Sick Heart: A Dark MMA Fighter Romance

Mmm. No. Wait.

I open both eyes and squint at the ceiling again.

Then I’m awake. Fully awake and sitting upright staring at… what the hell am I looking at here?

It’s a bird. For sure. It has wings. Large, long wings that—holy fucking shit. I scramble backwards when it attacks, a massive curved beak snapping at me. It calls out. That low keening is the call of this… thing.

And this thing sounds eerily human in my hazy, post-blue Lectra state.

I get to my feet and start kicking at it, wanting to yell, forcing myself not to. I pick up a wrinkled and weathered magazine and throw it at the giant albatross. It flaps and flutters. This room is far too small for it to stretch out its wings, which must span at least a dozen feet.

And a good south wind sprung up behind;

The Albatross did follow,

And every day, for food or play,

Came to the mariner's hollo!

Huh. I study it for a moment, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s verse lingering in my head as it cranes its neck upwards, opens its beak, and calls out.

Something answers back.

Oh, shit. I whirl around. There are more.

I pick up another discarded magazine, roll it up, and this time I thrust it, like a fencing sword. The massive sea bird wants to put up a fight. And then there’s another noise and I see why.

There’s a chick resting on a pile of old clothes in the corner. I use the term ‘chick’ loosely, because when I think chick, I see a tiny newly-hatched chicken in my mind’s eyes. And that baby chicken and this baby albatross have absolutely no shared characteristics aside from the wings and the beak.

This baby is as big as Bexxie’s blond cocker spaniel back home. It is fluffy, and white, and takes up a good portion of the available space in… OK. I push the hair out of my eyes one more time and take stock. Where the hell am I?

A small dirty room made entirely out of concrete blocks. I look around, one hand still thrusting forward to ward off the angry albatross’s parental instincts, and get a glimpse of a door that says ‘generator room’ in Portuguese on one side, and another door mostly blocked by the bird. But there is a view of the ocean behind it. And… I’m swaying.

Am I still on the ship?

No. I don’t feel like I’m on a ship at all, but the view outside is confusing me.

I stab at the bird with my magazine. The massive wings open, spanning the entire width of the room. The tips actually push up against the walls on either side, because there’s not enough space.

It doesn’t give up its position in front of my escape route, so I do that another dozen times until finally it sidesteps its way over to the chick and I can slip past.

Outside I stop short. Because I was right. I am not on a ship. Not even close to being on a ship. There is nothing around me but ocean for as far as the eye can see. And I am on the top floor of a platform.

A platform I vaguely recognize as an oil rig topside. Minus all the things typically on a topside that makes them habitable. There is a large, faded H painted in the center of the platform’s open space. A helipad.

There are more birds out here as well. Several albatrosses as well as large formidable gulls are flying overhead, their wings gliding in and through the wind without flapping.

There are a few more nests along the edge of the tiny building I woke up in, and each nest hosts another sizable chick.

One of my flying enemies dives at me as I run towards the center of the expansive, empty platform to put some space between me and the chicks. When I get there I stop, turn in a circle, and see nothing in any direction but water.

My heart skips. Literally skips inside my chest. And then it begins to beat fast. Fast. Faster.

Calm down, Anya. Remain rational and do not overreact. He did not drop you off on an abandoned oil rig. That simply doesn’t happen. Your life is not a movie, or a book, or some other fiction worthy of such drama.

I tell myself this kind of shit because there is still a slim chance that I’m not on an abandoned topside. It’s still possible that this situation works. It is still possible that my life isn’t one long string of fiction-worthy drama.

Right.

I snort.

And it’s a real snort. Not an implied one. Because a flock of albatrosses—who, by the way, don’t even live in the part of the Atlantic where I was located yesterday—always make their nests on the top floor of a fully working, commissioned topside oil rig.

I take a deep breath and let it out. Force the fear and confusion to go with it. And I think rationally. Because that’s all there is left to do.