“Nicholas,” she said, in the calm, terrible voice she uses when I’ve done something wrong but she’s deciding whether to be amused or furious. “Where are your swimming trunks?”
I surfaced with a gasp, not from lack of air, but from the sheer, wet vulnerability of it all. The water was crystal clear. My wife, Elena, was still on the beach, her face buried in a book. Our friends, Mark and Chloe, were arguing about the best angle for a snorkeling selfie twenty yards away. No one had seen.
“Get in the car,” she said. “We’re going to the village to buy you the ugliest, most elastic-waisted pair of shorts they sell. And you’re wearing them for the rest of the trip. I don’t care if they have flamingos.”
I surfaced again, treading water. I had two options. Option A: Announce my predicament to the entire cove, including the elderly French couple painting watercolors on the rocks. Option B: Execute a tactical beach landing. My Swimming Trunks Have Been Sucked Off
“I’m good,” I said, not moving a muscle.
She tilted her head. “Why are you squatting?”
I felt the elastic waistband yank backward, then a strange, cool kiss around my thighs. I looked down just in time to see the bright blue fabric—featuring a cheerful pattern of cartoon pineapples—spiral away from my body like a startled squid. It vanished into the dark maw of the rock, sucked into the underworld. “Nicholas,” she said, in the calm, terrible voice
Chloe’s eyes went wide. Mark started to laugh—that horrible, silent, shoulder-shaking laugh that precedes an explosion. Elena put down her book. She looked at my face. She looked at my clasped hands. She looked at the empty patch of sea behind me.
The current was stronger than I’d anticipated. One second I was floating peacefully in the Aegean, the next I was being dragged toward a submerged vent on the seafloor of this tiny, forgotten Greek cove. It wasn't a whirlpool, exactly—more like a giant, thirsty mouth of rock, sipping the entire bay down into some subterranean river.
“And your wedding ring?”
The vent was a smooth, lipped hole in the limestone, about the size of a dinner plate. I pressed my face close. Darkness. A low, gurgling hum. And there, just visible in the faint turquoise light, was a flash of blue pineapple. My trunks were caught on a ledge about ten feet down the throat of the hole. I reached in. My fingertips brushed the fabric. The current grabbed my wrist.
I reached the shallows, where the water was only knee-deep and treacherously transparent. I had to crawl. On my belly. Like a marine. I dug my fingers into the sand and slithered, the waterline dropping from my chest to my waist to my… well. The moment of truth arrived when my feet touched dry land. I was behind a small rock outcropping, five meters from Elena.
And my swimming trunks were the first thing it tasted. My wife, Elena, was still on the beach,
She looked up from her book. “You’re back early. Did you see any fish?”
As I wrapped the towel around my waist, I glanced back at the sea. The vent was still gurgling, still hungry. Somewhere down there, in a dark underwater cave, my pineapples and my marriage band were keeping company with Greek shipwrecks and Poseidon’s loose change.