Noah

                                                           Keeping Afloat

A little boy sat in his bathtub. It was an old, white tub, surrounded by pink tile, with an occasional red accent. The tub had an old, gray stopper that kept the water from running down the drain and an old majestic faucet from G-d knows when, pardon my language. The faucet handles said Hot and Cold on them in faded black letters, and they controlled the hot and cold water, respectively.

The boy had been sitting in the tub for a while, and the bubbles which his mother had poured in as she ran in the water were now a soapy  film on the water's surface. The bath was now more warm than hot, as the boy had been playing for a while, but the boy didn't notice. He was deeply involved with his toys.

He loved his bath and loved his bath toys. They had evolved over the years. The rubber duckies were pretty much gone, and anything that made a squeak noise when you squeezed it had been eliminated. Those were for little kids, and he was a big boy now.

He had lots of boats. There was a multicolored sailboat with a sail that could move back and forth. You could blow on it and it would sail across the bathtub. There were small motorboats  in blue, red, and yellow, which came with little smiling sailors with cherubic faces. There was an aircraft carrier whose aircraft were long gone, and there were a few dinosaurs and farm animals floating around the tub for good measure. But the boy's favorite was his submarine.

The submarine was purple and orange (you were expecting yellow, maybe?) and once had Sesame Street characters that fit into all the slots on its deck, but they had been jettisoned a few months back in favor of armymen. It had a periscope that moved and a propeller in the back that you could turn with your finger. It had an inside compartment, so you could open up the submarine and hide things inside, like a zebra, a T-Rex, or a small action figure. The submarine had been on many adventures with the boy, and together they had sailed the seven seas.

The boy's favorite game in the tub was "Sink the Boat." It was nothing fancy, really. He would create a giant tidal wave with his legs and move the water back and forth until the various boats went down into the deep, resting on the bottom of the tub.

On this day, the boy created a huge storm with his legs. It was a tsunami, a monsoon, a hurricane of epic proportions. It was the perfect bathtub storm. He pushed the water back and forth violently, and the contents of the tub were spilling over the side in buckets. Still, the boy pushed on.

The sailboat was the first to go under, tipping easily with its heavy mast. The aircraft carrier follwed soon in its wake, being somewhat topheavy and not particularly seaworthy. The motorboats took longer to sink in the violent waves, although it was easier to tip them with their smiling sailors on board.

The submarine was proving hard to sink. No matter how high the boy made the waves, it still stayed afloat. In the end, the boy had to hold the submarine underwater and bang it against the side of the tub to make the final air bubbles escape and send the ship down to Davey Jones locker, so to speak.

When all the ships lay at the bottom of the tub, the boy reached down and lifted up the submarine. He drained it of its water and left it floating on the surface.  He then opened up the sub and took out the people and animals that were cradled inside. They had escaped the storm and emerged unscathed. They always survived the game.

The other boats would come and go, but the submarine was special. It was his favorite, and he loved the submarine and its occupants. It was so, and would always be so. Or at least until he grew up and the submarine was eventually sold at a yard sale for fifty cents along with a set of Candy Land that had half its cards missing.