My father talked about them when I was a kid, when I sat around the fire and listened to those older than me talk and laugh, the bottles in their hands getting emptier and lighter, as the night dragged on like an anchor. My father liked to talk about those monsters, those behemoths that came from nowhere, juggernauts that raged at whoever was foolish enough to be in their path. Worse than the leviathans from the Bible, from myths, they could attack in even calm weather, with the sea smooth as glass, a reflection of the perfect sky, nothing save the sun in the top half of the orb. Towards the end of the evening, he would have so much drink inside him, he would actually tell us, me, the story he refused to divulge when sober. He followed his father out to the sea, as I would him. My father was on a boat captained by an elder named Long, who some said was as old as the sea. He had been with those who founded our village when my great-grandfather was a boy. When the water was calm and their nets were out, Long talked about the dangers of the sea, the almost evil nature of an uncaring expanse. “I’ve seen many die out here,” Long said. “I’ve seen the best examples of men taken as quickly as a blink, bodies consumed by the abyss as if it were nothing. I’ve seen the sea itself rain down death.” Long said, “this water will kill you if it wants, make no mistake about that.” The old man lit a cigarette rolled in a corn husk, and as he struck his match, it was blown out by a swift shift of the wind. My father said his stomach lurched as the boat dropped with the lowering of the sea. The world went dark, as they were in a valley of water, and a mountain loomed above, and an avalanche came descending like the fury of God. The wave came crashing like the heavens on the final day, and the boat buried under the rolling mass. My father fought, and tried to find his way to the surface, but under that force he was not sure which was up, which down. For a time, he thought he was dead, and the struggle, the pressure of a world of water above him was what it must feel for a soul leaving the body. He stopped the fight, thinking it only right to accept God’s will, and then there was an explosion of air, and the world was right, the sky above and the water around him. The wave was towards the horizon, fleeing the wreckage it had made. The boat was capsized, but in one piece. He managed to get it right, being a small vessel, and he climbed aboard. He waited for Long, but the man never surfaced. He waited for hours, days, under the apathetic sun, the callous moon, and then there was a spot on the horizon, and for a moment he thought Death was coming for him, having missed its first effort. My father was rescued by the men of his village. As they brought him aboard their boat, no one asked where Long was; as they gave him bread and fresh water, not a word was said. When my father saw me to the dock for my first trip to sea, he told me, unaware he had in the past, of that wave, of the uncaring gods of the sea. I thought of them, of his words, as the blue expanse dropped abruptly, as the daylight was obscured, as that great titan descended upon the boat many years after I heard the story, and the currents ripped me from safety, as my lungs filled with brine, as the dark took me for its own, I thought of those words, and how I would not pass them to my young.