d’Verse Prosery; In the tender…

Launched by D. Avery

I’d always loved boats. So when this guy Gray hired me to run his tender with him, ferrying people between their moored liveaboards and yachts to the docks, I was thrilled. I passed his test, I guess, talked with him about boats, showed him I could tie a couple useful knots, that was it.

Usually the most dangerous part of the job was sunburn, but there were days when the weather would turn fast, the placid harbor becoming windswept chop. On one such day, our craft plunging wildly, I suddenly was launched into the waves, no longer in the tender.

“Gray! I—”

“Swim!”

Undisturbed by my wailing and flailing, the storm raged on, and I was swallowed whole by the swells. I was sinking and would surely drown, but then Gray grabbed me and hoisted me aboard.

“You can’t swim?!”

Now he asks.

I puzzled together this 144 word story for d’Verse, the pub for poets, where Lisa is hosting today’s Prosery. The challenge is to write a piece of prose of no more than 144 words that incorporates the given set of words in exactly the order given, but may be broken up with punctuation. Today we are to use the line “In the tender gray, I swim undisturbed“, by Celia Dropkin, from, “In Sullivan County”.