(Part 6 or is it? Reader, I'm not sure how the story goes at this point. I only have bits and pieces of the next part in my head, so I'm recording them here. Enjoy the ramblings, and maybe you'll find the ending here somewhere.)
So, She Really Did Kill the Fish
So Katreen had killed the fish. Not on purpose, although she'd been warned not to throw anything into the sea. All the waste was to go through a special purification system, but Katreen, while Josh had been taking his solar recharge nap, had decided to purify herself of her "memory pills" and tossed them into the ocean.
And then tossed herself into the ocean after them because she felt like she was burning up. Josh wasn't sure how toxic the pills were or how hot his wife had been, but they suspected that it was a combination of toxicity and heat that had overtaken the Sunset Fish, making them pop to the top of the water, over 600 killed, a class 6 felony, the punishment of which would be the exact opposite of the blissful contentment they'd enjoyed on this honeymoon.
So Many Pill Questions
Josh had many questions to ask Katreen about the pills, like, why did she decide she needed to throw them into the sea instead of just putting them into the trash bin along side their dinner scraps? Why hadn't she paid attention when the captain had told them explicitly not to "feed" the fish anything? Why had she decided on that particular moment when he was sleeping to throw out the pills and not involve him in the decision? Wasn't she an old-fashioned girl? Didn't she trust him in the same way she'd wanted him to trust her?
But they didn't have time to ask and answer questions right now. They'd headed down to the bottom of the boat to get a reading on the water, and their suspicions had been correct. The combination of toxic "memory" pills (what was in those pills, anyway) and Katreen jumping into the ocean and raising the water temperature in the surrounding cove where they'd "parked" the boat had been enough to send an alert to the captain about impending fish dead, for which he could be liable.
The captain would be here soon, so Josh and Katreen had to come up with a plan to explain the toxicity of the water (which had already been analyzed by the boat's computer, which had identified the manufacturer to the memory pills in the toxicity analysis) and the corresponding rise in temperature for which the computer had no reason, only data that the temperature had indeed risen. It would be simple to connect Katreen to the pills; yet complicated to connect her to the rise in temperature.
Wait, How Many Pills Does She Take a Day?
"The pills," she said. "It could be a simple mistake. I was sorting them out into their daily homes in my pillbox, and a wind or something came up, and I accidentally dropped them into the sea."
"But accidentally how many?" asked Josh. He thought it must be more than 7 pills to cause so many fish to pop and die.
"Well, more like a thousand," admitted Katreen. "My parents wanted to make sure had plenty of them on our honeymoon. They were that worried about me melting down."
"Hundreds?" said Josh. "That's a lot of pills...how many do you take a day?"
"Just a hundred or so," said Katreen. "You can imagine how much work it is swallowing so many and why I decided I was done with them."
Josh hadn't realized Katreen was taking so many pills a day and wondered how many she'd taken before she decided to taper off of them. Her condition must be serious indeed, he thought, to need so many pills to manage whatever condition she had.
She was standing close enough to him as they looked at the fish kill report that he could feel the heat emanating off her. Perhaps the pills did impact her memory, he thought, but he also had the feeling that they regulated her temperature. He did a calibration of the heat coming off her skin and estimated that she was currently running at a temperature of about 105 degrees. Although flushed, she seemed cognizant, energetic, and in no way about to "melt down."
"We can't really explain the pills," he said. "Unless you want to be all emotional or something about reaching for something else in your bag and knocking them all out?"
"I could cry about how much I need them," said Katreen, nodding her head in agreement. Whether they liked it or not, they were married, and they were now partners in crime. Perhaps she had accidentally killed the fish but he hadn't exactly stopped her, had he? He remembered the promise he'd made to her father, about how he'd make sure she would take her pills. He'd never promised she wouldn't throw her pills away, but who would have ever guessed that one?
"Okay," said Josh. "You cry about losing the pills, you need them, you must have them, if you don't, you might melt down. Maybe you should melt down, just a little."
Is He Ready for a Melt Down?
"You really want me to melt down?" Katreen asked. He noticed her eyes were a little glassy, wondered if she was getting hotter by the moment.
"Should I get you a cold drink?" asked Josh. He could feel the heat emanating from her body; how her temperature was rising quickly. He didn't wait for her answer; he rushed to the kitchen and grabbed a large glass, filled it with ice, poured the extra orange juice from the Sunset Fish over it, handed it to his bride. The moment she touched the glass, all of the ice melted away, making the drink running over the sides, splashing over the top of the glass.
She sipped it anyway, the liquid gushing over the rim of the glass, speckling her white evening gown with orange streaks. "We don't have time for this right now," she said. "We need to figure out a story about how the water got so warm."
There were no rules against swimming, and Katreen was such a small little woman that no one would ever suspect her of running at suchhigh temperatures. Certainly not high enough temperatures to kill over 600 fish. "So,where did the heat come from? What's our story?"
Josh thought about what he knew about the boat, where extra heat could plausibly be generated, what he could temporarily disable. As he tried to bring up the blueprints from the boat that he studied in his mind, he realized that his brain was not processing very quickly. The combination of stress and no food...he realized. He needed to engage his alt generator right now or he could power down, leaving Katreen with no option but to deal with the captain inquiry on her own.
"I'm powering down," he said to Katreen.
"And I'm melting down," she said to him. "What kind of couple are we, anyway?"
"Listen to me," he said, and he tried to infuse as much energy into his voice as possible. "I had an alt generator installed before our trip, but I need the key code in my suitcase to engage it. I thought I would remember it but..."
"But you're powering down," she said, and they both remembered their abandoned dinner at the top of the boat. "I'll go get the code right now."
Josh felt sleepy, like he had when he'd fallen asleep in the sun. It would be so easy to drift away, but he had to hold on. There was really only one reason to not fall asleep right now and that was because of his love for Katreen. No matter what, if she'd avoided the truth about the pills or if she'd really felt liberated by tossing all of the pills into the ocean, she was still the love of his life, and he could never let her go without a fight. His eyelids wanted to disagree with him, fluttering closed as she returned with the code, reading it off to him so that he could power up the generator. They needed his brain power and her tears to avoid the captain's wrath and a lifetime separated from each other, a class 6 felony meaning they'd never see another human again in their life.
As she finished reading the code, Josh heard and felt the generator fire up right under his skin, telling Katreen that the sound she was hearing was just him powering back up, telling her that the generator powered up with a burst of nuclear energy, burning hot without a flame. "Now you're as hot as me," she said, trying for a lightness in her tone. "We're such a hot couple."
"A hot couple!" said Josh. He knew now what he had to do. "The generator could cause the water to heat up enough to kill the fish."
"That doesn't help us," said Katreen. "What? I threw in the pills, and you heated things up?"
"The pills were an accident," said Josh, reminding her.
"The generator a necessity?" said Katreen.
"We were swimming," said Josh. "This morning. I got tired, took a nap. You accidentally dropped your pills into the water. You came over to wake me up, had to shake me awake, I had a hard time, realized all the activity had powered me down. I activated the generator, dove into the water to see if I could save the pills for you, never realizing that I would create a rise in temperature..."
"Or that the pills would dissolve so completely and rapidly," said Katreen. "I think it's the best we have," she said.
From the boat, they heard the sound of another boat's engine. The captain was nearing their honeymoon boat. He'd see all of the 602 popped fish when he moored and docked what had been their glorious little sanctuary. Stability, gone. Consistency, gone. Now all they had to rely on was creativity and a little bit of knowledge.
Josh pulled Katreen to him, and this time she let him. He was sure her temperature had gone up by a couple more degrees in the last few minutes, and he wondered if there was actually a point she'd ever melt down. He smelled a sweet scent, remembered it from the day he'd asked her to marry him. The day he thought he'd caught her smoking, gotten upset with her about it, so upset that she'd forgotten all of it, he thought.
But what if he hadn't "caught" her smoking the illegal and highly dangerous weed that still popped up in the cracks of the old sidewalks now and again? What if she hadn't been smoking? What if she was smoking? Not just "smokin' hot," to use language from a previous time but so hot that she actually emanated smoke?
Oh Captain. My Captain.
He looks at her now, the sweet smoke curling like silky tendrils around her face, and at the moment, he hears the angry roar of the captain's voice. "what have you done?"
What indeed, thinks Josh, and he holds Katreen, his smoking hot wife, a little closer, wishing she hadn't thrown all of those cooling down pills into the ocean, wishing he could access the international database, finding a way to cool her down. A woman so hot she could physically "smoke,"...her father was right, he'd never imagined such a thing could be true. Now he just needed to keep both of them alive in order to find a solution. But first, the captain. "
--
Story notes to add:
privacy on the boat, no video, no audio, just reporting of water
balloons, familiarity
class 3 felony, smoking weeds, write about what he saw that day. conversation earlier about had they ever broken the law? Josh recalls being a few minutes late for curfew, having to push his transport the rest of the way home, Katreen recalls returning an issue of Bride's magazine a little late and having to pay a fine of working deep in the musty stacks, scanning old pages. If these were their worst transgressions, they agreed on their mutual respect for society's laws
Josh wishes he could forget most of the day they got engaged. it was supposed to be such as special moment. He'd procured champagne and balloons, added little love notes inside each balloon, so Katreen pop each ballon, every "pop!" bringing her closer to his final question of "will you marry me?" He'd been so happy to see her that day, going out to her family's garden to see her. When he walked out, he only saw the back of her head, smoke twirling up and around her head, framing her like a picture frame, and making him realize that she'd not just been dishonest around the pills, she'd also never told him that she was a smoker, a class 3 felony that could endanger her life, end their relationship. It was the first time he'd ever gotten angry at her, and the only reason he was glad that she took pills that made her forget what she was supposed to forget, one of those things being her almost finance scolding her over, when he should have been focused on getting her treatment. Her father hadn't been clear that the pills were to help her over some sort of weed addiction, but now Josh knew the truth. And he decided to move on with the engagement, anyway.
PH, Katreen's tattoo, what does it mean?
Why does she take those pills? It's a PTSD kind of thing, forgets men who mistreated her.
Consider the alt ending, HH, she's in on it
Josh: so she's detoxing on their honeymoon, is it a bad thing? Perhaps she'll decide to tell him the truth or maybe she'll be able to get off the weeds for good and for all. He hasn't seen her smoking at all yet, and if she's able to get off her detox pills, perhaps she will be ready to...