child’s cries so they become very confused and panicked, and this prevents them from narrating without bias. The clouding of judgment also continues the unreliability and also links back to the ideas of active imaginations and inability to describe the state the child is in.
It is noticeable that the tense changes from past tense to present tense after the child dies (shown in the third paragraph “I took another step but fell into the water instead. I panic and try to swim back up to the surface”). This corresponds to the state of the child’s life. Their ‘alive’ life is their past and something they are remembering and so is written in past tense. After the child dies, the story is written in the present tense as their ‘dead’ life is what is happening to them right now.
In ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ by Edgar A. Poe, he suggests that “It is only with the denouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence...by making the incidents… tend to the development of the intention”. This quote mirrored my development of the story, as I knew what my end goal was, and all I had to do was figure out how it got to that point. I had to make every word, or ‘incident’, count. Throughout his analysis, Poe talks of how composition comes down to being “the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem” and that “no one point… is referrible to either accident or intuition”. Although my story had a planned ending, nothing else was planned, so I differ from Poe in the sense that not everything has to be calculated and precise. Sometimes accidents can add to the story — such as the ambiguity in the period and gender of the child.
While planning this creative I went through and wrote from about 4 writing prompts, but I wasn’t able to connect with any of them. I then thought of stories that I enjoyed in the past and found that lots of interesting ones were narrated by children. I then created my own prompt about a child. I chose to incorporate death into the story and only two characters. This added simplicity to the story, and so writing more than 500 words was a challenge. My first final story draft was approx. 500 words so I got friends to read it and cull what they thought was unessential to the story. My final piece is just over 400 words but contains all the ideas I wanted and had unknowingly put in. My intention was to make a short, impactful story. I did not want to expand on it because then it would feel dragged out and unnecessary.