Micro-fiction: I Found The Holy Grail In 1976

A cup is not always only a cup

Photo by Joan Oger on Unsplash

Hello! I hope your happiness has an inverse correlation with the stock market! This week we’ve got a little horror-adjacent story.

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I Found The Holy Grail In 1976

In 1976, in a stream in southwest France, I found the Holy Grail. It was an insanely hot summer and I’d been hitchhiking around Europe for a coupla months. I figured I’d get away from roads for a bit, cross a few hills and see the land, but the heat was getting to me. Back then we didn’t carry around water bottles everywhere. ‘Stay hydrated’ wasn’t a thing, we just got thirsty then waited till we found stuff to drink.

So, there I was, real thirsty in the middle of a patch of woodland, and I heard a stream. Groovy. Sometimes you just gotta ask and the world’s gonna give.

It was this tiny stream, clear as air, with pebbles and tiny fish glinting in dappled sunlight. There must have been a farm nearby, because the woodland smelled like oranges, but all I could hear were birds chirping overhead and an occasional rustle of a squirrel darting through bushes, then the pitter-patter scratches of its claws as it scampered up a trunk.

I was just about to plunge my head straight into the water, when I saw the rippling curve of a bowl among the stones. It was wedged in there, I had to twist it to get it free. It was plain. The bowl at the top was all I’d seen at first, and the bottom half had been buried. It was kinda egg-timer shaped, and just a simple wooden goblet, nothing fancy, but nice. It felt good in my hand.

Got a cup, got a stream, got a thirst, so of course I took a drink. Now, as you’d expect on a sunny day in a damn serene woodland with the smell of warm fruit and the sound of birds, the water tasted like honey. It was like a gift from God, like a choir singing in my throat, like a unicorn had pissed in my belly. Amazing, I swear.

After taking my fill, I strapped that cup to my backpack and went on my way. I carried it with me for a few more towns, shared drinks with others in hostels where the wine flowed exactly like you’d imagine French wine did in 1976, then I lost it somewhere near a village I don’t know the name of.

Around a week later, I was hit by a Citroen going at 60 around a corner. I was thrown halfway across a field, rolling and tumblin’ through mud, grass, and straight into a damn big rock. I must’ve blacked out, because I woke up to a cow licking my face.

There I am, stinking of cow spit, coated in their dried shit, face ground into a boulder, and yet, it was the wackiest thing, I was fine. Like, totally A-okay. Not even a graze.

Burning rubber hit my nose. Getting fully back to my senses, I saw smoke on the edge of the field. Crackling sparks, metal pinging from a hidden flame heating something. Getting closer, the driver was a goner. Head totally carved up, halfway through the windshield, flies already snacking on his eyes. It was seriously heavy, then the fire spread and—whoompf—the whole thing went up.

It knocked me back, the cows hollered as they ran to the far side of the field. Fierce gouts of flame sent out black clouds that reeked of burnt plastic and roast pork.

There wasn’t nothing to be done. No mobile phones back then. Even if I could find a phone to tell someone, I didn’t even know the name of the road and my French back then was creaky as a barn door.

I left the driver there, cooking in the car’s frame.

Lucky. That’s what I thought I was. I didn’t think I was immortal. That came when the boat sank on the crossing to Brazil. I’d got a cheap ticket below decks on a tanker. I got the fare for basically scratch so long as I helped out in the kitchen and kept the heck out of the way the rest of the time. All good, until we hit tropical storm, some hurricane-grade blow up in the middle of the middle.

It was supposed to be pretty much impossible for that kind of boat to go down, but ‘pretty much’ ain’t the same as ‘actually’, and that day proved it. We took on water like the ship was auditioning to be an Olympic pool. By sunset the distress call was out and we were all in rafts.

I hope you’ll trust me when I say that a life raft in a hurricane is not a fun ride. There was barfing and more than one person went over the side and never came up. He was a lucky one. The rest of us got to sit on that raft for weeks. We drank turtle blood, we ate raw fish, we caught rain water. It was all enough keep us going a long time.

Well.

It didn’t rain often enough for them. Me? I was A-okay. Huddled at the edge, looking maybe a touch skinnier than usual, but otherwise, judging by my arms and legs, not so bad. Kinda New-York-model-chic-thin rather than the living skeletons the other crew became.

They muttered among themselves when they thought I was sleeping. I don’t speak much Portuguese, but ‘Diabo’ in their tones didn’t leave much to the imagination.

I lost count of the days. They all died.

Waves are a fucking annoying sound, when you notice them. Walk towards a beach. As you get closer and closer, they get louder, they fade in, and then they’re there, but in a weird way they’re so loud and so consistent that the brain just switches them off, they’re just filtered out white noise.

But if they’re all you hear, for months, and then you notice them, well. Fuck. You don’t want that, you don’t. When you can’t get away from a sound like that, it’s hell.

I went mad for a while. I talked to the corpses. Didn’t have the heart to throw them over the side. At least the flies—that somehow found us even out there in the middle of death’s ocean—at least the flies were company. They reminded me other things were alive. Maggots aren’t so bad if you’re hungry enough.

And then the bodies were too dried, too far gone, for even flies to bother with. They just buzzed around me. A never ending cloud that swarmed and crawled, but even they never worked out how to end me. I kept living.

In the swimming vibration of insanity, I thought back to the car crash, and how I’d lived, walking away with no scratches. It had seemed like a bad dream, something I had begun to think never happened, but there I was, alive again with no physical way for it to be true. The damn goblet floated in my memory, the taste of that honey water, and I knew to the marrow of my bones that cup was the grail.

I’ve no idea how long I drifted. I gave up moving, maybe even on breathing. It made no difference. Next thing I remember, fishermen with deep brown faces and threadbare T-shirts were goggling at me. When I moved, they screamed.

Stumbling up, I found I could still walk. My muscles were fine, no fatigue or wasting. It felt wrong though, and it took a second to realise it was because the lifeboat wasn’t moving. The fishermen had dragged it to shore.

One of them returned with a machete, shouting, and I fled into the trees. There was nothing to power me, no food, no water, but I lived. The fisherman was smart. If I found a living, fly-infested thing rising up from among desiccated sailors on a tattered lifeboat, I’d go get a machete. Probably a gallon of gas and a lighter, too. What other sensible option is there?

At a pool in the forest, I fell onto my knees and saw, reflected on my face, that I’d been marked with bloody crosses, dried and cracked. As I slept, my companions on the lifeboat had marked me, trying to rid me of the demon. Maybe they were too religious to throw me overboard, or perhaps too weak for murder. I guess it crosses were all they could do.

In my wavering reflection, I looked like a demon.

There, among the trees, I could no longer hear the waves. That torture had ended.

Those were the first two times I should have died. There have been more. I sometimes wish I’d stayed drifting in the Atlantic, caught in a circling current keeping me away from the land and trapped in blissful, starved insanity, my brain cracked like mudflats, too drained to think or feel.

Instead, I walk, trying to never see death again.

Sometimes I think I recognise a face, a face with whom I shared wine from a wooden cup in a forgotten corner of France in 1976, a face that will not age and crack and decay, a face stuck in time like mine, but then Time takes their hand and withers their features, and I move on.

The end

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Okay you amazing people, that’s my story for this week. Hope you’re keeping your head above water, feet paddling like crazy, as you serenely glide on the world’s waves.

Go out there, be awesome. Be kind, and always be spooky. I believe in you.

Mata

xxx