Unclaimed Cargo

Shipped, soaked, and slightly offended

Hector isn’t sure how he ended up on this cold, metallic box, drifting gently away from the shore. More like slowly drowning, but with extra steps, he thinks to himself. It’s far from ideal. The slow rolling of the waves unsettles his stomach, sending vague ripples of nausea through his body. He rubs his eyes - once, twice, then a third time - trying to bring the distant rocks into focus. Finally, he spots them: his friends, gathered loosely around the music box, exactly as they did each morning.

Hector doesn't know the word "hungover," but if he did, it would perfectly describe the strange haze he’s swimming in right now. Detached from reality. Thirty percent brain capacity, Hector thinks, and that's being generous. Twenty on a good wave. The metal surface beneath him rises and falls rhythmically with the ocean’s slow pulse, playing cruel tricks on his balance. Last night lingers at the edges of his mind, as blurred and fragmented as the images currently appearing before his eyes.

There had been music, certainly. And there was that peculiar liquid they'd discovered washed ashore: sharp, biting, but oddly thrilling as it slid down their throats. Hector recalls sweet, crunchy, white cloud-shaped snacks melting on his tongue.

Sweet white crunchy cloud-snacks? Really, Hector? You don't even know what clouds taste like.

The laughter of his friends echoes faintly, as if from another world. Dancing, too, though Hector isn’t exactly sure what that means (probably just another silly human invention), attempting to describe the awkward yet joyful movements they'd all made beneath the eerie glow of the night sky. And then, blackness. Not the kind of gentle blackness you experience during a moonless night or deep underwater. This was jagged, cracked darkness, interrupted periodically by flashes of brilliant color, pulsating behind his eyes. A blackness scattered with strange memories, flickering fragments that felt as unreal now as they had then.

Ah, yes, Hector muses bitterly out loud to himself, this is exactly how I hoped to spend my morning: seasick, confused, and possibly kidnapped by a box.

The only option now: swim back home. Normally, he wouldn’t have minded. He loved the cool pull of the deep, the never-ending silence, the promise of food. But the thought of a fresh, glistening lanternfish now twisted his stomach into knots. He shoved the image away, exiling it to the farthest, darkest corner of his mind. Let’s get this over with, Hector thinks. I’m probably going to get laughed at anyway.

The cool darkness wraps around him, more refreshing than he ever remembered. It holds him gently, like a dream, weightless and forgiving. A kind of freedom. The feeling reminds him of being a chick, tucked safely between his mother’s and father’s legs, the world distant and muffled by warm feathers. On nights like those, just before sleep would pull him under, they told him stories. Stories of the "before" and of the single day when everything changed. Not all at once. And not in any way you could point at. But slowly, almost imperceptibly, two worlds that were never meant to meet had been stitched together by mistake. Like waking from a nightmare, when for a moment you don't know which world you belong to - the dream or the waking - and everything feels slippery, uncertain, but undeniably real.

The loud Orange Bird who couldn’t fly, but somehow convinced the other birds he was the sky, had one day decided that Hector’s home now belonged to their kind. Hector’s parents had said they hadn't understood it at first, just a faint stirring in the air, like a storm forming on the far side of the horizon. The albatrosses who visited their rocky sanctuary spoke of it in low, uneasy tones. Especially Old Marrow, the wandering albatross who stopped by twice a year, smelling of salt and faraway winds. Marrow had flown across every ocean Hector could imagine, but even he seemed rattled. He muttered of shifting currents, of maps being redrawn by invisible hands.

And somehow, little by little, the Orange Bird had swayed the oceans themselves. Chipping away at patches of land, swallowing rocks, gnawing at the edges of their home. And all the while, stranger things began to wash ashore.

At first, the things that arrived were harmless enough. Plastic ribbons that wrapped themselves around your feet if you weren't paying attention. Shiny boxes that sang when you hit them hard enough. Tiny bottles with unreadable labels that some penguins insisted were ancient elixirs of wisdom (and others just drank to see what would happen). Hector remembered when Bonzo, the oldest of their lot, wore an entire six-pack ring around his neck for a week, declaring himself "Supreme Leader of the Rocks" until he got stuck between two boulders and had to be pried loose by a very unimpressed skua.

After that, even the albatrosses stopped offering advice.

But then the boxes changed. They grew bigger, heavier. They stopped carrying strange treats and started arriving already half-filled: with odd bits of metal, broken gears, and glass that smelled like burnt air. No one could explain it. Some said it was a punishment, others said it was a tribute. A few whispered that the Orange Bird had made a deal with the sea itself, trading useless things in exchange for... well, no one was quite sure.

The rocks kept shrinking.

The boxes kept coming.

Hector dragged himself onto the rocks, dripping, dizzy, and utterly defeated. For a moment, there was silence, the kind that makes you think maybe, just maybe, you’ll be spared. Then, as if on some unspoken signal, his friends erupted. Pointing, howling, clutching their bellies, their screeching laughter rising like gulls in a storm. It was almost impressive, how coordinated they were. Almost like they’d been waiting for this moment all morning.

"Welcome back, Captain Cargo," Bonzo wheezed between gasps of laughter. "Looks like the sea’s trying to trade you now."