We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [84]
Then the cloud was upon us, and fleetingly we felt as though we were being showered with the withered leaves of an autumn forest. Then I realized it wasn't dead foliage, but living creatures whirling around us, fluttering silky yellow wings. We were at the center of a vast swarm of butterflies.
There had to be millions of them. A storm, raging far away from the tyrannical calm in which we found ourselves, must have swept them off an island and out to sea. They must have been seeking land—and thought they'd found it on our doomed ship. They settled everywhere, on the ship's rigging and on every single one of its countless ropes, covering the slack sails and transforming them into bright tapestries of yellow. Within minutes this living, breathing mass of exhausted insects had changed the Flying Scud beyond recognition.
And the butterflies settled on us too, apparently unable to distinguish between wood, rope, canvas, and human skin. Sharing our desperate thirst, they stuck their tiny proboscises all over our skin, to suck the sweat from it. It wasn't painful in the same way as a bee sting or a mosquito bite, but it was soon followed by an unbearable prickling itch that drove us out of our minds. The moment we relaxed, the creatures descended on us again in droves, going for the moist corners of our lips and eyes, which we had to squeeze shut for protection. If we opened our mouths to scare them off with an angry roar, they instantly clung to our teeth, covering our tongues and tickling our palates with their fluttering wings.
We staggered around, blind and hacking, lashing out at them, but we were their last chance and nothing was going to keep them off. We smashed them against our cheeks, foreheads, and eyebrows, but they kept coming at us, even though they were flying to their doom. I think we'd all willingly have jumped into the sea to escape them, had the water around the ship not been swarming with them. The Flying Scud sat like a coffin on a church floor littered with flowers.
When I briefly opened an eye just a crack to find my way to the rail, I caught sight of one of the Kanaks, his blue face and head half swallowed by butterflies. For a moment I forgot the danger and let myself be lulled by the lovely sight of his beautifully rounded blue skull clad in lemony insects slowly flapping their half-open wings, his dark eyes staring out from behind those shining fans. But unlike me, he seemed completely at ease. Whether this was simply because he'd accepted and surrendered to his fate, I never discovered, for at the next moment I was hit in the face by a slosh of water: a quick-witted Kanak had lowered a bucket into the sea and started dousing himself and the rest of us. We followed suit, and it was only then that we succeeded in ridding ourselves of the fluttering parasites.
For a while after that, the butterflies continued landing on our faces and naked torsos, searching for moisture, until finally they gave up. We collapsed on the deck, which now was covered with a sticky mess of trampled and drowned butterflies. It was as if every living thing on board the ship had surrendered to the same lethargy.
I happened to glance at the hammock where the wounded Kanak lay. In his exhausted state he'd been defenseless, and now he was buried beneath a vibrating mountain of paper-thin wings. We brought the bucket, poured water over him, and scraped handfuls of insects off his skin, not even knowing if he was alive underneath. He'd done the only sensible thing he could, which was to bury his face in his arms, and this was